The success of a congressional investigation shouldn’t be measured by scoring an impeachment, but by getting to the truth, House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer says.  “History will show Joe Biden and his family were the most corrupt occupiers of the White House of any family in the history of America,” Comer, R-Ky., told The Daily Signal in an interview late last week. “And a big footnote will be the investigative work that our committee did and made public.” During the course of its probe, Comer’s committee obtained records revealing that the Bidens and their associates received over $20 million in payments from foreign entities and individuals, largely through numerous limited liability companies, or LLCs, established by the family. Sources of  the millions of dollars include China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Kazakhstan, the committee showed.  The committee found a $200,000 check from James Biden to brother Joe Biden written the same day in 2018 that James Biden received $200,000 from a rural health company known as Americore. Comer’s panel also discovered a $40,000 check cut by James Biden to Joe Biden in 2017 that appeared to be tied to the China-linked company CEFC China Energy. Both checks bore the notation “loan repayment.” “Our investigation was a huge success because we got the truth [for] the American people that no one would have ever known about otherwise,” Comer said. “No one knew about all the different LLCs the Bidens had. No one knew they had all these bank accounts, and no one knew that Joe Biden actually met with these people.”  Biden consistently has denied any involvement in the business dealings of his family, including son Hunter Biden and brother James Biden. Family members have made similar denials. In June, three House committees made criminal referrals to the Justice Department to investigate Hunter Biden and James Biden for alleged perjury to Congress.  The referrals from the Oversight, Ways and Means, and  Judiciary committees will be sent to the next presidential administration as well, Comer said.  “There are criminal referrals that will go to the next administration for charges of perjury against the president’s son and the president’s brother for lying to Congress,” the Kentucky Republican said.  The three committees allege that Hunter Biden wasn’t truthful during his deposition to the panels about his position at Rosemont Seneca Bohai. The corporate entity’s bank account received millions of dollars from foreign individuals who met with Hunter’s father, then vice president under President Barack Obama. The RSB account then transferred funds to Hunter Biden.   The House committees also allege that Hunter Biden wasn’t truthful about text messages he sent to Chinese business partners, invoking his father’s physical presence with him.  The committees also allege that James Biden wasn’t truthful in a deposition when he said that Joe Biden didn’t meet with family business associate Tony Bobulinski in 2017 to pursue a deal with CEFC China Energy. The president’s brother was contradicted in depositions by Hunter Biden as well as Bobulinski. “The bar has been set,” Comer said, referring to the Justice Department’s prosecutions of two former Trump White House advisers, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, for contempt of Congress. Both men declined to testify before House Democrats investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.   Attorneys for the president’s brother and his son have said the two men were truthful during the depositions.  Reason for Impeachment Inquiry Midway through the Oversight and Accountability Committee’s probe of alleged influence peddling by the Bidens, the House authorized an impeachment inquiry that also brought in the Judiciary Committee and the Ways and Means Committee. Then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., deemed the three panels’ investigation to be an impeachment inquiry. Later, under new Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., the full House voted along party lines to approve an impeachment inquiry.  Getting a vote to proceed with impeaching Biden was never the priority of the inquiry, Comer told The Daily Signal. As a constitutional process, impeachment makes it difficult for a presidential administration to invoke executive privilege over either documents or witnesses’ testimony.  “This is something that I’ve stated that’s been written very seldom,” Comer said. “When Kevin McCarthy made the decision to go from a regular investigation to an impeachment inquiry, he did so to help give us more leverage in court, because the Biden administration was obstructing our investigation.” “It was never necessary to impeach. … It was to give us more standing in court because of all the obstruction,” he added. “Every single thing we subpoenaed in the private sector we got. We got every bank record, we got every bank statement. But if it had to do with the government,  emails, testimony from people in the White House, we were blocked.” Comer said he recognizes some angst on the Right over the fact that the House didn’t vote to impeach Biden. But he pointed to the House impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, after which the Democrat-controlled Senate dismissed the charges without holding a trial.  “People say, ‘Well, you didn’t impeach him.’ The Senate was never going to convict,” Comer said. “You saw what happened with Mayorkas.” “If you can’t even get rid of someone for leaving our southern border wide open, then what can you do?” the Kentucky Republican said. “And no president in history has ever been removed from office because of impeachment.” The House investigation did gain testimony from Biden business associates who talked about Joe Biden’s in-person or video meetings with family business associates while serving as vice president or as a former vice president.  One associate of Hunter Biden’s, Devon Archer, identified Joe Biden as “the brand” for raking in money by joining meetings and teleconferences related to family business dealings.  “That’s kind of incriminating evidence that his dad was involved,” Comer said, referring to Hunter and the president. “The mainstream media didn’t think so.” That Bribery Accusation One sticking point that the committee didn’t prove emerged from an FBI form known as an FD 1023, which records raw, unverified statements from informants. One such form shows that a longtime FBI informant alleged that the head of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden.  The potential of a bribery case gave public momentum to the impeachment inquiry, Comer said, but it was never a necessary aspect of it.  An FBI whistleblower—not the informant—turned the document over to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. The FBI did not name the informant.  “When that document was discovered, we wanted to investigate it. You investigate every aspect,” Comer said, adding that the committee discussed the FD 1023 form with FBI Director Christopher Wray.  “Christopher Wray said that this informant was one of our highest-paid and most successful informants we have used in prior convictions, because we wanted to interview the informant,” Comer said. “We just wanted to interview the informant. And then, lo and behold, they indicted him.” The name of the informant, Alexander Smirnov, became known in February when he was indicted for allegedly lying to the FBI.  Comer noted that it wasn’t clear what the informant was charged with lying about.  “I don’t know if the informant was telling the truth or not, but I know the way that Christopher Wray told everyone that he was credible and highly paid and then turned around and coordinated with the mainstream media that he lied. That was as shady as hell,” Comer said.  The FBI didn’t respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal before publication of this story.  Democrats Claim ‘Fruitless Investigation’ The White House also didn’t immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries for this story.  However, Ian Sams, senior adviser to the White House counsel’s office and spokesperson on investigations, has been dismissive of the impeachment inquiry on several occasions.  “Comer knows 20+ witnesses have testified that POTUS did nothing wrong,” Sams posted on X in March, after the committees invited the president to testify. “He knows that the hundreds of thousands of pages of records he’s received have refuted his false allegations. This is a sad stunt at the end of a dead impeachment. Call it a day, pal.” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., ranking member of Comer’s committee, blasted the criminal referrals in June as the end of a “fruitless investigation.” That probe, Raskin said, showed the president “was not part of, did not profit from, and took no official actions to benefit his family members’ business ventures.” “Of course, the chairmen’s 60-page letter is a last-ditch effort to distract from the exoneration of President Biden by offering ‘gotcha’ accusations against the president’s son and brother based on their efforts to recollect years-old financial transactions, text messages, and conversations in the course of this interminable fishing expedition,” Raskin said in a public statement.  Regarding the criminal referrals to the Justice Department alleging perjury before Congress, lawyers for Biden’s son and brother scoffed in their own written statements.  In June, Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said the criminal referral regarding the president’s son “is nothing more than a desperate attempt by Republicans to twist Hunter’s testimony so they can distract from their failed impeachment inquiry and interfere with his trial.”  James Biden’s lawyer, Paul Fishman, said: “This baseless partisan action is a transparent and cynical attempt to distract from and retaliate for Donald Trump’s recent criminal conviction.” Truth vs. Media Narrative Legacy media outlets generally joined Democrats’ narrative during the Biden probe.  The legacy media narrative consistently portrayed Joe Biden as completely outside family business activities.   “All along the way, the media said ‘Well, Joe Biden didn’t know anything about it,’” Comer told The Daily Signal. “Then we proved Joe Biden knew everything about it and that he was the central figure in the influence peddling scheme. Joe Biden was the brand that they were selling.”  Comer said the most biased media coverage of the investigation came from “The Associated Press, The Washington Post, [and] MSNBC, in that order.”  “When we started the investigation, the media narrative was that [Hunter Biden’s abandoned] laptop was Russian disinformation. We’re the ones that pushed that narrative to the wayside when we had the Twitter hearings,” Comer said. “We’ve done a great job getting the truth out there, and that’s all we can do.”  Media coverage became worse after the investigation officially became an impeachment inquiry. And, without naming names, Comer said some Republicans weren’t helpful.  “People in our conference that are obsessed with impeachment felt like they could get retweets on impeachment,” Comer said.“The mainstream media fueled impeachment because they knew in the end no one would ever be impeached.”  Only after the June 27 presidential debate between Biden and Trump did media outlets begin to raise concerns about the clout that Biden’s son had with him.  “The media says, ‘Why are you picking on Hunter Biden? Hunter Biden’s not got anything to do with the administration,’” Comer added. “Well, then The New York Times, when they’re trying to get rid of Joe Biden, they start saying, ‘Yeah, Hunter Biden is calling the shots up there.’” The post Comer: Biden Family ‘Most Corrupt Occupiers of White House’ in History appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—An investigation into a Maryland school system’s electric bus initiative found that it resulted in millions of dollars in “wasteful spending” due to issues with the vehicles, according to a report from the county’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released in late July. In February 2021, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland announced it was replacing 326 diesel school buses with electric buses as part of its sustainability initiative, the county OIG concluded in the report. Due to delayed deliveries and frequent mechanical issues with the electric buses, the county has had to partially resort back to diesel buses despite the roughly $170 million it paid for the new fleet. “All of the buses received during fiscal years (FY) 2022-2024 were delivered beyond the contractually required delivery date,” the OIG report stated. As a result, the school system spent “over $14 million to acquire diesel buses to compensate for not receiving the anticipated electric school buses.” In addition to the delays, many of the electric buses have been “inoperable for extended periods,” with the inspector general estimating that “MCPS should have assessed the [electric bus] contractor approximately $372,000 for failing to provide serviceable buses between FYs 2022 and 2024.” “MCPS Financial Manual defines waste as ‘the extravagant, careless, or needless expenditure of MCPS funds, or the consumption of MCPS resources that results from deficient practices, systems, controls, or decisions.’” the report reads. “MCPS’s failure to hold the contractor accountable to the terms of the contract and their decision not to include a provision to offset incurred expenses has led to millions of dollars of wasteful spending.” The now-former MCPS superintendent, Monifa McKnight, originally claimed electric school buses would save the county money. “We are going to be saving upwards of 6,500 gallons of diesel fuel per day,” McKnight said during a 2022 press conference touting the initiative, according to Electrek. “Immediately, this is going to cut costs by 50%.” Rollouts for electric buses across the country have been plagued with issues, including reports of the vehicles bursting into flames due to battery malfunctions in Wichita, Kansas; Philadelphia; and Hamden, Connecticut, since July 2022. Additionally, eight electric buses purchased by a Democratic enclave in Wyoming became indefinitely inoperable in 2023 after the buses began experiencing mechanical issues and their manufacturer, Proterra, went bankrupt. Despite these issues, the Biden administration has continued to push for electric buses and electric vehicles more broadly, including handing out, or announcing plans to hand out, roughly $10 billion to states and territories for the purchase of electric and low-emission buses. In May, the Biden administration announced it was handing out an additional $900 million to pay for green school buses in its bid to lower carbon emissions. MCPS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Originally published by Daily Caller News Foundation The post Maryland County’s Electric School Bus Program Resulted in Millions of Dollars in ‘Wasteful Spending’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Israel soon could find itself locked into a multifront war against the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, a scenario that experts say the Israelis may need additional time to prepare for after a grueling conflict with Hamas that so far has lasted 10 months. Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander Tuesday in an airstrike in Lebanon. Hours later, another strike in Iran killed the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh; Israel has not taken credit for that strike, but it prompted promises of revenge from Iran regardless. Former U.S. officials and defense experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation said that while Israel is the chief military superpower in the Middle East, it urgently needs to restock its defensive and offensive systems to be truly prepared for another war. “Israel does not have an infinite amount of interceptors, bombs, munitions. The military feels taxed, they’re feeling strained,” Gabriel Noronha, executive director at Polaris National Security and a former State Department official, said. “When I talk to Israeli officials, there’s a desire for them to have a little bit more time before they go to war … they want more time to replenish their stockpiles. They don’t feel quite ready for it today.” Hezbollah, operating just north of Israel in Lebanon, has far greater manpower and access to weaponry than does Hamas or any of Iran’s other terror networks. While Hamas receives only about $120 million a year from Iran and $120 million a year from Qatar, Hezbollah receives over $700 million a year from Iran and makes additional hundreds of millions of dollars from illegal activities. Hezbollah is estimated to possess somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 operatives, including its elite Radwan fighting force. It also has access to over 150,000 rocket, missile, drone, and mortar variants. Israel is ranked as one of the world’s top military powers, having access to high-level equipment and weapons, as well as a host of ground, aerial, and sea assets, according to the Global Firepower Index. IThe Jewish state maintains approximately 170,000 active personnel and 465,000 reserve personnel. Hezbollah has become increasingly hostile along Israel’s northern border, prompting Israeli officials to warn in recent weeks of a dramatic and escalatory response should attacks continue. In April, Iran and Israel directly engaged in conflict with each other in a rare confrontation that required U.S. and Western defensive intervention. It isn’t immediately clear how Hezbollah or Iran intends to respond to the strikes Tuesday in Beirut and Tehran, although Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei reportedly will order a strike directly inside Israel, Iranian officials told The New York Times. “It wouldn’t be the first time Israel has fought a war on multiple fronts, so that’s not the issue. The issue is the fact that Israel has been fighting a 10-month war … so the army needs a refractory period,” David Daoud, senior fellow on Middle Eastern affairs at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the DCNF. “You need to restock weapons and you need to harden critical infrastructure.” Although war ultimately could arise, it’s possible that Hamas Gaza head Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah will intervene to cool down temperatures and ward off a full-scale confrontation, Shoshana Bryen, senior director at the Jewish Policy Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There are two possibilities—one is that, yes, things get hotter. The other is that Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah want to stay alive” and will therefore avoid a serious confrontation with Israel,” Bryen said. “If they don’t [avoid confrontation], then yes, there will come a point at which Israel will be stretched. No one knows the full extent of Israel’s capabilities, and so at some point, it will want to be able to call on its allies.” Sinwar, elected as Hamas’ Gaza head in 2017, was a key player in establishing the terror organization decades ago, The New York Times reported. Like Sinwar, Nasrallah has decadeslong ties to Hezbollah, becoming the group’s head in 1992, NPR reported. The U.S. would come to Israel’s defense in the event of a large-scale attack or invasion, which could factor into Iran and Hezbollah’s calculus, experts said. The combined U.S. and Israeli effort could be enough to deter Hezbollah or Iran from striking Israel too harshly, although the Biden administration’s approach to foreign policy—criticized for appeasing Iran—may make Tehran believe it can get away with war, said Jason Brodsky, policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reiterated Wednesday that the U.S. would be there to defend Israel should Iran attack the country in the way it did in April, The Times of Israel reported. On the Hezbollah issue, however, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown told reporters in June that the U.S. would have limited ability to intervene, given the environment on the ground. “The Islamic Republic [of Iran] does not want to get involved in a direct conflict with the United States. If there’s a direct conflict between the U.S. and the Iranian regime, it could be a regime-ending situation. And they know it,” Brodsky said. “My concern is that the Biden administration appears crippled by fear of escalation, and if you’re constantly giving off that impression to an adversary, that makes the U.S. and its allies more vulnerable.” U.S. officials have spent months working to lower the temperature in the Middle East, urging Israel to show restraint in going after its enemies while also maintaining a commitment to Israel’s defense. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday during a trip to Singapore that the U.S. was not warned in advance or involved in the strike against Haniyeh, Reuters reported. The focus, Blinken said, remains on achieving a cease-fire in Gaza, which the U.S. hopes would extend to the broader region. The Israeli prime minister’s office and Israel Defense Forces didn’t respond immediately to requests for comment. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post ‘They Want More Time’: Israel Could Be Walking Into War It Might Not Be Ready For, Experts Say appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The online digital ID age verification creep in the US continues from a number of directions, through “recommendations” and “studies” – essentially, the government is nudging the industry to move in the direction of implementing digital ID age verification tools. At this point, it is happening via various initiatives and legislation, still, without being formally mandated. One instance is a recommendation coming from the Biden-Harris Administration’s Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force, which is telling online service providers they should “develop and inform parents about age verification tools built into the app or available at the device level.” The task force is led by the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS (its Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, SAMHSA,) in what is referred to in official statements as “close partnership” with the Department of Commerce. Related: The 2024 Digital ID and Online Age Verification Agenda This initiative is presented as an industry guidance that will ensure the safety of youths on the internet, as well as their health and privacy. One of the steps presented in the fact sheet refers to age verification. This is a hot-button issue, particularly among privacy and security advocates, considering the methods that would be necessary to prove somebody’s real-life identity online, and that this would have to apply to all users of a site or app. Yet, the current White House is now “urging” the tech industry to, among other “critical steps” inform parents about developing and building digital ID tools into either apps or devices themselves. The setting up of the task force and its recommendations are supposed to contribute to Biden’s “Unity Agenda,” while a report released last week talks about an “unprecedented youth mental crisis” as the reason for coming up with these recommendations for families and industry. The initiative, announced in May, bases its claims about the metal crisis of previously unwitnessed proportions on a report put together by the US surgeon-general and his advisory concerning social platforms. In addition to “sneaking in” the mention of age verification, the report also talks about the need to enact bipartisan federal legislation aimed at protecting the health, safety, and privacy of young people online. Another point is urging the industry to advance “action to implement age-appropriate health, safety, and privacy best practices on online platforms through federal legislation and voluntary commitments.” The documents’ authors from the several departments behind the task force also want platform data to become available to “independent researchers.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Biden-Harris Task Force Urges Online Age Verification Digital ID Tool Development appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Sign Up To Keep Reading This post is for Reclaim The Net supporters. Gain access to the entire archive of features and supporters-only content. Help protect free speech, freedom from surveillance, and digital civil liberties. Join Already a supporter? Login here If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The Olympics Is a Testing Ground for Pre-Crime-Style Mass Surveillance appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Brandon Johnson, the radical Democratic mayor of Chicago, railed against former President Donald Trump and extoled the supposed virtues of presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris during a bizarre speech before the National Association of Black Journalists convention.On Wednesday evening, several hours after Trump deftly handled "gotcha" questions from hostile media figures with the NABJ, particularly Rachel Scott of ABC News, Johnson took to the stage at the convention to mischaracterize Trump's record on race.'You literally have the power to write our liberation into existence.'According to Johnson, Trump — who barely escaped with his life just a few weeks ago when a bullet intended for his head instead tore through his ear — believes that "violence should have immunity, particularly when it's done against black people." Johnson's reference to "immunity" may relate to a recent Supreme Court ruling that a U.S. president has immunity for most of his official acts, though the case associated with that ruling had nothing to do with race. Plus, Trump has a lengthy track record of wanting to protect the lives of young black men who die by violence at alarmingly high rates, especially in Chicago, the city Johnson currently oversees. "If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible 'carnage' going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!" Trump tweeted just days after taking office in 2017.Ignoring the ample evidence that Trump is not a racist, Johnson also mentioned an old lawsuit from nearly 50 years ago to try and support his argument that Trump harbors animosity toward black people."He is so bad at what he does," Johnson said of Trump, "he was sued by the Justice Department because he was refusing to house black people."Johnson is correct that Trump and his father were sued in the 1970s over alleged racial discrimination in housing practices. However, that case was settled out of court without any admission of wrongdoing on Trump's part.Even as Johnson distorted Trump's record on race, he still claimed the former president "sits in the office of lies."By contrast, Johnson could hardly contain his admiration for Kamala Harris.Occasionally using the cadence of preacher, Johnson claimed that "only an amazing God can take an Indian and a Jamaican and create somebody in his image. A black woman."Johnson further insisted that against Kamala Harris, Trump "ran into blackness" and "the unconditional love" and "the masterpiece of the black woman.""Then came along a black woman, by the name of Kamala Harris, who took on banks and corporations during the housing crisis and settled billions of dollars to ensure homeowners get to experience the true, full expression of the American dream," he gushed.Finally, Johnson addressed his audience of black journalists and implied that, even with him in charge of Chicago and after nearly four full years of the Biden-Harris administration, black people are still second-class citizens in a country hopelessly marred by "racism.""You literally have the power to write our liberation into existence," Johnson cried. "You have that power — the power to make sure that racism is not the prevailing form of governance, but that hope and aspiration becomes the reality of people across America."A portion of Johnson's NABJ speech can be viewed here.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A Nevada couple was shocked to find that a man tried to steal the charging cable to their electrical vehicle right from their driveway, and he was caught on surveillance video. Lori, who wanted her last name withheld, spoke to KVVU-TV about the unwanted visitor outside their Las Vegas home. She said that she was awakened by a notification on her home alerting her that her electric car had been disconnected from the charging cable in the middle of the night. “I thought it was me. I thought I didn’t plug it in correctly," said Lori. "When I went to check it, I was so surprised cause the cord was all the way in the middle.”When they reviewed their security video, they saw a man with a shirt tied around his face pulling on the cord to try to dislodge it from underneath their garage door. He runs away after Lori opens the door to check on their car. KVUU said that thieves are targeting charging cables in order to sell the copper wiring to scrap yards, even if they only get between $15 and $20 per cable. And it's becoming a national problem as thieves hit up commercial charging stations in order to steal more cables at a time. One business that oversaw about 1,000 charging stations reported 129 incidents of cables being cut so far this year. Lori's husband, Glenn, said they would start charging during the day in order to deter theft. “From now on we are going to be charging our car in the late afternoon and making sure that we are done with it before we go to bed so there won’t be any of those crimes of opportunity,” he said. The surveillance video of the would-be thief was published on KVUU's news video on YouTube. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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