For years, the FDA allowed a drug to be injected into pregnant women that was neither safe, nor effective. Finally, it has been withdrawn.
BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD | MAY 15, 2023
Previously, I wrote about Makena, a synthetic hormone given to millions of pregnant woman, to prevent premature birth. It was highly controversial because there was no robust proof that it was safe or effective, despite having FDA-approval.
Last month, after many years of use, the FDA finally decided to withdraw Makena from the market.
Adam Urato, a maternal-foetal medicine specialist at MetroWest Medical Centre, Massachusetts welcomed the decision, but said it took the FDA far too long.
“I cannot believe we’ve been injecting this hormone into pregnant women for 20 years, all the leading medical organisations recommended it, the FDA approved it – and it took this long to finally acknowledge the drug did not work,” he said.
Urato opposed the use of Makena from the start. He testified before the FDA, he wrote in the media and in medical journals, and helped petition the FDA to withdraw the drug from the market.
Preterm birth is a major issue in obstetrics. In the US, one in 10 babies are born prematurely, and accounts for most of the neonatal morbidity and mortality.
Physicians were desperate for a solution, and Makena seemed to hold promise.
It wasn’t cheap though. Makena was 5,200% more expensive than generic versions of the same medication.
Large amounts of public money in the Medicaid program and other health insurance dollars were used to pay for the weekly shots at a total cost of $30,000 per pregnancy.
How it began
The drug maker sought fast-track approval of Makena, citing a 2003 study that was so flawed, the FDA’s own statistical reviewer commented that the drug was not worth approving.
The FDA approved it anyway on the basis that the drugmaker conduct more in-depth research into the medication’s effectiveness.
Then, in 2019 a confirmatory trial found the drug did not work. And by this stage, there were documented harms including gestational diabetes, depression, blood clots and a non-statistical doubling in stillbirths.
But instead of pulling the drug off the market, the FDA allowed Makena to be licensed for another four years.
“It should’ve been pulled immediately,” said Urato. “There were substantial profits for the drug company even after a confirmatory trial found it did not work, so it’s no wonder it was dragging its feet.”
It begs the question…
How is it even possible that a drug, which was neither safe nor effective for pregnant women, was allowed to be on the market for so long?
Urato says it’s a direct symptom of the medical-industrial complex – an entanglement of big pharma, medical organisations, and regulatory agencies – that creates an underlying motive to bolster profits, over health.
“For two decades the drug brought in billions in profits, and that money was used to fund physicians, researchers, professional medical societies, and academic institutions,” said Urato.
This makes it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for patients to navigate the healthcare system and know who to trust.
“We need elected officials that are going to put the interests of patients and the public first, and not be tainted, or corrupted by industry. We need to separate our politics and our regulatory bodies from industry funding,” he added.
Lesson learned?
Urato feels vindicated for his work, but says it’s no time for a victory lap. Instead, the Makena fiasco should provide us with tangible lessons to safeguard us against such scientific transgressions in the future.
“We must ‘first do no harm’ and follow the precautionary principle,” insisted Urato.
“When you’re exposing developing babies to synthetic chemical compounds, you can’t just assume it’s safe, until harm is proven. You must assume that the chemicals are having chemical effects on the foetus, because that’s what chemicals do.”
The Diethylstilbestrol (DES) disaster should have been a reminder to all obstetricians about the harms of giving synthetic hormones to pregnant women without sufficient data. But once Makena was rolled out, Urato said, “it was like everyone forgot the past.”
“I counselled my patients on my concerns about exposing them and their babies to a synthetic hormone with unknown short and long-term effects, so I guess I could have been accused of peddling ‘misinformation’,” said Urato cognisant that he was going against medical consensus.
“But what is considered misinformation today, may be scientific fact tomorrow. I helped to prevent a generation of mums and babies in my community from being exposed to a useless drug. That’s why it’s so important that doctors have freedom of speech to express their views,” said Urato.
It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of pregnant mothers and babies were exposed to the ineffective and risky synthetic hormone over the past 2 decades.
“Time and time again, drugs and devices are pulled off the market for safety issues. If the FDA approves a drug, it does not mean that it will be proven to be safe and effective over time. The FDA has lost the public’s trust,” Urato said.
In April 2020, I warned about that the false positive-prone non-quantitative RT-PCR was deadly. Now we know, again, I was (sadly) correct.
By James Lyons-Weiler | Popular Rationalism | May 17, 2023
Hospital protocolists sticking to the strict hand-me-down highly profitable “COVID protocol” may have doomed a majority of admitted COVID-19 patients to death due to a perfect storm of institutional failure.
I first warned FDA in early 2020 that because the commercial kits did not use internal negative controls there would be arbitrarily high COVID-19 false positive rates due to the abuse of non-quantitative PCR. The majority of “cases”, I pointed out, would be false because the test was to be used as a screening device – and when you screen with an imperfect test when prevalence is low, you end up with more false positives than negatives in the set of positives.
Knowing that people who were symptomatic for respiratory infections would be among the most tested population and that Fauci’s medical approach to COVID-19 was to tell people to go home and get as sick as possible, it was readily clear that people would be dying due to lack of treatment for treatable conditions, like bacterial pneumonia and fungal infections in the lung.
Now a study from NIH-funded researchers in Chicago, IL has found that unresolved respiratory infections – not necessarily those involved in SARS-CoV-2 – were present in people who failed to “respond” to mechanical ventilation.
The authors wrote:
“Recent data suggest that secondary pneumonia is present in up to 40% and pneumonia or diffuse alveolar damage is present in over 90% of autopsy specimens obtained from patients with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection (18). Consistent with these observations, we and others found high rates of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) in patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia requiring mechanical ventilation, suggesting that bacterial superinfections such as VAP may contribute to mortality in patients with COVID-19 (7, 19–22). These findings prompt an alternative hypothesis that a relatively low mortality rate directly attributable to primary SARS-CoV-2 infection is offset by a greater risk of death attributable to unresolving VAP (23).”
They concluded:
“These data suggest mortality associated with severe SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia is more often associated with respiratory failure that increases the risk of unresolving VAP and is less frequently associated with multiple-organ dysfunction.”
Unsurprisingly, the study found that people with bacterial pneumonia who were on ventilators had the highest mortality. Although their analysis restricted consideration to bacterial pneumonia cases detected 48 hours after ventilation, they did not distinguish between undiagnosed cases of bacterial pneumonia upon admission and those acquired in-hospital (nosocomial infection). The rate of co-infection is not clear either, due to insufficient testing for bacterial pneumonia in patients once diagnosed with COVID-19.
The study leads to the stunning potential that perhaps 58% of “COVID” cases were respiratory issues other than COVID (43% bacterial pneumonia, 16% non-pathogen causes of respiratory failure). Treated as “COVID”, these patients were doomed to a fate of non-treatment due to mis- or under-diagnosis.
It is unclear what percentage of deaths attributed to COVID-19 could have been prevented via a standard therapy for bacterial pneumonia, but it is potentially very high. Fauci’s prescription – sending patients home to do nothing – no corticosteroids, no antibiotics just in case it was bacterial – drove the COVID-19 death rate up far higher than it had to be.
Gao et al., 2023. Machine learning links unresolving secondary pneumonia to mortality in patients with severe pneumonia, including COVID-19, Journal of Clinical Investigation (2023). DOI: 10.1172/JCI170682
By Victor Davis Hanson | American Greatness | May 15, 2023
Federal prosecutors last week announced the indictment of U.S. Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.) on a host of charges, including misuse of federal campaign funds and wire fraud, almost all of them resulting from his pathological lies.
Certainly, Santos deserved the attention of prosecutors for lying on federal documents and affidavits that may have helped him win a congressional seat as well as personal lucre.
But if that’s the case, why haven’t federal prosecutors also gone after Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? She clearly lied her way into a Harvard Law School professorship and an erstwhile presidential candidacy by claiming, in part, quite falsely she was a Native American, supposedly Harvard’s first indigenous law professor.
Her Senate colleague, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), flatly lied (he said “misspoke”) about being a Vietnam War veteran. He never confessed to “misspeaking” about his résumé until caught. Both senators, apparently like Santos, gained political traction in their various campaigns from such lies, but the two apparently never put them in writing, or at least not as blatantly as did Santos.
New Federal Standards?
Are federal and states prosecutors now setting a new moral and legal standard by criminalizing Santos’ lies? If true, congratulations—it is long overdue.
Now can we please extend the long arm of the law to reach far beyond a bit player like Santos?
Why not reboot with the really big liars? Their lies far more undermined the integrity of our key agencies and indeed our national security.
So let us start with John Brennan, the former CIA director. He lied on two separate occasions, in one case while under oath before the U.S. Senate. His untruths were not mere campaign finance fabrications. They involved falsely swearing that the CIA did not spy on the computers of Senate staffers (“Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”). He also lied that U.S. drone missions in prior years had not killed innocent bystanders (“There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”).
Brennan, only when caught, admitted to both lies. But he faced zero consequences and, in fact, was soon rewarded with an on-air analyst job at MSNBC.
Then we come to James Clapper, the former director of the Office of National Intelligence. Like Santos, he lied. But unlike Santos, Clapper was under oath to Congress. And further unlike Santos, Clapper was not a small fish, but a whale in charge of coordinating the nation’s intelligence bureaus.
Clapper’s lies mattered a great deal, especially when he swore to Congress that the National Security Agency did not spy on Americans. (“No, sir. Not wittingly.”) When caught, Clapper confessed that he gave “the least untruthful answer.” (“I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no.’”). He faced zero consequences for his perjury. And like Brennan, he marketed his anti-Trump phobias into a comfortable cable news gig.
Note well that both Clapper and Brennan likely lied again when they signed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter, with a wink and nod suggesting it was a hallmark example of “Russian disinformation.”
Then we come to the former interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He is also currently working as a cable news commentator. McCabe admitted to lying—according to the inspector general, “done knowingly and intentionally”—four separate times to federal investigators, three times under oath. McCabe misled the country in matters that concerned a national election, more specifically lying that he had not leaked to the media to massage media narratives about the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
Then there is James Comey, another former FBI head, who confirmed McCabe had lied. He simply claimed on 245 occasions to House investigators and members that he either had no memory or had no knowledge, when asked under oath to explain some of the wrongdoing of the FBI during his directorship. Remember, Comey and the FBI signed off on the authenticity of Steele document material to obtain a FISA warrant, when they knew it was unreliable and Steele was not credible. Comey also likely leaked to the media a confidential memo officially memorializing a private conversation with the president of the United States.
Should we include yet another former FBI director? Robert Mueller swore under oath to Congress that he knew little about Fusion GPS (“I’m not familiar with that”) and more or less had ignored the Steele dossier. (“It’s not my purview.”) Mueller’s claims cannot be true because revelations about both were the very catalysts that prompted his own special counsel appointment.
Will the Santos prosecutors go after Anthony Fauci, the recently retired head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases?
Fauci seemingly lied under oath to the Senate when he preposterously claimed the money he channeled through a third party to the Wuhan virology lab did not entail support for gain-of-function virology research. (“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”) Many virologists were aghast at Fauci’s claims, since they knew gain-of-function research conducted in China—the point being to skirt U.S. laws—was precisely what the U.S.-subsidized researchers in China were doing.
The Bidens
Prosecutors are currently looking at the various shenanigans of Hunter Biden, whose lies may even be a match for those of George Santos. Joe Biden’s son apparently lied on his firearms background check affidavit when applying for a handgun purchase—so far, with impunity.
When asked point blank on national television whether his lost laptop was his own—he had signed a receipt for it at the repair shop—Biden refused to give a yes or no answer.
Hunter Biden has apparently de facto lied for years when he purportedly did not report either his entire income or his real business expenses accurately, or that he was the father of a child he conceived with an ex-stripper in Arkansas.
If Hunter’s lies do not match the number of Santos’ prevarications, his were at least far more significant. His lie that the laptop was not his prompted current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a former top Biden 2020 campaign aide, to call up Mike Morell, former interim CIA director. Morell’s mission was to round up as many intelligence authorities as he could to lie on the eve of a presidential election that the laptop had “all the hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” He found 51, including himself. Apparently, some active members of the CIA pitched in as well to lend the letter additional authenticity.
Note that Morell swears Blinken called him to solicit signers of the bogus letter, while Blinken claims he did not. So either the current secretary of state or the former interim director of the CIA is lying—or they both are. Again, among the first to sign the fraudulent intelligence letter were Brennan and Clapper. They apparently had earned a reputation as team players, given that both men had been willing to lie under oath to Congress. Misleading the nation again about the laptop to aid Joe Biden’s campaign was small potatoes.
Biden, on spec, promulgated the lie when he said in his second debate with Trump, “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it, except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”
A subsequent poll suggested the Bidens’ concocted laptop lies may have influenced voters to side with Biden in the election. If true, that was a lie that should be of far more interest to current federal prosecutors than Santos’ crazy fairy tales.
The Lies of the “Big Guy”
So we come to the greatest prevaricator of all.
Joe Biden flat-out lied on numerous occasions, such as when he claimed that he never discussed the family shake-down business with Hunter Biden.
Joe Biden, in fact, turns up on the laptop as someone deeply connected to Hunter Biden’s quid pro quo companies (“10 [percent] for the Big Guy”). Tony Bobulinksi, a former business associate of Hunter’s, has sworn that Joe and his brother Jim Biden were deeply involved in their foreign leveraging efforts.
A photo shows Joe Biden with Hunter’s “business” associates. Will the current Santos prosecutors turn their attention to the Oval Office occupant’s financial records to determine whether his lavish private homes and lifestyle were viable under his reported stated income?
Biden lied to Americans dozens of times to get elected. The tragic death of his wife in a car accident was not due to the drunkenness and fault of a truck driver. That was a horrific smear designed to shift blame onto an innocent man and gain sympathy for himself.
He lied that his son, Beau, died while serving in Iraq.
Biden dropped out of the 1988 presidential race after he was caught lying about his college records and plagiarizing a speech from a British politician.
So we know that in the past, Joe Biden’s lies have left a mark on history in a fashion that Santos’ never will.
When Biden prefaces his whoppers with “No joke!” or “This is the God’s honest truth!” and especially when he swears, “My word as a Biden!” then it is a fair bet that he is lying.
When Biden entered office, he lied about the number of Americans previously vaccinated under the Trump Administration and preposterously claimed there had been no COVID vaccine available.
He lied that his loan forgiveness amnesty passed Congress by two votes. In fact, Biden simply declared amnesty by fiat and never submitted the request to Congress at all.
He repeatedly lies that billionaires pay only three percent of their income in taxes on average. He lies about minor details, from giving his Uncle Frank a purple heart to matters of national concern, such as the price of gas when he entered office. It was most certainly not $5 a gallon!
Biden constantly lies about his résumé. He was never a long-haul truck driver. Nor was he a star athlete almost headed for the Naval Academy on a sports scholarship if only Dallas Cowboys legend Roger Staubach had not beat him out. “I was appointed to the academy in 1965 by a senator who I was running against in 1972. I didn’t come to the academy because I wanted to be a football star. And you had a guy named Staubach and Bellino here. So I went to Delaware.”
His house was never almost destroyed by a fire. He was never raised “politically” as a Puerto Rican. Biden never pinned the Silver Star on a Navy Afghanistan war hero for bringing back the body of a fellow soldier from a deep ravine. He was never arrested, either in South Africa or in Atlanta, for demonstrating on behalf of civil rights.
No foreign leader can believe Biden. He never traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He lied about his own Amtrak travel. He lied about his record on inflation and economic growth. He lied about upping Social Security payments. (It was a larger-than-usual automatic cost-of-living increase spurred by his inflationary policies.) He lied about the nature of the Trump tax cuts.
Biden keeps lying that the southern border is “secure” even as nearly 2 million people have crossed illegally on his watch and tens of thousands more are massed to enter the country as Title 42 restrictions are lifted.
He insists that five police officers died at the hands of protestors on January 6, 2021. In truth, the one person we know for certain who died violently that day was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed protester who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police lieutenant with a checkered record, whose identity was suppressed for months while Babbitt’s past was sullied by the press.
Biden’s defenders hint that either he is cognitively compromised and thus not responsible—as if he has told the truth the last 40 years when he was hale!—or his lies are mere “exaggerations” unlike the “lies” of Trump—as if lying about the death of one’s spouse or son or school record or resume or major legislation or his presidency is a mere “exaggeration.”
As a general rule, since 2015, if any federal bureaucrat or elected official lied in service of opposing Donald Trump, he was exempted from consequences. If not, he was properly held responsible for his lying. So the more that the fake Steele dossier, the Russian collusion hoax, and the Russian disinformation laptop lie warped the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the more the promulgators of those falsehoods never faced any consequences for their untruths.
So, yes, let federal prosecutors go after the lying George Santos to set a precedent that the lying of government officials has consequences.
But in the great scheme of lying things, Santos is a prevaricating minnow who was snagged to great acclaim because the lying sharks swim and circle with impunity.
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | May 17, 2023
On Monday, Special Counsel John Durham released his final report on the FBI and Justice Department’s abuse of power during the 2016 presidential election. His 316-page report proves that federal law enforcement was weaponized to rig American politics by shielding Hillary Clinton’s campaign and persecuting Donald Trump’s campaign.
Durham’s report is only the latest in a long pattern of abuses by the FBI. In 1945, President Harry Truman noted in his diary, “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.” In the 1948 presidential campaign, Hoover brazenly championed Republican candidate Thomas Dewey, leaking allegations that Truman was part of a corrupt Kansas City political machine. In 1952, Hoover sought to undermine Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson by spreading rumors that he was a closet homosexual. In 1964, the FBI illegally wiretapped Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s presidential headquarters and plane and conducted background checks on his campaign staff seeking evidence of homosexual activity. In 1972, acting FBI chief Patrick Gray burned incriminating evidence from the White House in his fireplace shortly after the Watergate break-in by Nixon White House “plumbers;” he was forced to resign in 1973 for that ignition.
But those interventions were child’s play compared to the FBI’s role in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for years before the primary, had used an insecure private email server to handle top-secret documents while she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. The server, located in a bathroom of Clinton’s Chappaqua, New York, mansion, exposed emails with classified information to detection by foreign sources and others.
Clinton’s private email server was not publicly disclosed until she received a congressional subpoena in 2015. A few months later, the FBI Counterintelligence Division opened a criminal investigation examining the “potential unauthorized storage of classified information on an unauthorized system.” Attorney General Lynch swayed FBI chief Comey to mislead the public by denying that a criminal investigation involving Clinton had commenced; instead, it was referred to simply as a “matter.”
The FBI treated Clinton and her coterie like royalty worthy of endless deference, according to a 2018 report by the Justice Department Inspector General. The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of top Clinton aides after a limited examination of their contents (including a promise not to examine any post-January 31, 2015, emails or content). When BleachBit software and hammers were used to destroy email evidence under congressional subpoena, the FBI treated it as a harmless error. A 2018 Inspector General report criticized FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence.
FBI investigators shrugged off every brazen deceit they encountered from Hillary’s staffers. The 2018 Inspector General report revealed that key FBI agents in the investigations were raving partisans. “We’ll stop” Trump from becoming president, lead FBI investigator Peter Strzok texted his mistress/girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, in August 2016. One FBI agent labeled Trump supporters as “retarded” and declared “I’m with her [Hillary Clinton]”. Another FBI employee texted that “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS.”
The FBI delayed interviewing Clinton until the end of the investigation, after she had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination and just before the Democratic National Convention. Comey decided before Clinton was interviewed by FBI agents that she would not be charged with criminal wrongdoing. FBI agents at that interview found Clinton’s answers claiming she didn’t realize she was handling classified documents “strained credulity;” one agent said he filed her responses in the “bucket of hard to impossible to believe.’” The FBI planned to absolve her “absent a confession from Clinton,” the Inspector General noted. There was no recording or transcript of that final interview. Minimizing the evidence and disclosures maximized the arbitrary power of Comey and other FBI officials in a landmark political case.
Shortly after that interview, FBI chief James Comey publicly announced that “no charges are appropriate” because Hillary didn’t intend to violate federal law. But that law is a strict liability statute; “intent” is irrelevant to the criminal violation.
FBI racketeering repeatedly rescued Hillary Clinton. The Clinton Foundation raked in hundreds of million dollars of squirrely foreign contributions while she was Secretary of State and revving up her presidential campaign. The Durham report found that “senior FBI and Department officials placed restrictions on how [the Clinton Foundation investigation was] handled such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for months leading up to the election.” On top of that dereliction, “the FBI appears to have made no effort to investigate…the Clinton campaign’s purported acceptance of a [illegal] campaign contribution that was made by the FBI’s own long-term [confidential human source] on behalf of Insider-I and, ultimately, Foreign Government.”
A few weeks after an effective whitewash, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server,” according to the Durham report. CIA chief John Brennan briefed President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and other top officials on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal…to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” There is no evidence that Obama and his policymakers had any objections to Hillary’s vilification proposal (referred to as the “Clinton Plan” in Durham’s report).
FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though “No FBI personnel who were interviewed by the Office recalled Crossfire Hurricane personnel taking any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence,” the report noted. The Clinton campaign helped bankroll the notorious Steele dossier, which made sweeping, unsubstantiated, and salacious accusations against Trump. The FBI, which was apparently willing to pay any price to defeat Trump, offered former British spy Christopher Steele $1 million in cash if he could prove the charges in that dossier before the 2016 election. There was no proof—but that didn’t stop the FBI from using the dossier to get warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “The FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” the report noted. As FBI analysts began to recognize that the Steele dossier was a hoax, FBI bosses ordered “no more memorandums were to be written” analyzing its claims.
After the election, FBI officials devoted themselves to crippling Trump’s presidency with fabricated evidence that Russia massively intervened to help him win. Kevin Clinesmith, a top FBI lawyer, was convicted for falsifying evidence to secure a FISA warrant to unjustifiably target Trump campaign officials. A federal prosecutor declared that the “resulting harm is immeasurable” from Clinesmith’s action. But federal judge James Boasberg conducted a “pity party” at the sentencing, noting that Clinesmith “went from being an obscure government lawyer to standing in the eye of a media hurricane…Clinesmith has lost his job in government service—what has given his life much of its meaning.” Scorning the prosecutor’s recommendation for jail time, the judge gave Clinesmith a wrist slap—400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.
Though the Durham report vivifies the extent of FBI meddling in the 2016 election, Americans remain in the dark about the full extent of the FBI’s efforts to rig the 2020 election. In December 2019, FBI agents came into possession of a laptop that Hunter Biden, the drug-addicted son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. That laptop’s hard drive was a treasure trove of crimes, including evidence that Hunter and other family members had collected millions in payments from foreign sources for providing access in Washington and other favors. That laptop provided ample warnings of how Joe Biden could be compromised by foreign powers. But FBI bosses blocked their agents from investigating its contents until after the 2020 election. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) reported that FBI agents examining the evidence on Hunter Biden “opened an assessment which was used by an FBI headquarters team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”
When news finally leaked out about the Hunter Biden laptop in October 2020, 51 former intelligence officials effectively torpedoed the story by claiming that the laptop was a Russian disinformation ploy. Their letter was orchestrated by Biden presidential campaign advisor—and current Secretary of State—Anthony Blinken. The FBI knew that the laptop was bona fide but said nothing to undercut the falsehoods made by the former spooks. Twitter and other social media outlets suppressed information on the Hunter Biden laptop until after the election. Matt Taibbi and other Twitter Files investigators have provided a torrent of evidence of how the FBI censored Americans prior to the 2020 election, almost always muzzling conservative voices.
Special Counsel John Durham asserted that the FBI’s abuses in the Clinton and Trump investigations caused the agency “severe reputational harm.” But Congress just awarded the FBI a record budget, and that is the only “reputation” that matters inside the Beltway.
Democrats and other Biden allies are treating the Durham report as a nothing-burger. The Washington Post fretted that the Durham report “may fuel rather than end partisan debate about politicization within the Justice Department and FBI.” The FBI announced that it had taken “dozens of corrective actions” to prevent similar “missteps” in the future. Law professor Jonathan Turley scoffed that the FBI’s statement “is ample evidence of a lack of remorse by the FBI like a habitual offender giving a shrug in his court ‘allocution’ before a judge.”
When getting caught trying to steal an election is a mere “misstep,” it will happen again. How many years will it take until we learn all the details of how the FBI tampered with the 2020 election?
Unless Congress and federal courts rein in the FBI, there needs to be a change in inaugural festivities. Instead of invoking “the will of the people,” will future presidents candidly tout “the will of the FBI”? If that happened, a big swath of the Washington press corps would probably stand up and cheer for their favorite agency.
Jim Bovard is the Junior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. He is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 16.05.2023
Special Counsel John Durham’s report helped expose the FBI’s corruption, thus curtailing the intelligence community’s ability to interfere in US politics, according to Larry Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism.
Special Counsel John Durham’s much-anticipated report about the origins of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s alleged ties to “Russia” was released on Monday. The special counsel concluded that the bureau had no factual evidence to open a probe on Trump. The probe lasted from July 31, 2016, when Trump was the Republican nominee, to May 17, 2017, after he had taken presidential office.
“The FBI is totally corrupt,” Johnson told Sputnik. “It’s a totally politicized organization. It really has completely discredited itself. This report confirms that very top officials at the FBI were nothing but liars, liars and engaged in a coup to try to overthrow a democratically-elected president. (…) Trump represented a threat to the deep state policies that wanted to expand NATO, to provoke conflicts around the world. And to basically destroy Russia was one of the objectives. And because Trump was seen as someone who was not going to go along with those objectives, they had to destroy him, or try to destroy him.”
According to Johnson, the FBI and the CIA will not be able to engage in the kind of corrupt acts in 2024 that they did for 2020 and 2016; at least not to the same degree. The newly-released report exposes “everything that they said that Donald Trump was doing with respect to Russia was a complete and utter fabrication,” the CIA veteran underscored.
“[The FBI and CIA] credibility has now certainly been called into question,” Johnson continued. “Just the fact that they can no longer be trusted, that the CIA was so prominently damaged by the admission that the 51 people who signed that letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, that they were making it up, that they were lying, so none of these people have the credibility now that will allow them to be taken seriously going forward.”
The years-long probe resulted in the conviction of just one FBI operative, Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to doctoring an email to state that Trump aide Carter Page had never been a CIA asset, despite the evidence to the contrary. However, it’s unlikely that James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and a whole host of FBI personnel allegedly responsible for violations of the bureau’s rules and politically-motivated persecution of Team Trump would ever be brought to justice, according to the CIA veteran.
“The way to understand this, their motive in doing this in 2016, was they fully expected Hillary Clinton to be the president,” Johnson said. “And they felt that if they made any attempts to investigate and prosecute her, that she would punish them. So, therefore, they dropped that investigation and then fabricated the warning against Donald Trump in order to distract, to take away all attention from the substantive allegations against Hillary Clinton. (…) I think there are certainly grounds for a civil lawsuit by Donald Trump and others who are injured, damaged by these lies. Unfortunately, it does not look like the Department of Justice will undertake any prosecutions of these people. So that said, this complete exposure of their corruption, I think, does make it more difficult for them to be as active in 2024.”
By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 16.05.2023
Since 2018, Hunter Biden has been under a series of investigations into tax-related crimes, drug use, money laundering and illegal business dealings in foreign countries, including Ukraine and China.
On Monday, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) removed the investigative team from their protracted tax fraud probe of Hunter Biden, in an apparent retaliation against a whistleblower who raised concerns about the handling of the case.
The whistleblower’s lawyers Mark Lytle and Tristan Leavitt wrote to Congress that the IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent they represent “was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress. He was informed the change was at the request of the Department of Justice.”
The two also recalled that on April 27, 2023, IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel appeared before the House Committee on Ways and Means to testify “without any hesitation there will be no retaliation for anyone making an allegation or a call to a whistleblower hotline.”
“However, this move [by the IRS] is clearly retaliatory and may also constitute the obstruction of a congressional inquiry,” the lawyers added.
They added that they “respectfully request that you [the IRS] give this matter your prompt attention” and that “removing the experienced investigators who have worked this case for years and are now the subject-matter experts is exactly the sort of issue our client intended to blow the whistle on to begin with.”
This comes a few weeks after insiders revealed that US District Attorney of Delaware David Weiss is close to making a decision on whether to charge Hunter Biden with a crime over tax and gun-related offenses.
The First Son is reportedly being investigated by Weiss for two misdemeanor tax filing charges, one pertaining to a felony tax evasion and other – to a false statement about a gun purchase.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland — appointed by former President Bill Clinton in 1995 and blocked as a Supreme Court nomination in 2016 by Senate Republicans — said his office would respect the outcome of Weiss’ investigation. “I stand by my testimony and I refer you to the attorney for the District of Delaware, who is in charge of this case and capable of making any decisions that he feels are appropriate,” Garland said.
The federal probe into Hunter Biden’s “tax affairs” is said to have been partly based on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) detailing fishy foreign transactions, with another insider claiming that these SARs were linked to money exchanges with “China and other foreign nations.”
The probe was launched by US Attorney’s Office in Delaware as early as 2018, but Hunter Biden said in December 2020 that he had learned about the investigation into his business deals only that month.
The son of then-president-elect Joe Biden said at that time that he was taking the matter “very seriously” and was “confident” that he had always managed his affairs “legally and appropriately.”
Apart from “tax affairs”, Hunter Biden is being probed over a drug use, money laundering and illegal business dealings in foreign countries including Ukraine and China, with investigators specifically looking into the content of Hunter Biden’s so-called “laptop from Hell“.
New York Times especially revolting in perpetration of massive and ridiculous fraud
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | May 16, 2023
On Sunday, June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in an interview on the British political show, ITV Peston: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct,” Assange said.
Just two days after Assange made this statement, the Washington Post published a report titled “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump.”
As soon as I saw this Washington Post report, I suspected it was a fraud perpetrated by Hillary Clinton’s friends in the U.S. government and mainstream media. Prima facie, it was pretty clear that the “Russian DNC” hack story was a way to distract attention away from the embarrassing content of the leaked DNC E-mails.
One of the oldest dirty tricks in the political playbook is to speak of the treachery of foreigners whenever a country’s rulers perceive that their power if threatened. As James Madison put it:
The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended.
The E-mail correspondence of Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, contained numerous expressions of a duplicitous, cynical, and Machiavellian nature. Clearly they felt threatened by the publication of these documents that showed their true colors. They therefore felt compelled to take strong action to change the subject. And what better way to change the subject than to speak loudly about Russian perfidy?
And so the Russian-Collusion Hoax was born. At the time I was astonished that such a huge swath of the permanent political class and mainstream media were all—in a perfectly coordinated fashion—talking such patently mendacious nonsense. I remember thinking that such orchestrated lying revealed extraordinary centralized control of our institutions. I also remember thinking that if this network of power could get away with telling—for months on end—such a whopper about President Trump, there was no telling what other colossal, organized frauds were going to be committed in the years ahead. “Wow, what’s next?” I asked my younger brother in one of our conversations about the hoax.
I am about 1/3 through reading the just-released report by Special Counsel John Durham titled REPORT ON MATTERS RELATED TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS ARISING OUT OF THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.
The first 100 pages contain nothing particularly surprising. Mostly it provides the meticulous details of what I already knew to be the case in the summer of 2016. However, on page 104, I ran across the following section:
iii. What the FBI knew from its intelligence collections as of early 2017. As the record reflects, as of early 2017, the FBI still did not possess any intelligence showing that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was in contact with Russian intelligence officers during the campaign. Indeed, based on declassified documents from early 2017, the FBI’s own records show that reports published by The New York Times in February and March 2017 concerning what four unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials claimed about Trump campaign personnel being in touch with any Russian intelligence officers was untrue.
These unidentified sources reportedly stated that (i) U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted communications of members of Trump’s campaign and other Trump associates that showed repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election; (ii) former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had been one of the individuals picked up on the intercepted “calls;” and (iii) the intercepted communications between Trump associates and Russians had been initially captured by the NSA. However, official FBI documentation reflects that all three of these highly concerning claims of Trump-related contacts with Russian intelligence were untrue. Indeed, in a contemporaneous critique of the Times article prepared by Peter Strzok, who was steeped in the details of Crossfire Hurricane, all three of the above-referenced allegations were explicitly refuted. Strzok’s evaluation of the allegations included the following:
• The FBI had not seen any evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with Russian intelligence officers. He characterized this allegation as misleading and inaccurate as written. He noted that there had been some individuals in contact with Russians, both governmental and non-governmental, but none of these individuals had an affiliation with Russian intelligence. He also noted previous contact between Carter Page and a Russian intelligence officer, but this contact did not occur during Page’s association with the Trump campaign.
• The FBI had no information in its holdings, nor had it received any such information from other members of the Intelligence Community, that Paul Manafort had been a party to a call with any Russian government official. Strzok noted that the Intelligence Community had not provided the FBI with any such information even though the FBI had advised certain agencies of its interest in anything they might hold or collect regarding Manafort.
• Regarding the allegation that the NSA initially captured these communications between Trump campaign officials and Trump associates and the Russians, Strzok repeated that if such communications had been collected by the NSA, the FBI was not aware of that fact.
In other words, in its Russian-Collusion reporting, the New York Times published assertions from “four unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials” that were entirely false. Thus, the practice of using “unidentified sources”—a practice that was once heavily frowned upon by respectable journalists—enabled the commission of a giant deception that inflicted untold damage to our political system.
Even at that time (in early 2017) I told anyone who would listen that if it was possible to take down a sitting President of the United States by publishing the assertions of anonymous sources from within the state bureaucracy, then our government by elected officials was over, and our true masters were the “unnamed intelligence officials.”
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | May 15, 2023
The Biden Administration’s State Department has failed to meet the deadline to provide documents related to the “misinformation” and censorship efforts by its controversial Global Engagement Center (GEC). The House Foreign Affairs Committee demanded the documents in a letter sent on May 1.
The GEC has come under fire from Republicans after it was revealed that it funds the Global Disinformation Index, an organization that provides blacklists of media outlets to advertisers.
“State’s failure to meet the deadline continues a troubling Biden administration practice of noncompliance with congressional oversight and a lax attitude about its obligation to respond,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the committee’s chair, told the Washington Examiner. “The Foreign Affairs Committee will keep this in mind as it considers any and all State Department-requested legislative proposals.”
In the letter, which was addressed to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, McCaul accused the GEC of straying from its mission to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate” the government’s efforts to combat “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation” by funding organizations like the Global Disinformation Index, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and Moonshot CVE.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee, now led by Republicans, delayed reauthorizations of the GEC, which was founded in the Obama era. The GEC’s legal authority will end in December 2024 unless Congress reauthorizes it.
“Neither the State Department, nor the GEC, have come close to detailing for Congress the extent of their censorship activities or provided any confidence that the problem isn’t even worse than is known right now,” said Rep. Dareell Issa (R-CA), one of the signatories to the letter sent to the State Department on May 1. “This is the time to come clean.”
Tales of the American Empire | May 11, 2023
The American empire has over 1000 overseas military bases with between a dozen and 45,000 personnel. The United States spends more to operate its overseas military bases each year than China spends on its entire military. Several of these bases have become worthless yet remain open because of bureaucratic resistance. The largest unneeded base is also the oldest overseas base, the US Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, known as Gitmo. No combat forces are based there or even combat support forces. There are no ships, no aircraft, no weapons, nor munitions based at Gitmo. The lights could be shut off at expensive Gitmo tomorrow and everyone flown home and the US Navy wouldn’t notice, except that it would free manpower and resources for a dozen more warships.
__________________________________
“All Bases Covered”; Tom Engelhardt, Antiwar.com; January 10, 2011; https://original.antiwar.com/engelhar…
“Overseas Base Closure List”; Carlton Meyer; G2mil; 2016; https://www.g2mil.com/OBCL.htm
Related Tale: “The Empires Cuban Colony 1898 -1959”: 
• The Empire’s Cuba…
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | May 7, 2023
The House Judiciary Committee has issued subpoenas to executives at a group often affiliated with the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Chair of the committee, Rep. Jim Jordan said the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and the organization that created it, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), might be allowing the violation of US antitrust law.
“To advance our oversight and inform potential legislation related to these collusive practices, the Committee must understand whether, how, and to what extent GARM and WFA facilitate collusion to prevent certain content from benefiting from advertising dollars and to reduce that content’s presence online,” Jordan wrote.
According to the letters, the House Judiciary Committee has attempted to get communications and documents “related to how GARM and WFA act to demonetize and eliminate disfavored content online, in addition to other information” since March.
However, both the WFA and GARM did not provide the documents requested.
The subpoenas addressed to GARM’s co-founder Robert Rakowitz and WFA president Raja Rajamannar, demand communications and documents from January 2019 to date. The organizations have until May 26 to respond.
Read the letter here.
The farm to table vertical integration of the gates foundation investing racket
by el gato malo – bad cattitude – may 6, 2023
in the aftermath of great events, “who knew what and when did they know it?” is always an interesting question.
the US intelligence community (michael spenger substack ) was suspected to have caught wind of covid back in november 2019.
astonishingly, the IC itself denies this and claims they were in the dark until later
Every official interviewed by the Committee—from working level analysts at NCMI to an official with relevant knowledge at the NSC—said that their first indication of a novel virus came with the publication of the ProMED notice published at 11:59 p.m. on December 30, 2019 that reported the announcement of a novel virus by the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee.
In sum, the first warnings of COVID-19 came from the non-IC based public health track—in this case disease surveillance conducted by local public health authorities in Wuhan.
but this invites some pretty pointy questions about their competence, no?
because it sure looks like pretty much everyone on the super special inside track of business and finance CLEARLY knew by then.
bill gates knew. the WEF and team davos knew. and they were making big plays to make big money months before the intelligence community is even claimed, much less claims to have known what was going on.
it does make one wonder…
bill gates bought $55 million (with an option for $100mm) of bioNtech stock in september of 2019 right before they suddenly had the intellectual property for the most profitable vaccine in history.
they were not working on vaccines previously.
i wonder where they got the tech?
no one seems to know.
but it sure looks like billy g knew.
so, here’s a fun little nugget from the bill and melinda gates foundation investment into bioNtech, from whom pfizer licensed the IP for the covid vaccine.
pretty prescient for september 2019.
does this seem like “boilerplate?”
because it seems oddly specific (but deniable) as a “partnership” on something unrelated that could suddenly be “covid.”
and the timing is awfully provocative especially in light of some other events.
he did well getting out as well.
gates sold in 2021, banking $260 million, pretty much right at the top and has since changed his tune on mRNA vaccines, but this is hardly uncommon for “investors talking their book.”
the rest of this fact pattern looks a bit nastier though, more like the 3.0 sand hill road model of “buy up companies in a space and then mandate the adoption of their products.”
this has been the great game out there since even before kleiner perkins hired al gore to shill and lobby for their greentech portfolio. they are currently playing a similar (and more subtle) game playing hungry hungry hippos with HVAC companies and then pushing through new “air handling mandates” for new buildings, schools, offices, etc. cuz “public health.”
but the gates foundation makes them look like pikers.
if you’re going to make a big push into selling vaccines and drugs, why buy mere lobbyists when you can buy the WHO? gates is by far their largest private donor, 25X the size of the next biggest and was their number 2 donor overall.
$531 million buys A LOT of access and control. it’s perfect. the WHO is not only on the ground all over, but they also give advice and set policy/terms for assistance. so gates gets all the info instantly about what’s happening in diseases and then gets to tell the WHO what to tell everyone to do about it. play the hero and add a zero (to your bank balances).
it’s a truly great grift and few dare call it out as the nasty, hard-knuckle lobbying and advocacy it is because it looks like philanthropy.
weaponized philanthropy to be sure, but “philanthropy” and tax free to boot.
not only did bill get early word on wuhan and reach out and place big money on the one subtle square that was going to pay out huge by suddenly having the answer to the most asked question on earth and coming out of obscure nowhere to partner with pharma titan pfizer, but he went a full step further and actually held a pandemic war game under the auspices of john’s hopkins that gathered top policy makers and thought leaders to assess a global outbreak of an “imaginary” disease that happened to look exactly like SARS-cov2. this was the now infamous “event 201.”
and look who threw the party: the WEF and the gates foundation.
it’s obvious that they knew exactly what was coming. this was the overt planning plenary for covid. it was not pretend. and many/most those attending must have known that. this is the same time gates was buying bioNtech.
the bioNtech investment was 9/4/19. event 201 was 10/18, five weeks later.
who knows how much earlier the due diligence and planning must have begun, especially for the investment.
there’s getting lucky, and there’s putting the fix in because you know what others do not.
tell me that this “imaginary scenario” 2-3 months before the whole world knew what was happening was just a lucky guess.
the “players” were a high powered gang including big business, healthcare companies, the UN, the head of china’s CDC, a number of academics, the head of US CDC preparedness and response, monetary authorities, and media firms.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 5, 2023
Journalist Matt Taibbi has corroborated claims made by Rebel News that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) coerced Twitter to suppress voices and organizations it found disagreeable, even going as far as threatening litigation if the social media platform failed to oblige.
Earlier this week, Rebel News released documents indicating that the CBC exerted pressure on Twitter to silence specific individuals and groups, many of whom have been criticized by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
These documents contained correspondence between Michele Austin, former Director of Public Policy for Twitter in the US and Canada, and key figures within the CBC, including President Catherine Tait and Cam Gordon, who at the time headed communications for Twitter in Canada. Austin’s communication with Gordon revealed that the CBC had explicitly threatened legal action during a call with the pair, prompting them to terminate the conversation.
Austin further deliberated on whether they should respond to a letter sent by the CBC or simply ignore it, while also mentioning that she had already escalated the case.
Another email highlighted by Taibbi was sent by Claude Galipeau, a CBC executive, addressed to several Twitter executives and Tait. The email contained a follow-up letter regarding the issue they had previously discussed on May 26, 2021.
Additional documents obtained by Rebel News showed that Tait warned Twitter that the CBC would cease advertising on the platform if it failed to suppress the voices that the publicly-funded media organization wanted censored.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 