Does SCOTUS Want To Find Leaker? Missed Opportunity. Censorship. How To Stop A Cop.

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The key question is not SCOTUS "Can't Find Leaker" it is if they really do want to find them.

Bert

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The way government bureaucrats and RR management handled this mess is disgraceful.  

This was an opportunity for a great teaching lesson by government and capitalists and they blew it.

This was an opportunity to show creativity, character and caring and they blew it. 

What they showed was indifference and contempt.

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‘We Don’t Know What We Are Breathing’: A Report from East Palestine 

By Salena Zito

EAST PALESTINE-

For three decades, Barbara Kugler has lived less than a block from the Norfolk Southern railway line that crosses through East Palestine, Ohio. Up until this month, the sound of an oncoming freight train’s warning whistle—long, long, short, long—used to be a comfort.

But now when she hears it, she tenses. 

“For thirty years that sound meant home. It was part of the rhythm of our lives,” says Kugler, 52, who was born and raised in a town one mile away and spends her days minding her grandkids. “Now I find myself flinching every time I hear it because I don’t know what is coming next.” 

Just before 9 p.m. on February 3, the noise of a train screeching to a halt followed by a large explosion jolted Kugler and her husband off the couch and out onto the street.

“I thought we needed to get out. This is the end of it. The town’s burning down,” she said.

They saw dozens of railway cars strewn about like a kid’s Tonka trucks, with flames and smoke shooting toward the sky. The blaze was so hot, Kugler said she had to remove her winter coat.

“It was like a bomb going off,” Kugler said. “The cars just hitting and hitting—it was this constant sound of them banging together.”

While no one was injured or killed that night, the chemicals on board the train presented an immediate threat to the town. Most frightening was the flammable gas vinyl chloride, which causes headaches, dizziness, and—in acute cases of exposure—cancer. 

Fearing a massive explosion would send shrapnel and toxic fumes soaring for miles, nearly 2,000 residents, including the Kuglers, were evacuated. On February 6, Norfolk Southern officials set off a controlled burn. But even that sent a fireball into the sky, with a black mushroom cloud that looked like something out of Chernobyl. 

The people of East Palestine are back, but they don’t feel safe. 

Faint traces of soot line the insides of some of their homes. An oddly sweet odor, like fresh bubblegum, also lingers.

I spoke to more than a dozen people over the past few days and many say they feel dizzy and have headaches. They worry about breathing in fumes that cause cancer. “It is a big fear,” said Kaylee Jackson, 40, who does odd jobs for a living. “These chemicals literally got sucked up into the air during the controlled burn and the derailment. Well, where do clouds go? What comes up, must come down.”

Several locals have taken photos of dead fish floating in the nearby creeks. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimates the chemical blast affected more than seven miles of streams, killing some 3,500 small fish.

Even so, Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency insists the five wells supplying the village’s drinking water are clean. The agency also declared the water in 50 private wells and the air quality in over 500 homes free from deadly contaminants.

For the past two weeks, Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine has also tried to reassure the public that their water is safe to drink and their air is safe to breathe. On Tuesday, he made home visits in the town and drank the tap water to prove it.

But few people here trust the authorities. If the fish are dying, why should they? And they’re getting conflicting messages, too. Earlier this week J.D. Vance, Ohio’s newly elected Republican senator, traveled to one of the contaminated creek beds and was filmed scraping its bottom with a branch, sending a bloom of chemicals to the surface. 

“This is disgusting,” Vance said in his now-viral video. “The fact that these chemicals are still seeping in the ground is an insult to the people who live in East Palestine.”

Kaylee Jackson doesn’t know who to trust. She refuses to drink water from her tap, and now gets her supply from bottles that local officials are providing to the town. And when she showers, she worries about the chemicals getting into her pores.

“We don’t know what we are breathing, we don’t know what we are drinking,” Jackson tells me while fighting back tears.

Christa Graves, a stay-at-home mom in her fifties, breaks down as she talks about the creeks that were a playground for her and her kids growing up. Her grandkids still play there.

“That was our swimming hole,” she says. “How many years? How many decades? How many generations can we not use any of these resources?” 

Many in East Palestine (pronounced Pal-e-steen) are seeking their own independent tests of the air and water. They also want better answers, more federal support, and a proper cleanup that eradicates all chemicals from the ground and the streams, guaranteeing their safety. But because this disaster is deemed man-made rather than environmental, relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) isn’t coming.

On Wednesday afternoon, former president Donald Trump, who is running again in 2024, came here in an 18-wheeler, bearing food and water supplies. Yesterday, former representative for Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard also tweeted that she had flown in “to see firsthand” what was going on in the town.

But while Trump and Vance and Gabbard are all showing up, the actual people running this country have been missing in action. It took until February 16—nearly a full two weeks after the crash—for the first top Biden official, EPA administrator Michael Regan, to be on the scene. Meanwhile, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg—who has one job, overseeing the infrastructure of this country—has not yet witnessed the catastrophe in person nor did he acknowledge it until February 13, though he is scheduled to arrive today. President Joe Biden released a fact sheet about the accident and tweeted about it, but he hasn’t given a speech about it, let alone visited the town. In fact, on Monday, he was 5,000 miles away in Kyiv, meeting with the president of Ukraine and pledging more aid in the war against Russia. 

That the president ignored East Palestine and chose to make a big splash in a foreign country symbolizes what matters most to the White House, the town’s mayor Trent Conaway said.

“That was the biggest slap in the face,” Conaway fumed on Fox. “That tells you right now he doesn’t care about us. He can send every agency he wants to, but I found out this morning that he was in Ukraine giving millions of dollars away to people over there and not to us… on President’s Day in our country, so I’m furious.”

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Columbiana County, where East Palestine sits, has swung between Democratic and Republican voters. But more recently, blue-collar workers started to feel abandoned by the party and its old-school progressives who once fiercely defended the unions. The last time people here voted for a Democratic president was Bill Clinton in 1996, and the area has been getting redder ever since. In 2016, Trump swept the county by 68 percent. In 2020, he took it by 72 percent.

You could argue the political shift started as far back as September 19, 1977, the day known as Black Monday, when the steel mills started shutting down in Youngstown, in nearby Mahoning County. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, but when the locals tried to deliver a petition to then-President Carter to grant them some relief, “they were largely ignored,” said Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown State University.

The Biden administration’s refusal to declare East Palestine a disaster area and grant FEMA aid feels eerily similar to Black Monday now, especially as the tragedy comes at a time of worker strife. Last year, two of the country’s largest freight rail labor unionsthreatened to strike, citing grievances such as staffing shortages and a requirement that workers be on call on short notice as often as seven days a week. Then, in December, Biden stepped in and signed legislation that imposed an agreement between the rail companies, including Norfolk Southern and its workers. A strike was averted, but the workers got little of what they asked for. 

“Look, I know this bill doesn’t have paid sick leave that these rail workers and frankly every worker in America deserves,” Biden admitted when he ended the dispute. “But that fight isn’t over.”

He never mentioned it again.

Though early evidence indicates the East Palestine crash was caused by an overheated wheel bearing on a train car, unions claim that rail companies’ push for higher profits is putting safety at risk—and unless something is done, more accidents will happen. Last week, Norfolk Southern railway officials failed to show up for a town hall meeting with locals, claiming in a statement that company representatives feared for their safety. 

Lee Boyle sits in the gazebo in East Palestine’s municipal park with his bulldog Cedric. Nearby, a cheery sign declares: WELCOME TO HISTORIC EAST PALESTINE, OHIO: The place to be.

Boyle said he’s furious at the railway bosses. “Look around you. Have you seen anyone here that strikes fear in you? Yes, we are frustrated and angry, but to be afraid of listening to our concerns is insulting,” he said.

Norfolk Southern recently issued a press release saying the company’s CEO and president Alan Shaw met with a handful of folks, including local officials.

But “we had no idea they were here until hours after the CEO was gone and we read it online,” longtime East Palestine resident Tammy Tsai, 62, told me.

Though Norfolk Southern is paying residents $1,000 each to offset the lodging, travel, food, and clothing costs caused by the four-day evacuation, people say it’s little comfort.

“Everything has changed. This was our forever home, my husband has a chiropractic practice here, we have a good life, had a good life, an idyllic life, and all of that changed in an instant,” Tsai said. “The lack of caring that has come from the federal government and Norfolk Southern has been shameful.”

She said it feels like Biden is trying to ride out the clock until the media’s spotlight on her town eventually fades away, “while the clock is subtracting time away from our lives.” 

Ironically, just last month, Biden saidthat progressive Democrats have lost sight of the party’s working-class base. Explaining how he won the 1972 Senate race in Delaware by appealing to blue-collar people and their pragmatic, kitchen-table values, he said: “We didn’t pay nearly as much attention to working-class folks as we used to. And the same thing is happening today.”

David Lonsbrough, an Iraq War veteran who enlisted three months before September 11, said the sights and sounds he experienced the night of the derailment reminded him of being on the battlefield.

Now he is packing to leave East Palestine for a new job in San Antonio.

As he plops down on the sofa he had just been moving, a train rumbles in the distance. 

“Every eleven minutes like clockwork, the day they lifted the evacuation, there was already a train waiting on the tracks and the engine started three minutes after we were all told we could return home,” says Lonsbrough, 40.

The CeramFab ceramic fiber factory where he used to work is located right next to the controlled burn. The plexiglass windows there, he says, have melted. 

“I had the perfect setup here. I live three blocks from work. I love my job, but after what I saw, I am out of here,” he said.

But what will happen to East Palestine now?

Tsai, an actress who moved here from California and does a fair amount of film and stage work in Pittsburgh, feels like her world has shattered. She said she and her husband Rick are moving to a cabin they own a few miles away until they have a clearer understanding of the fallout. 

“In a week or two this will all be gone,” she says, pointing to the media vehicles in the community parking lot. “But our problems are only beginning. We’ve lost our best capital—the values of our home. Now we have to think about what the cost will be on our health, something we may not know for years.”

“Nothing will ever be the same in East Palestine,” she says flatly. “Nothing.”

 Click here: https://www.thefp.com/p/we-dont-know-what-we-are-breathing

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And why not? It is blatant and obvious to anyone who is not blind.

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Congress Wants to Defund the U.N.’s Anti-Semitic Palestinian Refugee Agency

By Adam Kredo

Republicans in Congress are working to defund the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, which allows terrorist groups to store weapons in its facilities and distributes educational materials that advocate for Israel’s destruction.

Legislation circulating in the House and Senate would freeze more than half a billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer assistance to the U.N.’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

 CONTINUE

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Contemporary censorship.

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CENSORSHIP, COLUMN, COMMENTARY, DISINFORMATION, PRESS FREEDOM, ROBERT PARRY, RUSSIA, SOCIAL MEDIA, SOVIET UNION, U.S., UNTIL THIS DAY--HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEWS

By PATRICK LAWRENCE: Totalized Censorship

Content warning, canceling, de-platforming, denying access: The fate of Sy Hersh’s Democracy Now! interview on YouTube is the latest indication of how much rougher press suppression is in this new media era. 

Special to Consortium News

When I awoke Sunday morning to the news that YouTube had censored a long interview Seymour Hersh did with Democracy Now! on the grounds that it did not meet the Google subsidiary’s “community standards” and was, moreover, “offensive,” my mind went in many directions.

I thought of the New York Post case in October 2020, three weeks before the presidential election, when Twitter, Facebook and the other big social media platforms blocked America’s oldest daily after it reported the damning, politically damaging contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer.

I thought of what we now call “the disinformation industry” and all these diabolic organizations — PropOrNot, NewsGuard, Hamilton 68, et al. — that, stocked with spooks serving in staff positions and as advisers, dedicate themselves to discrediting dissenting writers and independent publications as conveyers of Russian propaganda.

And then I thought of a story a Russian acquaintance told me one afternoon over drinks when I was in Moscow some years back. Leonid was a professor of sociology at Moscow State University and had served the Central Committee and the Politburo in various advisory capacities during the Soviet era. Leonid knew how to ride the waves, let’s say, and he knew whereof he spoke. He also had a wonderful sense of humor and a highly developed appreciation for life’s infinite ironies.

Let me pass on his tale and then make the connection with Hersh’s exposé of the Biden regime’s Nord Stream op and the other cases I have mentioned.

We had been talking about the press, in Russia, in America, in Asia, and elsewhere, trading observations and comparing notes. It was then, in the bar at the old Metropole Hotel, that Leonid related a story he thought I would find useful or amusing or both.

Recollection at the Metropole  

During one of the periods of Soviet–American détente in the 1970s, the State Department offered to take two Foreign Ministry bureaucrats on a tour of the United States. They visited five cities — New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco — with the minders from State taking care to show their guests the sort of things minders from State would want Soviet visitors to see. A certain camaraderie developed. It is nice to think about the scene, impossible as such occasions have become.  

When they reached San Francisco and it was time to say farewell, the State Department’s shepherds asked the two Soviets what aspects of American life they found most remarkable. The Sovs seem not to have hesitated before replying.

In the Soviet Union, they said, all the newspapers across 11 time zones say the same thing every day because they are carefully censored. They are told routinely what to say and what to leave out. Here in America the press is free. We have seen no sign of censorship in all the cities you have shown us. And yet wherever we are, when we pick up a newspaper they, too, say the same thing. From New York to California, nothing we have read is ever any different.

There is externally imposed censorship and there is internally imposed censorship, to state the obvious, and the two Soviet bureaucrats were fascinated to see, firsthand and for the first time, the latter at work. Brute censorship is nothing pretty to look at, Leonid, my Russian acquaintance, meant to say. But the invisible kind is just as effective.

Everyone in mainstream journalism knows where the fence posts are, as I like to put it, and if you spend too much time beyond them you won’t work in mainstream journalism very long. I wonder if Seymour Hersh, certainly proven to rank among the great journalists of our time, may have a thought about this.

Internalized Censorship

This question of internalized censorship, commonly known as self-censorship, has long fascinated me. I have watched many times as journalists, surrendering themselves for the sake of their professional careers, train themselves to hear the silent language that tells them what to say and what to leave unsaid. And then, over time, you find them giving vigorous voice to thoughts and beliefs imposed upon them, absolutely convinced these are their own thoughts and beliefs and they have come by them independently.

The modern mind’s eager desire to conform while we remain certain of our originality and individuality: Philip Slater touched on this in his too-soon-forgotten The Pursuit of Loneliness, published in 1970. So did Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom, which appeared in 1941 and could hardly be more pertinent to our time:

“We are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of anonymous authorities like public opinion and ‘common sense,’ which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different.”

I have had overbearing editors I greatly wished were more anonymous than they were, but let us set this minor point aside. Fromm and Slater are concerned with the collective psychology from which self-censorship draws for its extraordinary effectiveness. “Compulsive conformity,” Fromm calls it.

We can go back as far as Alexis de Tocqueville to gain a sense of how deeply rooted this conformity is among Americans. When we do, we cannot be surprised or mystified to note what the Soviet visitors noted 50–odd years ago and what we fail to see even as it is before us in plain sight: American media are as rigorously controlled via the mechanisms of internalized censorship as any newspaper in any of the “authoritarian” societies we profess to detest for their lack of freedom.

But what happened to Sy Hersh’s Democracy Now! interview last weekend, to the New York Post in the final weeks of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and to a lot of independent journalists at the hands of the disinformation industry since this took shape a half-dozen years ago requires us to think anew.

It is commonly said that the emergence of digital media since the mid–1990s, when the first such publications appeared (and when Bob Parry started publishing Consortium News), has brought us into a new era. And we can mean many things by this. Let us not now miss: For all the good these new media have done and for all the doors they promise to open, this new era is to be one of coercive, externally imposed censorship as heavy-handed as anything those visiting Sovs had lived with all those years back.

With the decline of our legacy media into craven subservience to power to an extent no one could have dreamed of a couple of decades’ back, independent media such as Consortium News are where the future of the Great Craft lies, a point I have made severally in this space. But it seems to me the digital platforms on which these media depend have been liabilities as well as assets from the first.

Technologies are not value-neutral. Jacques Ellul, the Christian anarchist and many-sided intellect, made this case in The Technological Society, which came out in English in 1964. To put his thesis too simply, technologies are not empty of content other than what is put into them. Implicit in any technology is an affirmation of the political economy and material circumstances that produced it.

In other words, the technologies available to independent journalists are corporate products. They are vital to independent practitioners as means of delivery, but, as we learn by the day now, access to them can be withdrawn at any time. Many of us seem to have missed this contradiction. Now we are pressed to recognize it.  

As we do, we are led to ask whether the promise of independent journalism can be extinguished by way of a totalized system of censorship. Do you think this phrase too strong? Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, the web services company, and an influential figure in Silicon Valley, doesn’t. In the spring of 2022 Andreessen sent out this note via Twitter:

“I predict essentially identical censorship/deplatforming policies  across all layers of the internet stack. Client-side & server-side ISPs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, client OSs, browsers, email clients. With only rare exceptions. The pressure is intense.”

I do not know how far we are from the world Andreesson warns us of. But is there an argument that we are headed in the direction he forecasts?

I do not wish to diminish the importance of independent media, a point I hope is by now clear, but to turn these thoughts another way, it is one thing to bully, cancel and otherwise suppress emergent publications and greatly another to censor a legacy newspaper such as the New York Post and a journalist of Seymour Hersh’s stature. My conclusion: The game is getting rough and is likely to get a lot rougher.

There is one other factor forcing the pace of America’s censorship regime that bears mentioning. This concerns the larger context. By the time digital media began to find their place in public discourse, the events of 2001 had forced the American imperium onto its back foot, and it has ever since assumed the hostile crouch of the wounded. As history teaches us, it is at this point that declining nations require the loyalty of all economic, political, industrial, and cultural institutions. Accordingly, the line between the national security state and corporate media has not been merely blurred in the post–2001 era: It is now more or less eliminated, as documents such as the Twitter Files make clear.

Are we surprised? We ought not be. Next question: What are we to do as an era of totalized censorship appears to be upon us? Subscribing to the independent publication of your choice would be a conscientious start.

Portions of this column are extracted from the author’s book, Journalists and Their Shadows, forthcoming from Clarity Press.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.  His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCus42SC71w

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Biden's Barney Fife Security Policy. Amanpour Continues To Leak False Claims. More.

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ACRU COMMENTARY
The National Security Policy of Barney Fife Posted By Allen West, Lt. Col. Ret

It was an absolutely beautiful Saturday morning as I did my normal weekend five-mile run. The sunrise over Lake Ray Hubbard here in Garland and Rowlett, Texas, was serene. As I ran along, it suddenly hit me how best to characterize the recent balloon tomfoolery of the Biden administration. It reminded me of Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife of Mayberry RFD. Yes, I am dating myself, but many of you recall the character portrayed by actor-comedian Don Knotts on the “The Andy Griffith Show.” We all still laugh at the reruns of that classic, but to think that it mirrors the strategy of the Biden administration is quite terrifying.

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Golda Meir would agree with Netanyahu on this one

Helen Mirren is a wonderful actress, but her claim that she understands Golda’s “world” or the current debate about Israel’s Supreme Court is pure bunk.

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN

(February 22, 2023 / JNS) There are many issues worth having an argument over; then again, some are better left alone. For example, a debate about whether or not the actress who is hired to play Golda Meir in a movie is Jewish is not worth a moment of anyone’s time. By contrast, the discussion about whether the current nearly unlimited powers of Israel’s Supreme Court should be checked and balanced by giving more power to the Knesset elected by the country’s voters is of utmost import.

As it so happens, the British actress Helen Mirren is the focus of an unimportant controversy, yet has injected herself into a controversial debate despite having nothing to say that is of even minimal value about it.

Mirren is a great performer with a long list of theater and film credits. However, the current fashion in which “lived experience”— what other kind of experience is there other than that which is lived through?—is considered necessary in order to be able to pretend to be someone other than oneself, has rendered controversial the casting of Mirren in a film about the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. According to some, the instance of a non-Jewish actor playing a Jew has been dubbed “Jewface.”

The entire idea of “Jewface”—a play upon “blackface,” the reprehensible practice in which white people would mimic blacks in the manner of 19th-century minstrel shows—is a pathetic attempt by some Jews to get in on the victim game in which minorities have demanded better representation in the arts. While adopting a different race goes back to a tragic racist past, imposing that same concern on Jewish roles is ridiculous. Acting is, after all, make-believe.

The producers of the upcoming “Golda” biographical movie were lucky to get Mirren to play the title role, and whatever the film’s ultimate merits or failings turn out to be, it isn’t likely that Mirren not being a member of the tribe will be the reason why it flops. But while criticism of the casting is utterly without merit the same thing can be said about an article in which the actress was asked to weigh in on the merits of the current Israeli government’s proposals for judicial reform.

In an interview conducted with Agence France Presse during her appearance at the Berlin Film Festival, Mirren not only attempted to justify her casting in the role as Israel’s leader during the Yom Kippur War but claimed to have understood Meir, and to know what she would have thought about the current debate about judicial reform.

Mirren was chosen by Israeli film director Guy Nattiv, who said in the same article that he felt the actress’s long relationship with his country “lent authenticity” to her portrayal. It turns out that Mirren hitchhiked around Israel back in the 1960s and stayed at a kibbutz not long after the Six-Day War in June 1967 because her then-boyfriend was Jewish, and he wanted to be there.

Meir was a complex figure born in what was then the Russian empire before immigrating to the United States as a child, settling in Milwaukee. As a young woman, she made aliyah in 1921, settling with her Chicago-born husband, Morris Meyerson, on the kibbutz of Merhavia, living there for a few years before moving to Tel Aviv, where she began her career as a Labor Zionist activist. She would serve that movement for decades as a politician and then as Israel’s ambassador to the Soviet Union and Israel’s foreign minister before becoming prime minister in 1969.

She was much beloved in the United States and responsible for raising millions for the yishuv before 1948 and the establishment of modern-day Israel. But her premiership is chiefly remembered in Israel for a decision in which, despite last-minute warnings about an imminent attack from Egypt and Syria, she allowed Israel’s enemies to strike first on Yom Kippur in 1973, rather than to pre-empt the blow as her predecessor had done in 1967. Though the war ended in military triumph for the Israel Defense Forces, the grim death toll from its first days caused many in the country to view it as a defeat. Many blamed Meir; in fact, her reputation never really recovered from it.

Mirren’s claims about what Meir would think of this issue demonstrate her complete ignorance.

That Mirren seems to think that a few weeks spent in a kibbutz more than half a century ago qualifies her as an expert on “Golda’s world” is ridiculous. Even worse is her claim that it gives her the standing to give a considered opinion on Israel’s judicial system.

According to the actress, the proposals to establish some checks on the untrammeled power of an Israeli Supreme Court “would be a complete reversal and denial of her values and her understanding of the world that she wanted to create.” Mirren went on to claim, “I think she would have been utterly horrified. It’s the rise of dictatorship and dictatorship was what has always been the enemy of people all over the world and she would recognize it as that.”

This is nonsense on stilts.

That she would repeat the slanders of Israel’s left-wing opposition parties is unsurprising since they reflect Nattiv’s political views. Like most liberal elites in Israel, the director seems to despise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s coalition won a clear majority in the Knesset elections last November. As such, it acquired a mandate to restore some balance to Israel’s political system in which the representatives of the voters will regain some of the power grabbed by an unaccountable court that thinks arbitrary ideas about what is “reasonable” is more important than the law. The government’s proposal is an attempt to re-establish democracy, not destroy it—let alone the start of a dictatorship.

Mirren’s claims about what Meir would think about this issue demonstrate complete ignorance of the subject matter at hand.

During her entire time serving in and then leading Israel’s governments during its first quarter-century, the country’s Supreme Court did not exercise or claim to have the powers that contemporary left-wingers now assert are essential to democracy. On the contrary, the governments led by Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol did not recognize the right of the court to act in the manner it has done for the last 30 years. Neither did Meir.

The idea that founding father Ben-Gurion or Meir—or anyone in their Labor Zionist-led coalitions—would have tolerated for a single minute the court weighing in on every decision that the cabinet, ministers or the military made is laughable. They didn’t believe that any Israeli court had the right to override their decisions on appointments, policies or military operations without even establishing their standing to do so. The judicial revolution initiated by former Chief Justice Aharon Barak didn’t begin until many years later.

Meir was a hard-core partisan, and despised the Israeli right and its leader Menachem Begin. But the assumption that Netanyahu’s reforms would end democracy in Israel would mean that the country wasn’t one before Barak’s power grab. That happened more than a decade after Meir was driven from office in 1974.

That Mirren doesn’t know any of this is not surprising. But that anyone would listen to her on this question or give credence to her uninformed opinions in order to promote the “resistance” to Netanyahu says more about the Israeli left than it does about the object of their ire.

Whatever we may ultimately think about the current movie about Meir, Mirren’s comments about judicial reform should remind all of both the pitfalls of celebrity culture and the perils of historical ignorance.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

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Biden continues to spend tax payer money with abandon.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/23/biden-shoveled-36-billion-in-taxpayer-funds-to-bail-out-teamsters-for-mismanaged-pensions/

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Christiane Amanpour’s Dubious, and Likely Fabricated, Polling Data

By: David Litman

CAMERA - Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis

In yet another display of Christiane Amanpour’s prioritization of her disdain for Israel over journalistic integrity, the CNN anchor appears to have fabricated poll results to falsely suggest that the Palestinian side supports the two-state solution with Israel.

The comments came during her interview with former Israeli ambassador Yael German on February 14, 2023. Toward the end of the interview, Amanpour asked Ambassador German: “I want to know from you, as a diplomat, is there any hope for anything resembling negotiations on a two-state solution, given that the settlements and the settlement-believers are emboldened by now their backers who are in government?”

Ambassador German answered by pointing out the unwillingness of Palestinian leaders to agree to repeated offers of statehood and to live side by side with Israel. She also argued that the Palestinian people generally refuse to accept the existence of a Jewish state.

Then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, U.S. President Bill Clinton, and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat at the Camp David talks in 2000, which would end with Arafat’s rejection of the negotiated peace agreement that would have seen the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Amanpour responded first by downplaying the extent of Palestinian rejectionism of the Jewish state, saying only “some people” believe that, and then, without providing any specific source, claimed: “The latest polls from the Palestinian side also show that they want a peaceful, two-state solution to co-exist with you.”

It’s unclear what “latest polls” Amanpour might be referring to, given that every major recent poll from the Palestinian side shows exactly the opposite.

Recent polling by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) has consistently shown low support for a two-state solution. A June 2022 poll found that only 28% of Palestinians support the concept of a two-state solution. In September, that figure rose to 37%, but dropped again in December to 32%.

Other Palestinian polls show the same. An August 2021 poll from the Ramallah-based Arab World for Research & Development (AWRD) found that only 36% of Palestinians supported the principle of a two-state solution. A July 2022 poll by the Palestinian organization Jerusalem Media & Communication Center (JMCC) found that only 26% preferred a two-state solution. The data is further supported by polling data from The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (TWI), which found in June 2022 that only 37% of Gazans and 25% of West Bank Palestinians would “definitely accept” or “probably accept” the principle of “two states for two peoples.”

The PCPSR polls also dispel the notion that the “Palestinian side” seeks a peaceful solution. As the December 2022 poll showed, a “majority of 55% support the return to an armed intifada.” The figure was 55% and 48% respectively in June and September 2022. TWI found in June 2022 that approximately 70% of Gazans and 61% of West Bank Palestinians either strongly or somewhat agree that “Palestinians should move to a new intifadah and make armed struggle their top priority.”

The December 2022 PCPSR poll also found that 72% of Palestinians “support the formation of armed groups such as the ‘Lions’ Den’,” a terrorist organization behind a significant portion of the uptick in terror attacks in the last year, including by sending a 16-year-old to attack Jewish worshippers.

Given these consistent findings of relatively well-respected Palestinian polls, it seems likely that Amanpour entirely fabricated findings from nonexistent “latest polls.” A request for substantiation sent to Amanpour has so far gone unanswered.

Even if a recent poll does exist that shows dramatically different results than the consistent figures from PCPSR, AWRD, TWI, and JMCC, it would be intellectually dishonest to omit any mention of the other “recent polls” contradicting Amanpour’s preferred results. 

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SCOTUS Can't Find Leaker. Iranian Enrichment Level. Russian Violations? PBC. Klaus Schwab. Getting Old.

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Has the Supreme Court Given Up on Finding the Leaker?
by Alan M. Dershowitz


The failure to discover the leaker of the Supreme Court's draft decision overruling Roe v. Wade is an unsatisfactory resolution to one of the most serious breaches of confidentiality in American history. Let us not underestimate the seriousness of this leak. It apparently encouraged a potential assassin to try to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh in an effort to change the outcome of the case. The mystery of who leaked this draft decision must be solved. 

Following the Supreme Court's released findings of the investigation into who leaked the draft decision overruling Roe v. Wade, the matter seems to be closed. There has been no public disclosure of any further efforts to identify the malefactor.

This is an unsatisfactory resolution to one of the most serious breaches of confidentiality in American history.

Let us not underestimate the seriousness of this leak. It apparently encouraged a potential assassin to try to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh in an effort to change the outcome of the case. It could easily have succeeded in doing so.

The failure to discover the leaker will encourage others to engage in actions which they believe are well-intentioned civil disobedience even if it does not involve the disclosure of governmental wrongdoing. The mystery of who leaked this draft decision must be solved.

The investigation done by the Supreme Court was destined to fail. It was put in the hands of the Court's Marshall, whose job it is to protect the Justices and to assure order in the Supreme Court building. The office of the Marshall is not equipped to conduct difficult investigations.

The matter should have been turned over to the FBI or a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, as was done with the unauthorized possession of classified material by President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Let us be clear about one thing: the improper disclosure of the Supreme Court draft opinion in this case was at least as serious a breach as the Biden or Trump violations. Neither Biden nor Trump disclosed any classified material or actually endangered the security of the United States. They were dangerous because of the potential improper disclosure, whereas the Supreme Court leak involved an actual disclosure that impacted the High Court in numerous negative ways.

Trump criticized the Supreme Court investigation: he argued that the reporter who published the draft opinion should have been subpoenaed and threatened with imprisonment if he or she did not disclose the source. The reporter would undoubtedly claim that such compulsion would violate the journalist-source privilege that exists in many jurisdictions. It is not an absolute privilege, as evidenced by the fact that journalists, most famously Judith Miller of The New York Times, actually spent time in prison for refusing to comply with judicial orders to disclose her source. Subpoenaing a journalist and threatening her with imprisonment should be an absolute last resort.

Would it be justified in this case? Perhaps. The likelihood is that, like Miller, the journalist who received and published the draft opinion would refuse to disclose its source, although no one ever knows what impact the threat of imprisonment would have on a given journalist.

The journalist was not at fault for publishing the draft opinion. It was highly newsworthy, and like the Pentagon Papers and other confidential materials that have been published, the journalist receiving them has an obligation of disclosure to the public.

The same cannot be said about the Supreme Court employee who violated the commitment to confidentiality by improperly disclosing a document that was supposed to be kept secret until the decision was rendered by the Justices. If the source or sources are finally identified, they will probably defend their actions on the basis of a higher good. But noble ends to not justify improper or unethical means, especially if the disclosure might well have threatened innocent lives.

So do not allow the investigation to end with the report of failure. Thus far the entire matter has been relegated to the judicial branch, because that is the one most directly affected. All Americans are the victims of this breach, and both the executive and legislative branches have default roles to play if the Supreme Court cannot do the job properly.

Despite the fact that disclosure in and of itself may not be a crime, it may involve criminal conduct either before, during or after the disclosure itself. If the leaker lied to a law enforcement person -- including the Supreme Court Marshall -- that might be a crime. The FBI certainly has jurisdiction to investigate whether a crime has been committed.

Congress, too, may have an appropriate role in assuring that this breach does not recur. The report issued by the investigators faulted the security at the High Court. That problem will not be easy to solve: law clerks work on drafts and often take them home. The investigation also disclosed that several law clerks told their wives or partners about the decision.

When I was a law clerk in the Supreme Court 60 years ago, each Justice had only two law clerks and there were far fewer personnel in the institution. The first two months, the doors of the Supreme Court were open to anyone. A visitor could simply knock at the Justices' door and ask for an appointment. Then in the third month, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. After the assassination, nearly everything changed. Security was enhanced, barriers were erected and access to the Justices was severely limited. Nothing, however, was done to protect the secrecy of draft opinions and it seems that little or nothing has been done since.

It will not be cost-free to impose restrictions on law clerks' access to draft opinions and their handling of them. Even so, this cost, provoked by the current breach, may be worth incurring in order to protect future disclosures.

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of The Price of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth The Consequences. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and is also the host of "The Dershow" podcast.

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'Deeply worrying' – Washington experts on Iran’s new enrichment level

This development, emphasized by the monitors, represents the significant risk that the country's unrestrained atomic activity could bring about a global crisis.

WASHINGTON – Experts were alarmed by a Bloomberg news report that revealed International Atomic Energy Agency monitors in Iran last week detected uranium enriched to levels nearly high enough for a nuclear weapon.

This development, emphasized by the monitors, represents the significant risk that the country’s unrestrained atomic activity could bring about a global crisis.

Inspectors need to determine whether Iran intentionally produced the enriched uranium or if the concentration was the result of an unintended buildup within the network of pipes connecting the hundreds of fast-spinning centrifuges used to separate isotopes, according to Bloomberg.

What do the experts say?

“The report should be deeply worrying,” said Dennis Ross, a distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Enrichment to 84% “is essentially going to weapons grade, [with] the difference from 90% being so small,” he said, adding that it was hard to believe it was an accident or a loading issue.

“I suspect it is again part of an Iranian play to see what the reaction is,” Ross said. “If it is tough rhetorically, but little more, the Iranians will know the world will adjust to a new reality, just as it did when they went to 60%. If this is the case, the Iranians are putting themselves in a position where they can decide later to go to a bomb, but they will believe they have the option.”

Getting the Europeans to go along with snapback is certainly one step, but even that is unlikely to have much of an impact, he said, adding that the Iranians would threaten to pull out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty if that is done.

“There needs to be a set of quiet messages to Iran that if this is not reversed and the ongoing nuclear program halted, they will be putting their entire nuclear infrastructure at risk,” Ross said. “Conducting exercises in the region that simulate or rehearse air-to-ground attacks against hardened targets should be organized soon.”

Andrea Stricker, deputy director of the Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the Iranians were likely experimenting with producing near-weapons-grade uranium “in a way that Tehran believes the IAEA would not detect – when the material is in intermediate stages of enrichment rather than a final product.”

“That Iran would even take this step underscores the failure of the West’s diplomacy-first approach,” she said. “Washington and Europe have presided over two years of Iranian atomic advances met with virtually zero penalties. Thus, it is no surprise that Tehran continues to push the envelope.”

“Washington must resurrect a comprehensive strategy to penalize, roll back and deter further Iranian nuclear advances and reinstitute economic pressure to destabilize the regime while it is weak at home,” she added.

The multilateral cooperation between the US, the Gulf Cooperation Council and Israel “will be key to maintaining regional preparedness to confront the full range of Iran’s threats,” Stricker said. “It is a natural progression based on cognizance of this mutual menace to peace and security.”

Iran can go to 4 bombs within a month if they want to

According to John Hannah, a Randi and Charles Wax senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America and a former national security advisor to vice president Dick Cheney, Iran was almost certainly practicing its capability to breakout or sneak out to a bomb very quickly.

“This is only the latest step in that process,” he said. “Earlier violations included deploying cascades of advanced centrifuges, enriching to 60% and enriching directly from 5% to 60%. Already, Iran has accumulated enough highly enriched uranium to go for four bombs within a month of a decision to break out and enough for a fifth bomb shortly thereafter.”

“Politically, Iran is also continuing its salami tactics to test the resolve of the United States, Israel and Europe,” Hannah said. “A decade ago, Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu drew a redline on a cartoon bomb at the UN and threatened that if Iran accumulated enough 20% uranium for one bomb, Israel would destroy its nuclear program.

“Today, the 20% redline is a long-distant memory. The redline turned into a green light. Now they have enough high-enriched uranium for at least five bombs, and much of it not only in the form of 20% but 60% uranium. And what were the consequences imposed on Iran? Virtually nothing.”

“The Europeans should immediately respond to this provocation by triggering a snapback of all UN sanctions,” he said. “They should also withdraw their ambassadors from Tehran. President [Joe] Biden should publicly declare the JCPOA dead. The US should expedite the delivery of critical capabilities that Israel needs to enhance its own ability to destroy Iran’s key nuclear infrastructure, especially KC-46A refueling tankers and refilling the war reserve stockpile in Israel with thousands of long-range precision munitions capable of penetrating underground bunkers. Unfortunately, I have little to no hope that any of these steps will be taken,” Hannah said.

And:

The Editorial Board 

Russia has been refusing for months to allow U.S. inspections of Russian nuclear facilities, as called for under the New Start Treaty. Even the Biden Administration felt obliged this month to acknowledge the violations, which must have been embarrassing since President Biden had unilaterally extended the 2010 treaty in his first days in office. Mr. Putin’s suspension is truth in arms-control advertising.

Russia’s foreign ministry said the decision is “reversible,” but there’s no reason to believe that. Russia also violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which caused the Trump Administration to withdraw. Mr. Putin’s goal in making his New Start announcement was no doubt to increase public anxiety in the West as part of his effort to reduce support for Ukraine. He wants Americans to think Crazy Ivan might start a nuclear war.

But arms-control treaties can’t stop an adversary determined to evade them. Meanwhile, treaties create a false sense of security for the party that honors their terms. This is how Russia was able to build an arsenal of as many as 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads, despite the INF treaty. The U.S. has about 230.

The suspension of New Start means the U.S. will lose access to inspect some Russian nuclear sites. But the U.S. has other intelligence means of monitoring Russian forces.

Nuclear deterrence depends on having a credible nuclear force that can threaten an adversary. It can be buttressed by robust defenses that put doubt in the mind of an adversary that a nuclear first strike would succeed. The U.S. is only slowly modernizing its nuclear force after decades of deterioration, while U.S. defenses have a limited ability to intercept a small number of incoming missiles.

With Russia at war against the West, and China refusing to negotiate while it rapidly builds its nuclear force, rebuilding U.S. nuclear deterrence will have to be a U.S. priority. Holding out hope that Mr. Putin will change his mind about New Start is a fool’s errand.

Finally:

We recently learned of the “Penn Biden Center” through the Justice Department’s search for classified material in Joe Biden’s numerous homes and offices of which it was one.  But just what is the Penn Biden Center?  Well known author Paul Kengor attempted to find out.  Please read his piece to learn what he discovered (or didn’t).

CB

 

Paul G. Kengor is an author and professor of political science at Grove City College, a private liberal arts college in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He is the executive director of Institute for Faith and Freedom, a Grove City College conservative think tank/policy center. He is also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, a conservative think tank at Stanford University.

Kengor received his master's degree from the American University School of International Service and his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Kengor has focused much of his work on Ronald Reagan, the presidency, conservative politics, the Cold War, the communist movement, and Catholicism. He has done work for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy; and has served on the editorial board of Presidential Studies Quarterly. He does a regular commentary for three nationally syndicated radio programs: American Radio Journal, Moody Broadcasting, and Ave Maria Radio Network. He also writes for the conservative American Spectator.

What in the Hell Is the Penn Biden Center?

Clearly it has a bad case of cult of personality.

by PAUL KENGOR

If you’re like me, you’ve only recently heard of the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania, generously described in the press as a “think tank.”

My ignorance is instructive. You see, I’m somewhat of a connoisseur of think tanks. Some people are connoisseurs of the arts, food, fine wine, and even good cigars. But I, dear reader, have an odd expertise in think tanks. I’ve worked at, written for, and even written about think tanks. I’ve given lectures at and even lectures about think tanks in grad schools, describing these distinctive entities, left and right and center. I actually began my professional career at a think tank, the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Next week, I speak at the Heritage Foundation. I’ve been a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Institute for Faith & Freedom at Grove City College, and countless state and local think tanks.

If you’ll indulge me a bit more, I can relate an anecdote about this strange career path. I recall telling my working-class, Italian Catholic grandmother and her sisters that I worked for a think tank, only to elicit a puzzled look. “Paulie,” my grandma asked, “where do you work in Washington, D.C.?” I named the place and explained, “It’s a think tank, grandma.” This prompted my crusty grandpa to snap, “What in the hell is a think tank?”

All of which is a perfect segue to the Penn Biden Center.

Given my over three decades of think tank experience, I hereby assert, definitively, with no embarrassment, that I had never heard of the Penn Biden Center until it exploded into the news. And I’m certain that that’s more a product of the Penn Biden Center than anything lacking in my studious cranium.

To borrow from my Papa, I found myself wondering, “What in the hell is the Penn Biden Center?”

So, I ventured to the website of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement. Alas, I remain even more in the dark. I found a few articles and what seem like press releases. I found no reports or policy papers, which is odd because such is the main product of a think tank.

I did, however, find Joe Biden — everywhere. Biden’s grinning mug is splashed all over the thing. When you first open the website, you see Biden. When you click the first heading, labeled, “We’re Focused On,” you’re assaulted with some mindless mishmash about “Advancing the Dialogue of Internationalism.” The viewer is greeted by — surprise — two photos, both of Joe Biden. The first is a photo of, quite appropriately, old Scranton Joe and China’s Xi taking a friendly stroll together at some bridge near Beijing.

I say appropriately because, as readers know, the only thing maybe worth knowing about the Penn Biden Center is its possible shady connections with Xi and China. That being the case, I’m sort of surprised that whoever runs the website left that photo posted. Then again, the academic world moves very slowly. Perhaps they’re on sabbatical.

The next two “We’re Focused On” headings talk about “Advancing Threats to the Liberal International Order” and “Engaging a New Generation.” In each of these, once again, all photos boast one common feature: Joe Biden.

If you click the “Our Vision” tab, it takes you to the center’s mission statement. That statement includes five short paragraphs of politically correct twaddle about the center’s dedication to a “democratic, open, secure, tolerant, and interconnected world benefits all Americans.” It concludes with a paragraph about the group’s grand namesake, one Joe Biden:

Throughout his decades of public service, the Center’s namesake, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., has fought to secure American global leadership by defending and advancing a liberal international order. The Center will bring President Biden’s lifelong commitment to public service to its every endeavor.

The remainder of the page’s exciting mission statement is a longer section about — spoiler alert — the one and only: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

So, in sum, the Penn Biden Center is a monument to one man. It may shock Biden’s conservative detractors to hear this but, apparently, the heretofore alleged cognitively challenged president is, in fact, a one-man think tank.

Who would’ve thunk it?

Even progressives seem slightly annoyed. A January 2021 piece at the American Prospect, the left-wing periodical launched in the 1990s by Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, observes:

Three years ago, Joe Biden launched a center with his name on it through the University of Pennsylvania that’s just blocks from the Capitol. Since its opening, the Penn Biden Center’s office on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., has housed the future secretary of state, the president’s top adviser, and, not surprisingly, the future president himself. But for an organization with such high-profile alumni and staff, its mission is surprisingly unclear.

Well, not totally unclear. It’s about Joe Biden.

Of course, nothing I’ve said in this column gets to the core of why the Penn Biden Center is in the news. This time last year, my old friend and colleague Peter Schweizer released a major book, Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, that reported on the stench of communist Chinese cash possibly connected to the center or the university. “The flow of money to the University of Pennsylvania should raise some eyebrows and offer cause as to who is financing the Biden Center’s Operations,” writes Schweizer. “One trend is unmistakable: after the Biden Center’s announcement that it was opening at the University of Pennsylvania, donations from the Chinese mainland to Penn almost tripled.”

According to Schweizer, that was in the amount of tens of millions of dollars.

It is indeed suspicious. It smells of corruption at the highest levels — government, Biden, and the already rotten higher-ed establishment. Speaking of which, the compassionate progressives at Penn charge your kid over $63,000 per year for tuition and fees (not including room and board). That itself is a scandal.

But back to the nuts and bolts: I’ve worked for think tanks with budgets under a million bucks that produced more in five months than the Penn Biden Center has done in five years. Chi-comm connections aside, let it be said that even the very essence of the Penn Biden Center as a think tank is questionable. Other than serving as a dubious tribute entity to Joe Biden, I don’t see this thing as doing much. Of course, in the world of academia, that would be no surprise. But in the world of think tanks, it is a surprise. There doesn’t seem to be much thinking going on at this think tank. Other than perhaps thoughts about the next big check

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Brain CHIP Revelation - Klaus Schwab Confirms Everything!

Brain CHIP Revelation - Klaus Schwab Confirms Everything! Read More >> +++++++++++++++++++++ Getting old is tough! +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

A MULTITUDE OF TOPICS.

They grow.

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Canadian Intelligence Finds Evidence of Chinese Interference in Elections

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Did President Ordain Arrest of Israeli Over Hunter Biden Investigation?

Professor Gal Luft is detained trying to board a routine flight to Tel Aviv from Cyprus.

Usually when Israelis travel to Cyprus from Israel it is for short vacations or business and with the expectation that they will be able to make the hop back to Tel Aviv — about a 40-minute flight — without a hitch. That, though, was not the case last week when Gal Luft, a professor and former Israeli lieutenant colonel, was arrested at Larnaca International Airport as he was preparing to board a return flight to Israel. 

Mr. Luft was arraigned last Friday on charges of illegal arms trafficking but swiftly cast the claim as retaliation by President Biden for his cooperating with an investigation pertaining to his son, the artist Hunter Biden. It is probably outlandish to think that the impetus for the arrest of a fairly innocuous-looking Israeli citizen could have come from a vengeful White House — or is it?

The case, which was first reported by the Israeli news website Ynet and has since rippled across Greek and Cypriot press outlets, is by turns mysterious and portentous, particularly in light of the growing congressional scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s questionable business dealings with both Communist China and Ukraine.

In the first part of a tweet, the 56-year-old Mr. Luft stated, “I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated  extradition request by the US,” adding, “I’ve never been an arms dealer.” In the second part he wrote that “the Department of Justice is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden. Shall I name names?”

It is possible that he already has. Ynet reported that Mr. Luft’s attorney, Mordechai Tzivin, claimed that his client’s arrest “was politically motivated and an attempt to silence him for providing incriminating information in a corruption case allegedly involving Biden’s son, Hunter.” Mr. Tzivin said that “the arrest came four years after Luft cooperated with FBI and Department of Justice investigators to help them with information about the case.” He added that the meeting took place in 2019. 

Hunter Biden announced in December 2020 that he was under federal investigation for alleged tax crimes. Jim Biden is the president’s brother. Yet who is Mr. Luft, and how did he get so tangled up in an international web of intrigue that risks throwing Washington, Jerusalem, and Nicosia into an awkward triangle? 

Neither Mr. Tzivin nor the Israeli embassy at Nicosia have yet responded to requests for comment. However, Israeli press reports describe Mr. Luft as a defense and energy expert and co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. He has penned opinion pieces for the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post and appeared as a commentator on CNBC, where he spoke about the phenomenon of “de-dollarization” that has arguably accelerated under the Biden administration. 

The Jerusalem Post reported that “in a 2021 Beijing summit titled ‘International Forum on Democracy: the Shared Human Values,’ Luft accused the Biden administration’s ‘commitment to democracy going only as far as its interests allow.’” 

The Interpol Red Notice issued at the request of the United States claimed that Mr. Luft was wanted in relation to illegally selling arms to Libya and Communist China and fraud for offenses that allegedly occurred from 2015 onward, the Jerusalem Post reported. That is curious, as neither of those nations is at a loss for weaponry. Plus, this comes at a time when Beijing appears to have no qualms about  selling arms to Russia.

There are high stakes at play. Mr. Tzivin told Ynet that Mr. Luft’s testimony could “bury Hunter Biden, that’s why they’re trying to bury him first.” He added that any such testimony “will be very devastating” and will “divert attention to [President Biden] himself.” The lawyer also said that it’s “not unreasonable to think that the Democrats or some of their peers would like him gone.” He maintained that his client is “in great danger.”

What exactly Mr. Tzivin meant by that was not immediately clear. Ynet reported that Mr. Luft has been remanded in custody until another hearing on his extradition to America. 

Regardless of whether those extradition hearings proceed, it is now more likely than not that the case will cross the radar of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who has made clear his intentions to pursue issues of alleged corruption related to a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. The likelihood of that will only grow if Mr. Luft, whether from shores Cypriot or American, decides to make good on his taunt to “name names.”

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Report: Iran is ‘Mapping’ Jewish Leaders Worldwide for Assassination if Israel Strikes

Jewish News Syndicate (JNS)

The Iranian government is “mapping” Jews around the world with plans to kill them if Israel attacks Iran, according to a report in London’s Jewish Chronicle.

Catherine Perez-Shakdam, a Middle East scholar and research fellow at a think tank, met Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February 2017. She believes that he was unaware that she is Jewish.

According to Perez-Shakdam, the only thing Khamenei fears is an Israeli attack. “He believes Netanyahu’s threats, and he knows that for now, Israel is militarily superior,” she told the paper. “He feels that the Iranian regime can’t sustain a defeat.”

During her trip, Perez-Shakdad was told of a plan to “map key Jewish figures around the world for Iran’s assassination squads,” per the Chronicle.

“The idea was to identify all prominent NGOs run by Jews, who was doing what in each business sector, the important rabbis,” she said. “They wanted to figure out their influence and where they lived with their families in order to target them.”

The paper noted that in November, British intelligence’s MI5 stated it had foiled 10 assassination attempts in just one year. It did not say if any of those attempts targeted Jews.

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Market comments from Goldman:

Q4 Earnings Takeaways: No Recession, Fewer Labor Shortages, Continued Wage Pressures

With recession risk elevated and potentially hinging on the outlook for wage growth and inflation, we review Q4 corporate earnings season by analyzing company fundamentals, changes in 2023 forecasts, and management commentary. Our analysis produced four key takeaways:

Positive but below-potential economic growth. Real revenue growth for the S&P 500 has slowed but remains positive—we estimate at +1½% both year-on-year and sequentially (ex energy). This would be broadly consistent with the below-trend pace of GDP growth required to rebalance the labor market without a recession. Companies also continue to invest, with nominal capex spending up 17% year-on-year in nominal terms and 10% in real terms. And 2023 capex expectations actually increased during earnings season for all sectors except the struggling TMT category (technology, media, and telecom). For now, companies appear to be responding to lower margins and higher financing costs by cutting share buybacks—which fell 12% in the quarter—as opposed to reducing investment or employment.

Falling earnings not yet concerning. One possible red flag in the economic outlook is the downward revision to 2023 consensus earnings expectations. However, downward earnings revisions are common at the beginning of the year, and while the 8% pullback in 2023 consensus since July is larger than the -3% historical median, we find that neither EPS revisions nor prior-year EPS growth is a useful leading indicator of the economy. Earnings and revenues also continue to rise in the consumer and industrial sectors, an encouraging trend given that consumption and equipment capex represent three quarters of the economy.

Significant improvement in labor availability. References to labor shortages in Russell 3000 earnings calls fell to the lowest level of the pandemic recovery, at 4.9% of Q4 earnings calls compared to 16.5% for 3Q21. Our more detailed review of Dow Jones and large-cap consumer company transcripts was even more encouraging: Two thirds of references pointed to increased labor availability, and no companies cited labor shortages worsening. Furthermore, several companies viewed the staffing situation as back to normal or nearly normal, including Starbucks and Hilton.

Wage pressures waning but not going away. Management teams were somewhat less optimistic about declining labor cost inflation. Of the 44 of these calls discussing wage pressures in Q4, only a third cited or expected sequential moderation. Staffing firm ManPower Group neatly summarized the message from corporates on this dimension: “We would expect wage inflation to continue to come down... but it's going to take a while.”

The significant increase in labor availability and the sequential easing in wage pressures are consistent with our forecast of a significant decline in core inflation to a still-above-target 3% in late 2023. And while most management teams did not take a strong stance on output or consumer prices in 2023, both our company price announcements tracker and our business inflation expectations index remain below last year’s highs.

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If you missed the webinar, please visit our YouTube channel to view the recording, here.

The BBC's Islamist Insiders

with Adam Levick of CAMERA UK

 

Abdel Bari Atwan is the London-based editor-in-chief of the online newspaper Rai al-Youm and someone with a long, well-documented record of antisemitism and support for anti-Israel violence. He had been a frequent guest discussing the Middle East on the BBC – until CAMERA UK's exposure ended that. But Atwan is just one of many Islamists featured by the BBC. Why does the network have a penchant for Islamists? With recent changes, might it turn over a new leaf? What can politicians do about this problem?

 

Adam Levick is co-editor of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting & Analysis UK (CAMERA UK). He previously worked for NGO Monitor, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism. His op-eds can be found in numerous publications. He has a BA from Temple University and emigrated to Israel from Philadelphia in 2009.

 

The Middle East Forum, an activist think tank, deals with the Middle East, Islamism, U.S. foreign policy, and related topics, urging bold measures to protect Americans and their allies. Pursuing its goals via intellectual, operational, and philanthropic means, the Forum recurrently has policy ideas adopted by the U.S. government.

And:

Gil Hoffman on New Developments in Media Coverage of Israel

by Marilyn Stern

Middle East Forum Webinar

https://www.meforum.org/64177/gil-hoffman-on-new-developments-in-media-coverage

Gil Hoffman, Executive Director of Honest Reporting (HR), an organization that combats ideological prejudice in journalism as it impacts Israel, spoke to a February 13th Middle East Forum Webinar (video) about Israel's portrayal in the media and HR's battle to set the record straight. The following is a summary of Hoffman's comments:

With over two decades of experience as the Jerusalem Post's former chief political correspondent, Hoffman believes the "fairest fight" for Israel is to win on the "media battlefield." Success there is the "key" to winning on the military battlefield, where Israel has the advantage, and on college campuses, where Israel is at a great disadvantage. Israel's communication lag after destroying Gaza's "CNN Tower" in May 2021 supports his view. Although it gave advance warning to avoid casualties, a month passed before Israel finally made the case that its destruction of the building, which was used by Hamas as its "cyber tower," actually "saved lives." Because of the communication lag, Israel lost the media advantage. The Jewish State learned its lesson in August 2022's Gaza war after lives were lost in the Jabalia refugee camp. Generally, military bureaucracy is slow to release information, but the decision to fast track the release of proof that Israel was blameless in that incident enabled Israel to quickly win that global media contest.

Currently, the media battle is "only getting harder" because "the truth doesn't really matter anymore" to a media that promotes the false narrative that Israel is an "aggressor, foreign colonial power [that] indiscriminately targets and kills Palestinians." The recent murder of three Israelis by a Palestinian terrorist's car-ramming attack resulted in media outlets displaying their biases devoid of any "historic perspective." Ramot, where the terrorist struck, has been an established Israeli neighborhood since the 1970s and is situated within the city limits of Jerusalem. Although most of Ramot is located on land Israel liberated from Jordan's control in the Six-Day War, many global media outlets reported that Ramot is a "settlement." In essence, the media blamed the six-year-old, his eight-year old brother, and the twenty-year old newlywed for their own deaths in an "occupied" area instead of reporting the truth about the victims — that a Palestinian terrorist targeted civilians by using his car as a weapon to kill Jews waiting in an Israeli bus shelter.

Much like military deterrence on the battlefield, HR restores "deterrence" on the media frontline by challenging the narrative. To further its aims, the organization has succeeded in getting seven antisemitic journalists who praised Adolf Hitler fired. HR vetted Fady Hanona, the journalist who covered last summer's Gaza war for the New York Times, by researching his social media pronouncements posted in Arabic. Hoffman met with Patrick Kingsley, the New York Times bureau chief, and exposed Hanona's hateful social media rhetoric comments that included, "I'm in favor of killing [the Jews] and burning them like Hitler did." HR team's discovery that two more journalists praised Hitler or terror attacks led to other terminations at CNN and Reuters. By and large, media outlets appreciate and respect HR for ensuring that the media adheres to high journalistic standards because, as Kingsley told Hoffman, "We're both in the truth-telling business."

The West's late arch nemesis, Osama bin Laden, said the "key to winning a war is winning the media war." Israel's enemies have noticed HR's investigative success on social media. Accordingly, 350 Palestinian journalists signed a letter "condemning" the organization. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran's round-the-clock propaganda channel, Press TV, broadcast video reports targeting HR. Press TV went so far as to show an image of Hoffman and his child in an effort to "intimidate" him. Undeterred, Hoffman persists in his message that "blatant" antisemitic journalists who glorify terror cannot report objectively on Israel, and HR is committed to exposing them.

Although Hoffman perceives that the world is no longer "blindly" following anti-Israel narratives, recent shifts in Israel's current government have stoked the anti-Israel media fire. The media portray the "incorrect narrative" of a "right-wing, hawkish, hardline, ultra-right government," in contrast to the good press Israel received with its previous "more diverse" government. The pronouncement by the head of an ultra-Orthodox party member of the coalition that in "matters of religion and state" there will be no changes, has proven the global media wrong in reporting that the current government is looking to alter the status quo in Israel regarding religious matters.

Hoffman persists in his message that "blatant" antisemitic journalists who glorify terror cannot report objectively on Israel, and HR is committed to exposing them.

At present, Israel's proposed legal reforms are getting "bad press," with the media giving short shrift to the "two sides" of the debate. While there are valid concerns that the reforms will affect the "checks and balances between [Israel's] executive, legislative, and judicial branches" and harm democracy, the other side also makes a valid point in claiming the Supreme Court has had "too much power over the last 30 years." Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu maintains that the reforms will "improve the Israeli economy, strengthen it and strengthen our democracy," but the fact remains that Israel is "under a microscope more than anyone else in the world," and HR is cognizant of global media's "increased scrutiny."

HR is "punching above its weight" with its three writers and one social media staffer. Media Central, an arm of HR, engages in "journalistic outreach" by establishing relationships with journalists and media outlets and providing briefings and background information for journalists in order to "understand the nuances." HR also uses Meltwater, a costly media monitoring and analysis program, to conduct "forensic research" in mainstream and social media.

With its limited budget for technological software, its record of successes, and the dedication of its small staff, supporting HR as a force multiplier on the media battlefield is a critical part of Israel's ongoing struggle to restore deterrence on the military battlefield as well as on North America's college campuses.

To report anti-Israel coverage in the mainstream and social media, write to action@honestreporting.com

Subscribe to Honest Reporting and share its posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Marilyn Stern is communications coordinator at the Middle East Forum.

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WHERE ARE ALL THE WHITE PEOPLE?

 

What Suddenly Happened to the White People in America?

 

Of the 328.2 Million total citizens, there are 236.5 Million Whites in

the United States or 72% of the population!

 

A spreadsheet of TV commercials shows the following over a 4 month period:

 

White men have all but disappeared .

When they are in commercials they are either:

· Old, ugly and sick or:

Ø They are the partner of a black woman

Ø And have no speaking part.

 

Or have a gay male partner.

 

· In 3 of the commercials the white men are doing laundry and always paired with a little girl to whom they are delivering the clean clothes.

 

There were zero commercials of White fathers and sons. None!

· Equally disturbing, young white boys and teens have also disappeared.

· The study found a majority of the children were white girls

with a black "brother."

· Mostly TV commercial couples consist of a white woman with a black man.

 

Are they trying to program the young people of today?

Amazingly, in the month of December there was an uptick in good looking white male models. Research determined that in each and every case it was a cologne commercial and every one of those commercials were made in Europe where they still use muscular, masculine white men.

 

One insurance commercial featured a good looking white guy in his 20's.  He was so mind-numbingly stupid that he was incapable of delivering his lines and couldn't even say "Liberty Mutual" the insurance company featured in the commercial.

 

Over a period of 4 months it concluded that:

While the African American population in America is only 12% they were in 84.3% of the commercials.

Black males are only 5% of our population yet were in 79.7% of the ads.

 

White males make up the largest segment of our population:

· Yet were only in 4% of the TV commercials!

· In most of those cases they are in their 60's to 80's and

were pushing medication for debilitating diseases, reverse mortgages (i.e. Tom Selleck) or Medicare plans.

· While the study had many, many more alarming facts, one that really stands out is that:

Ø each and every ad for new cars featured a woman driver except for Lincoln.

Ø Only one ad included a white male passenger and he is not behind

the wheel, a black woman is.

Ø In the commercials for automobiles there were more black women

drivers than white women.

Ø Again, Europe was the exception here Mercedes and BMW had NO

VISIBLE DRIVERS!! They showed the cars cruising highways with license

plates that were obviously European but never allowed a view where the

driver was visible. I found that very interesting.

This questions:

· Who casts these commercial shoots?

· Who directs the directors to cast certain ‘types’?

· How did this trend in commercials happen all at the same time?

· Was it at federal government direction?

· Can you say conspiracy?

What is going on here?

· Demasculinization of the White American Male?

· Looks like White lives don’t matter and Black privilege has taken over!

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The Toxic Racialist Obsessions of Joe Biden

Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class.

bY Victor Davis Hanson

Joe Biden ran on “unity,” which is critical in a multiracial America. He vowed to heal the divisions supposedly sown by Donald Trump. Instead, he is proving to be the most polarizing president in modern memory. Often his racialist rhetoric and condescension have proven demeaning to both blacks and whites. In a volatile multiracial democracy that demands tolerance and restraint, a highly unpopular Biden, for cheap political advantage, continually proves incendiary and reckless. 

Last week Joe Biden snarked after watching a White House screening of Till:

Lynched for simply being black, nothing more. With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards. Hard to believe, but that’s what was done. And some people still want to do that. 

 Exactly who are these “some people”? Who fits Biden’s innuendos of contemporary “some people” who, he alleges in 2023, still wish, as “white crowds, white families” of the past, to mail celebratory postcards after they lynch black people? The Ultra-MAGA villains of his recent Phantom of the Opera speech? Have his current targets ever echoed anything like Biden’s own racist past warning that busing would force people to “grow up in a racial jungle”?

What current data might support Biden’s absurd charges? Is Biden referring to federal interracial crime and hate crime statistics charting violent white propensities against blacks? None exist. In fact, they continually reveal that so-called whites are underrepresented as perpetrators in both categories, while overrepresented as victims in interracial crimes—dramatically so in the case of black-on-white violent crime.

In our sensationalist YouTube world, are we suffering an epidemic of Internet-fed, white-on-black incendiary crimes that might have prompted the president’s demagogic accusations? Not at all. Most of the most recent publicized interracial violence—a woman in a gym fighting off a would-be rapist, a bicyclist doctor stabbed to death in an intersection as his attacker spewed racial hatred, a 26-year-old mother lethally shot in the back in front of her children in a parking lot over a minor argument, a young boy violently choked on a bus, a small girl on a bus beaten repeatedly by two teenage boys—have involved black perpetrators and apparent white victims. So, what contemporary evidence or widely publicized anecdotes prompt Biden’s recent charges of “white rage”-fueled violence?

Yet simultaneously with Biden’s blanket and unsupported charges of racism, no president since Woodrow Wilson has offloaded more racialist verbiage than Joe Biden himself. In an eerie example of psychological projection, never has a president accused others of racism more, while freely revealing himself either to be a racist or non compos mentis, or both.

Stranger still, Biden’s latest accusation comes from a president who once eulogized the former racist, Exalted Cyclops, and segregationist Senator. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) as “one of my mentors” and lamented that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” That was no isolated fluke.

During his campaign for the presidency, Biden in 2019 praised segregationist Senator James O. Eastland for not labeling a younger Biden with the derogatory term “boy”: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’” 

How odd, then, that Biden, as president no less, has used just that derogatory insult “boy” for distinguished blacks. Indeed, the very day before Biden leveled his “some people” slur, he was back at it with his racist “boy” reference to the black governor of Maryland: “You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell ya,” Biden told an audience of union workers on Wednesday. “He’s the real deal, and the boy looked like he could still play. He got some guns on him.” 

Such condescension was consistent with Biden’s past usage of “Negro” and his earlier August 2021 similar “boy” trope of referring to one of own top aides: “I’m here with my senior adviser and boy who knows Louisiana very, very well and New Orleans, Cedric Richmond.” 

In Biden world, blacks seem to be a collective to whom he can pander in stereotypical terms, as opposed to Latinos, whom Biden feels can think for themselves. Or so he said on the campaign trail in 2020, “Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

These were “gaffes” only if one believes Biden’s frequent racialist smears and slurs are more the symptoms of senility than bias. Again, as a 2020 candidate, Biden gave us his absurd racist “Corn Pop” fables. In these concocted, He-Man sagas, Biden stood down purported ghetto gangster with his own custom-cut chain, while often showing his tanned legs’ golden hairs to curious inner-city black youth.

Biden also smeared two black journalists who had the temerity to ask him a few tough questions, one with the now infamous slang ad hominem, “You ain’t black” and the other with the personal dismissal “junkie.”

A consistent trope in these insults is his lifelong condescension of accomplished black Americans, such as his long-ago infamous talk-down to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during Biden’s travesty of conducting his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. In that context we also remember Biden’s idiotic warning, replete with his accustomed affected black patois, to black professionals in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

Like Bill Clinton, who reportedly uttered of supposed 2008 upstart Barack Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Biden was especially bewildered by Barack Obama. He apparently seemed, in Biden’s racialist view, an aberration from Biden’s own usual stereotyped views of blacks of limited ability: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That assessment came from a candidate, who, even predementia, could never string together more than a few coherent sentences. 

Biden, remember, explained top-performing states in education as attributable to fewer minorities: “There’s less than 1 percent of the population in Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So, look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”

In a world of law schools turning out record numbers of black lawyers, and billionaire entrepreneurs like Bob Johnson, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, or Michael Jordan, Biden opines, “The data shows young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding given the chance as white entrepreneurs are. But they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have, they don’t have accountants, but they have great ideas.”   

The reason we do not associate Biden with characteristic racist stereotyping and tropes, other than with raw political demagoguery, is the same reason we give passes to liberals who say overtly racist things, which might otherwise suggest that their loud progressive rhetoric serves as some sort of psychological mechanism to square the circle of their own discomfort with the proverbial other.

Do we remember the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s quickly hushed up and contextualized confession that abortion was targeting the proper people. (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)? 

Do we recall liberal icon and former Senate Majority Harry Reid, who eerily dovetailed Biden with similarly racist assessment of Obama (“a ‘light-skinned’ African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”)? 

Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class. Fact checkers assure us that when Joe Biden libeled Trump supporters as “chumps” and “dregs” he really meant the Ku Klux Klan or white nationalists who gravitate to Trump. But most took his blanket smears as they were intended. And they fit the larger patterns of his more recent “semi-fascism” smears, and indeed, the genre of tired leftwing demagoguery that earlier gave us Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or the smelly who stink up Walmart in the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page joint text trove: “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”

In occasional opportunistic moments, Biden transforms into “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” to accentuate his middle-class roots. But he has a repugnant propensity for using racial terms of condescension and disparagement and for projecting his own unease onto a supposedly racist white middle class and poor even as he seeks to win support from the very minority communities he has so often crudely characterized. 

What is the concrete result of this now common Bidenesque schizophrenia?

Consider the toxic plume that has polluted the skies over East Palestine, Ohio, a working-class small town that is 98 percent white, with a median income of $26,000, and sits amid the Pennsylvania borderland. That very region once rejected in its 2008 primary Barack Obama—and in turn was blasted in stereotyped fashion by him: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” 

Ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton resonates that same contempt for the convenient target of the white poor and lower middle class. Rather than send in FEMA on day one of the toxic release with tents, mobile kitchens, and supplies and medical personnel to care for the evacuated, the federal government waited two weeks and then acted only when even the liberal media was confused by Biden’s deliberate neglect. 

Amid the disaster, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in his now tired boilerplate, was on record instead railing against supposed white hardhats who supposedly do not look like the communities in which they work. For a Biden or Buttigieg, the fish and animals dying from toxic air or water were insignificant artifacts, as were the complaints of burning lungs and allergic reactions to the black chemical cloud.

One wonders what would have been the immediate reaction of Biden and the federal government had a corporation decided to vent the contents of wrecked rail cars full of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate and then to light up the escaping gas, birthing a toxic black plume over Martha’s Vineyard or Malibu, as opposed to East Palestine or, say,  South-Central L.A. or Ferguson, Missouri. 

Biden would have sent legions of aid workers in to ensure social justice for the marginalized and performance-art reassurance to his donor class.

Whether Biden spouts racial bombast to curry favor with his Democratic base or to project onto others his own habitual racist put downs is not quite clear. But Biden’s utter contempt for white poor and lower middle classes, who are were deemed not worthy of the prompt federal attention customarily accorded to others in times of disaster, is self-evident.

Otherwise, Biden would have sent help immediately rather than smear “some people” as 21st-century lynchers.

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Joe Biden Colluded With National Archives, Report Finds

(PresidentialHill.com)- After documents were found in Joe Biden’s old office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, the National Archives arranged with the president’s attorneys to have them transferred from their Boston law office to the National Archives, according to emails obtained through a FOIA request.

The Associated Press and other outlets obtained over 70 pages of emails between National Archives officials and lawyers for the president that provide more detail about the initial discovery of classified records found in Biden’s possession.

In an email dated November 7, 2022, National Archives General Counsel Gary Stern told lawyers Patrick Moore and Bob Bauer to make sure the boxes removed from the Penn Biden Center were stored in a locked, secure location in their Boston law office that would not be “accessed by anyone.”

Moore reportedly took the documents from the Penn Biden Center to his Boston law office before the classified documents were discovered. However, it is unclear from the emails if the classified records were among those transferred to Moore’s office in Boston.

In a November 8 email, Gary Stern wrote to Moore and Bauer to arrange for the boxes to be transferred from their law office to the JFK library the following day. Moore replied that he was in Washington but would have his colleague facilitate the transfer of the documents.

The classified documents were initially discovered among the Penn Biden Center records on November 2. However, the Biden administration did not publicly disclose the discovery until January.

Another set of classified documents was discovered in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington home on December 20. The White House didn’t disclose that until January 12.

CNN reported this week that there had been two searches of Biden’s records housed at the University of Delaware that were previously unknown.

According to CNN, on two separate days in recent weeks, the FBI searched two locations at the University of Delaware and retrieved some materials which are being reviewed by the FBI. However, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN that the materials retrieved do not appear to contain classified markings.

According to the source, the searches were conducted with the cooperation and consent of the president’s lawyers.

Read More >>>

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Iran Enriching Uranium to Near Weapons-Grade

Latest Developments

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has detected Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 84-percent purity at the Fordow underground facility, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday. This purity level marks the highest achieved by the Islamic Republic, though the exact quantity of 84-percent enriched uranium currently in Iran’s possession remains unknown. Uranium enriched to at least 90 percent is considered atomic weapons-grade. Since 2021, Tehran has curtailed some IAEA monitoring at Iran’s enrichment facilities, and the Bloomberg story does not make clear how the IAEA detected Iran’s enrichment to 84 percent.

Expert Analysis

“That Iran is enriching uranium to near weapons-grade and the IAEA has limited means to detect it is a direct result of the West’s diplomacy-without-leverage approach, which has permitted Tehran to gallop to the nuclear threshold with impunity. Washington must take the lead on penalizing and deterring Iran’s atomic advances, reapplying maximum economic pressure, and demanding greater transparency by Tehran.” — Andrea Stricker, Deputy Director of FDD’s Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program

“Make no mistake, maximum deference and pulled punches against Iran’s nuclear escalation has led to this. These moves leave little room for the Biden administration to continue its current course on Iran and for resurrection of the 2015 nuclear deal.” — Behnam Ben Taleblu, FDD Senior Fellow

Iran’s Atomic Advances

Since entering office in January 2021, the Biden administration has presided over numerous qualitative Iranian nuclear advances, as Tehran capitalized on reduced pressure and the West’s fruitless effort to restore the 2015 nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

In January 2021, Iran resumed 20 percent enrichment at Fordow for the first time since the JCPOA’s finalization. In April 2021, Tehran enriched uranium to 60 percent purity. The same year, Iran also produced uranium metal, a material used in nuclear weapon cores. Over the course of 2021 and 2022, Iran installed thousands of fast advanced centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Iran’s breakout time, or the amount of time it requires to make weapons-grade uranium (WGU) for a nuclear weapon, now stands at weeks to produce WGU for four atomic bombs.

Fordow Is a Growing Proliferation Concern

It is no surprise that Tehran would experiment with producing near-WGU at Fordow, particularly if it thought the IAEA would not detect it. Last month, Iran also failed to notify the IAEA when it changed an enrichment configuration at Fordow, a violation of Tehran’s IAEA safeguards agreement, which requires the regime to declare such nuclear activities.

Washington Must Shift Course

Iran is unlikely to abandon its efforts to creep toward becoming a nuclear threshold state. The Biden administration should therefore abandon its policy of seeking the JCPOA’s resurrection and embrace broad multilateral pressure against the Islamic Republic. This includes working with transatlantic partners to issue a resolution of censure at the next IAEA Board of Governors meeting, which takes place in mid-March. The United States and Europe must also refer Iran’s nuclear file back to the UN Security Council, where they should trigger the “snapback” of previous UN sanctions resolutions.

Related Analysis

Exploiting America’s Declining Pressure: Iran’s Nuclear Escalation Over Time, by Behnam Ben Taleblu and Andrea Stricker

From ‘Maximum Pressure’ to ‘Minimal Resistance,’ by Behnam Ben Taleblu and Andrea Stricker

If Europe Wants to Sanction Iran, It Knows What to Do, by Richard Goldberg and Andrea Stricker

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