globalresearch |The following document pertaining
to the formation of “Greater Israel” constitutes the cornerstone of
powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government, the
Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence
establishment.
President Donald Trump had confirmed in January 2017 his support of Israel’s illegal settlements (including his opposition to UN Security Council Resolution 2334,
pertaining to the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the occupied
West Bank). The Trump administration expressed its recognition of
Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. And now the entire West Bank
is being annexed to Israel.
Under the Biden administration, despite rhetorical shifts in the political narrative, Washington remains supportive of Israel plans to annex the entire Jordan River valley as well the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Bear in mind: The
Greater Israel design is not strictly a Zionist Project for the Middle
East, it is an integral part of US foreign policy, its strategic
objective is to extend US hegemony as well as fracture and balkanize the
Middle East.
In
this regard, Washington’s strategy consists in destabilizing and
weakening regional economic powers in the Middle East including Turkey
and Iran. This policy –which is consistent with the Greater Israel– is
accompanied by a process of political fragmentation.
Since the Gulf war (1991), the Pentagon has contemplated the creation of a “Free Kurdistan” which would include the annexation of parts of Iraq, Syria and Iran as well as Turkey
According to the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl,
“the area of the Jewish State stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to
the Euphrates.” According to Rabbi Fischmann, “The Promised Land
extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts
of Syria and Lebanon.”
When
viewed in the current context, including the siege on Gaza, the Zionist
Plan for the Middle East bears an intimate relationship to the 2003
invasion of Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the
ongoing wars on Syria, Iraq and Yemen, not to mention the political
crisis in Saudi Arabia.
The
“Greater Israel” project consists in weakening and eventually
fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of a US-Israeli expansionist
project, with the support of NATO and Saudi Arabia. In this
regard, the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement is from Netanyahu’s viewpoint a
means to expanding Israel’s spheres of influence in the Middle East as
well as confronting Iran. Needless to day, the “Greater Israel” project
is consistent with America’s imperial design.
“Greater Israel” consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates. According to Stephen Lendman,
“A near-century ago, the World Zionist Organization’s plan for a Jewish state included:
• historic Palestine;
• South Lebanon up to Sidon and the Litani River;
• Syria’s Golan Heights, Hauran Plain and Deraa; and
• control of the Hijaz Railway from Deraa to Amman, Jordan as well as the Gulf of Aqaba.
Some
Zionists wanted more – land from the Nile in the West to the Euphrates
in the East, comprising Palestine, Lebanon, Western Syria and Southern
Turkey.”
The Zionist project has supported the Jewish settlement movement. More
broadly it involves a policy of excluding Palestinians from Palestine
leading to the annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza to the State of
Israel.
The
Project of “Greater Israel” is to create a number of proxy States,
which could include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well
as parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. (See map).
“[The
Yinon plan] is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional
superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its
geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding
Arab states into smaller and weaker states.
Israeli
strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an
Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the
balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the
basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called
for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one
for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step
towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the
Yinon Plan discusses.
The
Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal, in
2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the
outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, which the Biden
Plan also calls for, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt,
and Syria. The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also
all fall into line with these views. The Yinon Plan also calls for
dissolution in North Africa and forecasts it as starting from Egypt and
then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.
“Greater Israel” would require the breaking up of the existing Arab states into small states.
“The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must
1) become an imperial regional power, and
2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states.
Small
here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state.
Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become
Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation…
This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in
Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into
smaller units has been a recurrent theme.” (Yinon Plan, see below)
Viewed in this context, the US-NATO led wars on Syria and Iraq are part of the process of Israeli territorial expansion.
In
this regard, the defeat of US sponsored terrorists (ISIS, Al Nusra) by
Syrian Forces with the support of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah constitute a
significant setback for Israel.
“The
biggest news media companies are privately owned and operate without
direct government control, in contrast to the state-controlled media
landscape in Russia,” writes Politico’s Sergey Goryashko. “Russian state
TV and the primary news agencies there are the property of the
government, and the Kremlin controls other media or destroys those not
willing to collaborate.”
At the bottom of the article is a line which reads as follows: “Sergey Goryashko is hosted at POLITICO under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.”
I
really couldn’t have come up with a more perfect illustration of what
I’m talking about here than the US government and its European lackeys
running a complex and elaborate project to further slant European media
against the Russian Federation, which then manifests as a Politico
article calling Putin a liar and claiming propaganda does not exist in
the west.
There’s an old joke that goes like this:
A Soviet and an American are on an airplane seated next to each other.
“Why are you flying to the US?” asks the American.
“To study American propaganda,” replies the Soviet.
“What American propaganda?” asks the American.
“Exactly,” the Soviet replies.
In
reality the nature of the US-centralized empire allows it to run a
massive, nonstop international propaganda campaign through mass media
platforms which are mostly privately owned. A diverse network of factors
feeds into this dynamic which I’ve detailed in my unusually lengthy
article “15 Reasons Why Mass Media Employees Act Like Propagandists”,
but the gist of it is that anyone who’s wealthy enough to control a
mass media platform is going to have a vested interest in preserving the
status quo upon which their wealth is premised, and they will cooperate
with establishment power structures in various ways toward that end.
The
fact that these mass media outlets look independent but function as
propaganda organs for the US empire allows its propaganda to fly into
people’s minds without triggering any gag reflex of critical thinking or
skepticism, which wouldn’t be the case if people knew those outlets
were feeding them propaganda. Propaganda only really has persuasive power if you don’t know it’s happening to you.
twitter | So why is Israel doing this? Is there anything in it for Israel but virtually global hate? Because it doesn't seems like there is.
A couple days ago I said I was going to provide an explanation why Israel has chosen to conduct itself like it has. Here it is. It's very provocative, and it's going to mess with your mind quite a bit.
I will also remind you that I am Jewish and I have the perfect right to my own opinion on Jewish affairs. - Before I go on, and as I know many people are going to read this, make sure that you follow me. What I have to say doesn't end here. Stay connected. - Throughout these months, I am sure you have asked yourselves why Israel is acting as if its design is to maximize the amount of hate it stands to receive from a global community of shocked and terrified people.
There have been so many occasions for this, but I'll bet last week, when IDF soldiers executed 3 Palestinian men in a hospital, it stood out to you as outrageously brazen.
That's because the IDF took special care to get it televised. They didn't confiscate cameras or servers, and didn't hack or destroyed files. It's almost as if they were acting for the cameras.
A world wide audiences got the message, and everyone was talking about Fauda, the TV series meant to portray the humane face of Israel's apartheid.
How peculiar, right? And wait, what about all those videos by soldiers of themselves joyfully blowing up stuff? And what about the naked men filmed in their humiliated hundreds?
Let me reminds you, for contrast, that in two years of Russia's was in Ukraine, not once have you seen Russian soldiers celebrating the destruction of civilian infrastructure. And you've never seen naked and humiliated Ukrainian soldiers loaded on trucks, or sitting on the ground, eyes covered.
There may have been things like that happening. We don't know. But if scenes like these actually occurred, the Russian military took special care to conceal them from us. The IDF did not. Why? - Keep this question in mind, and let's make it ever more interesting. Let's ask: what is the justification, the reason, or cause for the existence of organizations such as AIPAC and ADL? I mean, seriously. Are American Jews in so much danger, and face so much persecution in the US, that perpetual billion-dollar operations are required to guard them from harm? Are Jews disproportionally jailed in the US? Designated victims of violent crime? Harassed by the authorities? Cannot be out on the street? Is American society that laser-focused on hating Jews? Aren't there other American communities who are more exposed to danger, harassment, poverty and crime? I mean, seriously?
And say an organization like AIPAC does have some nostalgic reason for being, what is doing pushing for wars? More specifically and currently: why are Jewish organizations in the US, alongside Israel, doing all they possibly can to place Jews at the epicenter of a possible world war?
Why are organizations that are supposed to keep Jews safe making Jewish affairs the formal declared reason for a clash and a war the could destroy civilization as we know it? Isn't it the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing? Say like a military that constantly broadcasts its own astonishing cruelty, and destroys its own image? - We are getting closer. But one more hurdle needs to be removed for us to see the answer. Stay sharp. - Two very obvious opposites in seeing the world: paranoia and basic trust. This is true for people, but it is just as valid for political societies. Some societies are more paranoid and some are more relaxed, but no society on earth is more paranoid than the super-mega-ultra Jewish part of the Jewish people, or wider society. There is no other group on earth the world is so contently on its feet defending.
No other society, too, decided to use trauma as the center of its identity. I know many of you, especially Americans, have come to see this as just Jewish. But it is not so (and maybe you need a Mizrahi Jew to tell you this). It is one strand of Jewish perception that derives its sense of identity from pogroms and the Holocaust. Israel and IPAC act like this is natural and the only way to be Jewish. That's nonsense.
Pogroms and the Holocaust were not all the experience of all the Jews. Many Jewish communities knew long percids of safety and prosperity. Not all Jews were victims all the time, and Jews are definitely not the only victims humanity has even known. Personally I always found it more than a little offsetting to hear American Jews refer to their misery and victimhood constantly, in a country where millions of natives, organized in hundreds and thousands of flourishing communities, were wiped of the face of the planet. A country and culture that operated industrial scale slavery of black people for hundreds and hundreds of years, and fought not to recognize them as equal humans for centuries more.
I would never do that.
A country that has so much terrible, dehumanizing poverty and homelessness, so much pain. How come the most successful, heavily represented in all things power and money minority in this society is also its greatest victim?
I know this is the norm and this is the description of reality I should conform to, but no. It doesn't make sense. - You can choose trauma and paranoia or trust and basic optimism as your guide in life. But the biggest Jewish organization in our lifetime chose one clear path: that of trauma, suspicion and what can be called Armageddonism. Always alert. Always someone out there to get you. Everybody hates us.
And as we're almost at the end of it, I will say the final part a little more directly. In choosing trauma and paranoia, both Israel and AIPAC found and unexpected source of false power.
Because existential fear can bring a society of people together, but it's not going to be a society many people would want to live in.
So you keep people afraid all the time, and you make sure they are feeling, or actually being, hated all the time. This is how you maintain your power over them.
And as Jewish trauma has become such a huge international political thing (again: I wouldn't do that), the incentive was always there to keep this mentality alive. To organize around it. To make sure it remains the formal doctrine of Jewish institutions. Such as AIPAC and Israel. - So Israel and American Jewish organizations took it upon themselves to keep Jews afraid and isolated. This strategy of intentional paranoia has been working for a while, but it gradually eroded. It especially eroded in the US, as younger Jews became increasingly aware that the stories they've been told are lies, and that no one really cares about their ethnicity.
That erosion in the power of instilled exceptionalism, isolationism and existential fear poses a very serious problem for Jewish organizations built around paranoia. The Palestinians and Arabs were a wonderful solutions for this problem for a while: by keeping Palestinians oppressed and thus hostile, the old myth of antisemitism as a huge international force could be kept on life support.
But this, too, began to fade, as younger American Jews started getting more familiar with Palestinian perspectives. - And then October 7th hit. And the right wing, nationalistic, paranoid section of the Jewish political spectrum, realized it could be translated into political gold.
This could be used to revive the old sentiments. The ghetto, the pogroms, the trains to the east. All of it. This is why Nazis were invoked so early on. Jews were once again the persecuted minority AIPAC and Netanyahu always told you they were. How wonderful for them.
But October 7th was not enough, because people would immediately put it in the context of the occupation. They would ask the eternal human question: why did this happen? What happened before?
If you're Netanyahu or AIPAC, putting Jews in the context of normal human behavior is the last thing you want. What you want is boiling rage and fear to be extensively covered in all the media and all the briefings.
Need I say I would not do that, either? - And this is where my final point arrives. It doesn't seem like Israel is trying to be hated globally. It is actually what it's doing. It is intentionally airing its cruelty and barbarity so that it will remain closed up to the world, thus guaranteeing the continued rule of the paranoia camp.
They are doing it on purpose, for cynical political gains, out of a twisted reading of history and of human nature. Palestinians are just crash test dummies in this scenario. They count for nothing. Their deaths are used to get people angry and Israel hated, so it becomes even more paranoid. - For the same reason, AIPAC is putting the Jewish issue at the epicenter of the lead up to WW3. They cannot not know that Jews will be called as responsible, or at least a major factor in it.
Can you imagine millions of dead Americans, destroyed cities, populations stressed into panic and despair - all because of a war Jewish organizations pushed for? How does anyone who purports to represent Jews and care for them not recoil from this scenario? Do these people have any idea at all of what they're doing?
And I am sorry for sounding this impolite an not nice: we are on the eve of a potential world war. As a Jew I am terrified.
The last thing I want is to be blames for a world war. But the Jewish paranoia camp seems to relish the opportunity. Maybe they are sure this is how the messiah comes. I have my reservations. - Finally, Jewish organization centered around trauma found a very welcoming and happy to help friend in American imperialists. It is so wonderful when you can market middle east invasions as battling antisemitism. Who could argue with you? In the name of defending Israel, the US can do whatever it wants. It has the perfect moral cover. It will support an actual genocide. It will go completely insane.
What they - both AIPAC and US establishments - are not including in their calculations is that a big war in the middle east can have very devastating results for both the US and Israel. In their quest for creating a Jewish psyche and a world beneficial to their paranoid vision (which America shares as a colonial power), that don't take into account that reality is a whole different business from propaganda. - But this is why they do it, and televise and broadcast it. So that we are hated, isolated, fearful and controlled by Bibi and AIPAC forever. There's nothing that reassures those people as hate for Israel. - Don't fight people who thrive on hate with hate. Fight them with clarity and resolve.
To hear Eric Weinstein's entire "shut it down, the goyim know" drunken rant, - in which he repudiates everything he's professed about the DISC as well as placing himself squarely in the Epstein psy-op camp - go to the 3 hour 30 minute mark on the spotify podcast with Rogan.
Jeffrey Epstein was a fake billionaire set up by intelligence services. His private island functioned as a massive child sex trafficking ring that was used to collect blackmail on the global elite (billionaires, celebrities and politicians, etc) pic.twitter.com/P4YjQF7Kzb
With the war claiming many U.S. aircraft, the military wanted to
increase the armor protection of their bombers to increase their
survivability, but they were unsure of the best places to put this armor
and were frankly unqualified to find out themselves.
Where do you go with such a specific issue? The Statistical Research Group, of course!
The group was given the task of analyzing the damage received by
Allied aircraft from enemy fire, and recommending the best way to
increase their chances of survival. It was here that Wald made massive
bounds in “survivorship bias.”
When bombers returned from missions, they’d often come home covered
with bullet holes. However, these bullet holes were not evenly
distributed around the aircraft, but were actually concentrated on the
wings and fuselage, almost twice as much as places like the engines.
Why were bullets concentrating on the fuselage and wings? Were German
pilots trained to aim there? Were they firing futuristic homing
bullets? Military officers came to the seemingly obvious conclusion that
the armor should be added in these areas, as after all, they were
taking the most fire, right?
Not quite. Wald quickly realized what was happening, and the solution was simple.
Bullets holes weren’t found on areas like the engines because aircraft that had been shot here didn’t come home! Wald believed
bullets were actually hitting the aircraft equally all over, but
because the ones hit in the most vulnerable areas didn’t come home, the
data incorrectly suggested that these areas weren’t being hit at all.
The only aircraft that could be examined were those that came home —
the survivors. The aircraft that were being brought down weren’t
available for inspection, thus creating the survivorship bias.
The massive amount of damage on bombers’ fuselages and wings was
actually evidence that these areas did not need reinforcing, as they
were clearly able to take a large amount of punishment. Therefore, as
Wald concluded, the armor should be placed on the areas that seemingly
received the least damage.
NEW: MSNBC’s finest, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell and Joy Reid, melt down after the special counsel said that the mentally declining president is mentally declining.
The Three Stooges couldn’t fathom how the special counsel thought Biden had mental issues.
Quite clearly Biden is old, but the reducing of all of his mental
faculties down to specific examples is ludicrous. I bet every single
person reading this said something yesterday that, if taken in
isolation, would make them sound like an dottering fool.
While I’ve always been really good at dates, I’ve long been pretty
bad with names—an issue that has increased significantly in recent
years. I’m 58 and have no reason to think I’m going senile.
As for Biden, he’s clearly slowing down with age and is having more
of these mental lapses. But, while I wish there were a younger option
available, I think he’s still mentally up to the job—and light years
better than the seeming alternative, Donald Trump.
Alas, this isn’t an objective conversation. People are looking at
both candidates through partisan lenses and, like it or not, Biden’s
gaffes are judged much more harshly than Trump’s.
NPR’s Domenico Montanaro (“Biden’s rough week highlights his biggest vulnerability — one he can’t change“):
The special counsel report about Biden’s handling of classified material didn’t
charge him with a crime, but special counsel Robert Hur, a Republican,
seemed to go out of his way to include damning commentary about Biden’s
supposedly faulty memory, like referencing that Biden, 81, “did not
remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
That was stinging.
“It clears him legally and kneecaps him politically,” Paul Begala, a
veteran Democratic strategist and former Bill Clinton adviser, said of
the report.
The 388-page report set off a political firestorm — and an ensuing clumsy response from the White House and the president himself.
Biden angrily rejected Hur’s claim, saying Thursday night in a press
conference he felt questions about Beau weren’t “any of their damn
business.”
The president got choked up while showing a rosary he was wearing on
his wrist in memory of Beau, then thundered, “I don’t need anyone to
remind me when he passed away.”
If Biden had left it at that, that might be what people remembered about the news conference.
Instead, Biden wound up walking right into the stereotype laid out by
Hur when he mistakenly said that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of
Egypt was the “president of Mexico” while answering a question about
current hostage negotiations with Israel and Hamas.
It’s a mistake. Verbal slips happen. Everyone makes them — including
Trump, who is only four years younger than Biden. Trump often meanders,
recently appeared to confuse his primary opponent Nikki Haley for former
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; on more than half a dozen occasions in the
past year mistakenly referred to former President Barack Obama when he
should have said Biden; and while in Iowa, called “Sioux City” “Sioux
Falls,” which is 90 miles up the road in South Dakota.
But because more Americans are concerned with
Biden’s age and fitness to do the job in a second term than they are
about Trump’s age, every time Biden makes a flub it will have more
resonance politically.
“It’s certainly true that anything that feeds the master negative
narrative is especially harmful,” Begala said. “For [Bill] Clinton, it
was cheating, for [George W.] Bush, it was ‘dumb,’ Obama ‘elitist,’
which is why when Obama said 57 states, it didn’t hurt him. If it was Bush, it would have.”
“Obviously with Biden, it’s ‘old.’ So, this really really hurts him.”
[…]
“Fair or not, this just amplified Biden’s greatest challenge,” David
Axelrod, a former senior adviser in the Obama White House, said of the
special counsel report. “It screams through every poll and focus group.”
Axelrod went viral back in November for raising whether it was “wise” for Biden to run for reelection after a series of swing-state polls showed him losing to Trump.
“Many people have made a judgment about his age and command and
discount his accomplishments and attribute every problem to it,” Axelrod
said.
The Atlantic‘s Yair Rosenberg (“What Biden’s Critics Get Wrong About His Gaffes“) tries to handwave this away:
[T]he truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who
has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career.
Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his
running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack
America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre
tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining
“why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such
gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie
Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got
on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He
said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that
he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a
gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional
intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading.
But he recognizes that there’s a perception problem and that the Biden team needs to address it head-on:
The president’s staff is understandably reluctant to put Biden front
and center, knowing that his slower speed and inevitable gaffes—both
real and fabricated—will
feed the mental-acuity narrative. But in actuality, the bar for Biden
has been set so laughably low that he can’t help but vault over it
simply by showing up. By contrast, limiting his appearances ensures that
the public mostly encounters the president through decontextualized
social-media clips of his slipups.
As Slate observed in 2008, the frequency of Biden’s
rhetorical miscues helped neutralize them in the eyes of the public. In
2024, Biden will have an assist from another source: Donald Trump. Among
other recent lapses, the former president has called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “the leader of Turkey,” confused Nancy
Pelosi and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly expressed the strange belief
that he won the 2020 election. With an opponent prone to vastly worse
feats of viscous verbosity, Biden can’t help but look better by
comparison, especially if he starts playing offense instead of defense.
But none of this will happen by itself. If the president and his
campaign want the headlines to be something other than “Yes, Biden Knows
Who the President of Egypt Is,” they’ll have to start making news, not
reacting to it.
This strikes me as wishful thinking. Few people watch these speeches
and interviews in full. If the press seizes on the gaffes—and they
will—that’s what most will remember.
dailysignal |President Joe Biden gave
a tumultuous news conference hours after special counsel Robert Hur
released a report Thursday recommending against charging him for
retaining classified documents from his years as vice president and
senator, in part because the jury would find Biden sympathetic as an
“elderly man with a poor memory” and because his “diminished faculties”
make it less likely he intentionally violated the law.
During the news conference, Biden claimed that Hur’s comments about
his mental state were “extraneous commentary,” and he attempted to allay
concerns. Yet the president blamed his staff for the mishandling of
classified documents, insisted that his memory was fine but mixed up the
countries of Egypt and Mexico and appeared to forget where his son Beau
got a set of rosary beads the bereaved father says he highly values.
House Speaker Mike Johnson responded on X, saying the conference proved Biden is not fit to be president.
“The president’s press conference this evening further confirmed on
live television what the special counsel report outlined. He is not fit
to be president,” Johnson wrote.
In January 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Hur, the
U.S. attorney in Maryland appointed by then-President Donald Trump, to
investigate Biden’s improper retention of classified documents after he
left the Senate in 2009 and the vice presidency in 2017.
The records Biden kept included classified documents regarding
military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, along with national security
records that implicated “sensitive intelligence sources and methods,”
Hur’s report finds.
The special counsel’s report finds a “shortage of evidence” proving
that Biden intentionally violated the law and concludes “there are other
innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.” Yet the
report also finds that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed
classified materials.”
An attorney for Biden claimed the classified documents
were “unexpectedly discovered” Nov. 2, 2022, at the Penn Biden Center
for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., and that he
immediately notified the National Archives and Records Administration.
Biden lawyers later discovered a “small number” of additional classified
documents in a storage space in the garage of Biden’s private home in
Wilmington, Delaware.
These admissions from Biden’s attorneys came after the FBI opened an investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling
of classified documents in March 2022. Eight months later, Garland
appointed former DOJ official Jack Smith to investigate Trump’s
retention of classified documents. A grand jury ultimately indicted Trump for his alleged offenses in June 2023.
Hur’s report notes Biden’s willing cooperation with his
investigation, saying that cooperation “will likely convince some jurors
that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully—that is,
with intent to break the law—as the statute requires.”
Hur’s report also takes Biden’s mental state into account on numerous
occasions, finding that his “poor memory” and “diminished faculties”
make his defenses plausible and would likely endear him to a jury.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present
himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a
sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the report
notes. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him,
he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable
doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict
him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious
felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
dailycaller | Among the documents recovered was a transcript of a Dec. 11, 2015
phone call between then-Vice President Biden and then-Ukrainian Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, according to Hur’s report.
Federal
investigators found a handwritten note with a tipsheet for the phone
call Joe Biden placed in a red “VP Personal” fold in addition to the
transcript.
“Get [a] copy of this conversation from Sit Rm for my Records
please,” the note to Biden’s assistant says. Biden’s signature is at the
end of the note.
Biden’s attorneys and the DOJ discovered the
documents at his Delaware residence and at his former office at D.C.’s
Penn Biden Center between Nov. 2022 and Jan. 2023
At
the time of the phone call with Yatsenyuk, Biden’s son Hunter was
making more than $80,000 per month as a board member of Ukrainian energy
firm Burisma Holdings, bank records
show. He joined the company in spring 2014 despite lacking experience
in either Ukraine or the energy sector. He departed the firm in 2019,
when his father was a private citizen and possessed the classified
documents.
Ahead of his appointment with Burisma, Hunter Biden
sent then-business partner Devon Archer, who served alongside Biden on
Burisma’s board, detailed information about Ukraine’s political situation and energy sector.
In Dec. 2015, Joe Biden took a trip to Ukraine and spoke to the
country’s parliament, urging them to step up anti-corruption measures,
according to an archived transcript of his speech.
Carlson interviewed Archer in the days following his testimony before the House Oversight Committee. Archer told lawmakers the Biden family “brand” protected Burisma from scrutiny and recalled a spring 2015 dinner attended by then-VP Biden and Burisma executive Vadim Pozharskyi.
Forbes | After former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced his sitdown interview
with Russian President Vladimir Putin, viral social media posts began
to claim Carlson was added to Ukrainian government “kill list,” though
the controversial site is not government-run and has criticized Carlson
for earlier remarks made by Carlson about Russia and the war.
Myrotvorets is a running list made in 2014 by an independent
organization called the Myrotvorets (or Peacemaker) Center, which keeps
track of people it believes have committed crimes against the “national
security of Ukraine, human life and health, peace, human security and
the international legal order,” including musician and Russia defender Roger Waters and NBC journalist Keir Simmons.
People on the list who have died from various causes are marked as liquidated, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died in 2022 from disease, daughter of Russian nationalist Daria Dugina, who died in a car bomb attack the U.S. believes elements of the Ukrainian government was behind, and Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli, who died after being hit by mortar fire in Ukraine while covering the conflict.
The site claims that Carlson was added to the list on June 08, 2023, after posting a 10-minute long video
to X where he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “rat-like,”
and suggested the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was a
Ukrainian terrorist act; Forbes could not independently verify when his
name was added.
The site does list Carlson’s interview with Putin as another offense against Ukraine, along with a 2022 statement he made on Fox News, saying Ukraine’s army was too small to win a victory against Russia.
Ukrainian politician George Tuka told
the Times of London the site doesn’t receive government funding and is
not government-affiliated, and was created to keep track of Ukrainian
political officials, ex-military and ex-police officers who were
pro-Russia—Forbes has reached out to the Myrotvorets Center for comment.
Despite not being government-run, Ukrainian secret services
reportedly keep “close ties” with the website, and the former Ukrainian
Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov supported the site, while former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko condemned it, according to the U.S. Department of State.
Myrotvorets has received criticism from Western countries for exposing
journalists. After Western journalists’ personal information was leaked
on the site, G7 Ambassadors stated
they were “deeply concerned” about the leak. They worried threats made
against the journalists were a result of the leak, and called for the
personal information to be taken down. The United Nations urged
Ukrainian police to investigate personal data leaks on Myrotvorets and
remove the data from the site. The U.S. State Department also regularly includes
Myrotvorets in its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,
identifying the various times journalists’ personal information was
leaked on the site. A Ukrainian journalist’s personal data was leaked
after a story she wrote led to the firing of a Ukrainian official, which
reportedly led to her receiving threats, according to the State
Department’s 2022 report.
BBC | The news host has long been a familiar face for Russians, with clips of his critical outbursts on Fox News against US foreign policy aired extensively across Russian state TV.
Kremlin-controlled television continues to dominate the Russian media, with around two-thirds of people receiving most of their news from there.
In Russia, Carlson is frequently cited as an authoritative source of news, particularly when it comes to his views on the war in Ukraine.
In September last year, Russian news channel Rossiya 24 even began airing lengthy excerpts of his "Tucker on X" show, dubbed into Russian.
While Carlson has not spoken directly to any of Russia's TV channels, their shows are revelling in his visit and the US reaction to it.
"In the West they're comparing this visit to actress Jane Fonda's visit to Vietnam in 1972, following which she ended up on the list of America's top ten traitors and the Hollywood blacklist," presenter and pro-Putin politician Yevgeny Popov told viewers of his 60 Minutes talk show.
Popov also jibed that Carlson had managed to experience Moscow's modern public transport system during his visit.
"Americans can't even dream of such wonders of civilisation!" he said.
Before Carlson confirmed plans to interview Mr Putin, NTV, Russia's second most popular channel, promoted a post on X by Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that "Democrats and their propagandists in the media are spasming" at the prospect of Carlson interviewing Mr Putin.
"In Washington they suspect with good reason that the journalist didn't fly to Moscow to sightsee," NTV's presenter commented.
NYPost | Squatters are ruining entire neighborhoods in Atlanta and police
response to evict is so slow, some homeowners have resorted to paying
nuisances to leave.
“I’d be terrified in Atlanta to lease out one of my properties,” Matt Urbanski, who manages a local home-cleaning company, told Bloomberg.
Urbanski’s company cleans out homes for corporate landlords, and in some cases has to remove squatters’ possessions.
Recently one of his employees was shot after attempting to remove intruders from a property.Simon
Frost, CEO of large-scale landlord Tiber Capital Group, said there have
been incidents of unlawful occupants brandishing weapons and
threatening neighbors, which affects the safety of neighborhoods and
other residents, according to Bloomberg.
Evicting squatters in Atlanta is tough, involving negotiating court backlogs and strained police resources.
Meanwhile, online listings and virtual real estate agents make it
easy for squatters to identify vacant properties to break into.
Simon Frost, CEO of large-scale landlord Tiber Capital Group, said
there have been incidents of unlawful occupants brandishing weapons and
threatening neighbors, which affects the safety of neighborhoods and
other residents, according to Bloomberg.
Evicting squatters in Atlanta is tough, involving negotiating court backlogs and strained police resources.
Meanwhile, online listings and virtual real estate agents make it
easy for squatters to identify vacant properties to break into.
In October, an Atlanta neighborhood found itself at the center of a
scandal involving squatters who transformed a home into an illegal strip
club, complete with weekend parties and even live horses on the
property.
The drama unfolded in the South Fulton area, where four individuals —
DeAnthony Maddox, Jeremy Wheat, Kelvin Hall and Tarahsjay Forde — took
up residence without permission. Little did the neighbors know that the
4,000-square-foot, five-bedroom home with three bathrooms would become a
den of illicit activity.
The squatters ran the clandestine strip club, held noisy parties and
even organized car races in the street, ruining the neighborhood for
others, according to local reports.
expats.cz | United States Senator J.D. Vance has written a letter to
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urging her to suspend the sale
Sporting Products, the arms and ammunition division of U.S. company
Vista Outdoor, to Czechoslovak Group (CSG). According to Vance, there
are potential security risks in the sale to the Czech company, including
alleged ties to Russia.
CSG, a prominent industrial-technology holding, entered into a $1.91 billion (roughly CZK 44.6 billion) sales agreement with Vista Outdoor earlier this month, marking a significant deal within the arms industry.
Senator Vance, however, has raised concerns about CSG's alleged history
of collusion and alleged connections with entities hostile to the United
States. In his letter, Vance stressed the need for a thorough
assessment of potential risks, stating that the transaction poses clear
threats to U.S. national security.
CSG,
in response to the senator's claims, has vehemently denied any links to
Russian authorities. Andrej ÄŒÃrtek, a spokesperson for the Czech
holding company, emphasized that CSG is a private entity committed to
selling its products to partner countries within NATO and the EU.
ÄŒÃrtek
highlighted CSG's collaboration with leading defense companies,
including U.S.-based Raytheon and General Dynamics European Land
Systems.
Senator
Vance's letter further referenced CSG's alleged ties to Russian
President Vladimir Putin's inner circle, raising concerns about the
company's sponsorship of a show in Moscow aimed at facilitating Russian
authorities' access to European military technology.
CSG
has countered these allegations, asserting that their exports have
always been conducted with duly granted licenses. The company
spokesperson pointed to their previous acquisition of Fiochci, a
U.S.-based small-caliber ammunition manufacturer, as well as high-level
security clearances, as evidence of their adherence to stringent
security protocols.
"Our
acquisition of Fiochci, which manufactures small-caliber ammunition in
the U.S., has successfully passed the U.S. Committee on Foreign
Investment's review," ÄŒÃrtek states. "Some of the companies owned by
CSG have both Czech and NATO security clearances. None of this would be
possible for a company with ties to Russia."
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...