Category Archives: Media corruption

Once Again a Terror Plot in Latin America

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In 1992, Hezbollah was successful in bombing a Jewish community center, killing 85 and injuring more than 300. So, it is no surprise that Iran and it’s proxies are at it again.

There is no effort anywhere to stop the flow of migrants all unknown.

Record half million people crossed the treacherous Darién Gap in 2023

Jungle between Colombia and Panama marks the start of the dangerous trek north from South America to the United States.

A record 520,000 people crossed the treacherous jungle between Colombia and Panama known as the Darién Gap in 2023, more than double the number reported the year before, according to new figures from the government of Panama.

The people who made the journey that marks the start of the dangerous trek north from South America to the United States last year were mostly from Venezuela, Ecuador, Haiti and China, according to the numbers from Panama’s migration agency.

Around a quarter of the people who crossed were minors, said Samira Gozaine, who heads the agency. More here

France24:

Security Minister Patricia Bullrich told the media that authorities had been on high alert as Buenos Aires hosts the Pan-American Maccabiah Games, bringing together some 4,000 athletes.

She said the country had received intelligence from the United States and Israel on the potential threat, and that the three suspects had booked a hotel near the Israeli embassy.

“We have neutralized the arrival of a possible terrorist cell in the country,” the security ministry wrote on social media.

The three were arrested on December 30, and one of them was found with Venezuelan and Colombian passports in his name.

Bullrich said the three had been awaiting the arrival of what her ministry earlier described as “an international shipment of a 35-kilo parcel originating in the Republic of Yemen.”

Argentina has the largest Jewish community in Latin America, which has been targeted by two major attacks in the past. Link

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This planned attack came multiple months after an Iraqi national was arrested for lurking outside of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, shortly after a series of bomb threats.

Three men from Syria and Lebanon were arrested in Buenos Aires and Avellaneda this week, the Argentine Federal Police (PFA) said.

The suspects were waiting for a 35-kilogram package to arrive from Yemen for their planned attack, the police said, adding that the package was addressed to the home of one of the suspects.

The police said they were paying extra attention to the security of the event following email threats and reports of suspicious people lurking around the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.

In October, an Iraqi national who was being investigated for falsifying Argentinian documents was arrested outside of the Israeli embassy while having phone conversations the same week the embassy received a series of bomb threats.

One of the three suspects arrived in Argentina from Syria. He was traveling with additional passports from Venezuela and Colombia, Argentinian media outlets reported. The other two suspects arrived from Lebanon. All three suspects arrived on separate international flights to Buenos Aires, the reports said. Link

This is a condition that requires top attention not only from the CIA but also from the FBI Miami Field Office which is chartered with international investigations under Memoradum of Understanding in the Legal Attache Program.Latin Migrants Shift Sights From U.S. to Neighbors - WSJ More here

Two months ago, Brazil said it had foiled an attack on its soil following the arrest in São Paulo of two men suspected of being linked to Hezbollah.

The group is considered a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US, Argentina, Israel and Gulf Arab countries among others.

 

Your Introduction to United Front

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The Chinese Communist Party is operating everywhere across the globe but those of us outside the Beltway should really come to understand the threats. Congressman Mike Gallagher heads a very important committee in the House that is doing outstanding work but the flow of that work is not getting to us as it needs to. So, this is summary is here to help. The enemy is inside the wire, meaning right here embedded in our every day lives.

The committee published an easy to read and understand 6 page introduction for your use. It includes social media, universities, policy demands, manufacturing and trade. Civic groups, public schools, theft and espionage. In fact as an aside, you can’t even play Candy Crush without being forced to watch a Temu ad (Chinese) or be secretly tied to Tik Tok which steals your all you data from your electronic devices in places like Facebook.

You are being manipulated every hour of every day by misinformation, propaganda and influence and you need to see and understand the consequences including election interference. We have major power brokers and industry leaders as well as politicians such as Governor Newsom that simply love all things China, so take extreme caution.

https://sp.rmbl.ws/s8/6/8/s/S/a/8sSao.WdEB.1.jpg President Xi arrives in San Francisco

Newsweek has done some good independent work in this area including exposing 600 United Front linked civic groups.

It is important to pay attention to Congressman Gallagher’s production and for sure former CIA Director and former State Department Secretary Mike Pompeo. Below is a sample of the work:

In February, for example, Pompeo warned the National Governors Association at a meeting in Washington D.C. that the CPC was identifying and grooming state and local politicians who would support its interests. A Chinese think tank had already graded governors on their “friendliness,” Pompeo said. Newsweek obtained and translated a copy of the 2019 report, which labeled 17 governors as “friendly;” called 14 “ambiguous,” deemed six as “hardline” and the rest “unclear.” Pompeo told the governors, “Whether you are viewed by the CPC as friendly or hardline, know that it’s working you, know that it’s working the team around you.”

Six months later, at a meeting of economists and sociologists in Zhongnanhai, a secretive leaders’ compound in Beijing, Xi told more than a dozen top economists and sociologists that China would double down on seeking “cooperation” with U.S. politicians and business leaders at the states and local level, exactly what Pompeo had warned about. “We must actively develop cooperation with all countries, regions and enterprises willing to cooperate with us, including states, localities and enterprises in the United States,” Xi said, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

In his talk, Pompeo gave several examples that he said reflected an uptick in CPC interference at the state level. In 2019, he said, diplomats at the Chinese consulate in Houston wrote to the Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, threatening to cancel a Chinese investment in his state if he traveled to Taiwan, the de facto independent island nation that Beijing claims and says no one may have official ties with. Bryant went anyway.

In another example, Chinese diplomats at the consulate in Chicago wrote to a Wisconsin lawmaker, Republican Roger Roth, asking him to sponsor a bill they wrote praising China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wisconsin Examiner reported. Roth initially ignored the request thinking it a joke. The Chinese diplomats sent it again. Roth replied with one word: “nuts.”

Those two attempts may have faltered in the face of pushback, but outreach often works, especially on the business level. Speaking on background, one official described the pattern: “Say you are governor of a state that has tremendous economic investments in China, or that has a good relationship with China exporting soybeans or grain. China can use that relationship,” say, by asking their political or business contacts to make calls to Washington to try and influence policy. It sounds like U.S. political lobbying, “but you have to know, it’s a foreign government playing this game,” the official says.

He is asking you, the reader to challenge your own knowledge and then challenger your own local leaders.

Furthermore from Newsweek:

A three-day summit that took place in mid-October at the China Institute, a New York City non-profit, provides a classic example of how the United Front works. The event, titled “Finding Success in an Age of Crisis,” promised to help participants figure out how to “achieve success in the face of strained U.S.-China relations and a volatile world.”

The event featured an illustrious line-up of panelists from U.S. business, academia, technology, media, diplomacy and politics, including Rick Snyder, former governor of Michigan, and Stapleton J. Roy, a founder of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute. Yet what participants likely didn’t know: Three of the four “knowledge partners” are directly or indirectly part of the United Front.

The Beijing-based Center for China & Globalization, a think tank, is one of them. The organization was co-founded by Wang Huiyao, who is also a deputy chairman of the Western Returned Students Association, a United Front Work Department group, according to Joske, who has documented Wang’s multiple connections to the United Front. The other were the China General Chamber of Commerce USA and the China General Chamber of Commerce USA Chicago, both among the 600 or so American groups Newsweek has linked to the CPC system.

Asked for comment, the China Institute replied that it “chose to engage with these organizations because of their large memberships and connection to the issues and topics that are a priority today. We wanted to ensure they were engaged in the conversation.” In an emailed statement, the China General Chamber of Commerce–USA denied it was linked to the United Front system, saying it was “a non-profit and non-governmental organization representing Chinese enterprises in the U.S.,” with a mission “to create value, generate economic growth, and enhance cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese business communities.”

Shame on the Biden administration and for sure shame on Governor Newsom.

 

 

One Sided Human Rights When it Comes to Gangs and Terrorists

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We continue to watch in horror and fear the deadly terror in Israel and Gaza and rightly so. It must be known however, these types of attacks and terror go far beyond the Middle East. There is an organization funded by the usual. George Soros but also other nefarious people and that is the Human Rights Watch. (travel over to Wikipedia and read their summary, it sounds great but the reality is not so much)

As we pray for the hostages to not only survive but to be released in Gaza, it is happening in other corners of the world including what the Russians have done to Ukrainian citizens and especially children and then there is Haiti and Africa. Human Rights Watch is not so into caring about those locations.

Let’s begin with Haiti as it is news to all of you. It was just a week ago that the Associated Press reported the following in part:

A heavily armed gang surrounded a hospital in Haiti on Wednesday, trapping women, children and newborns inside until police rescued them, according to the director of the medical center, who pleaded for help via social media. Ulysse said members of Haiti’s National Police force responded to his call for help and arrived with three armored trucks to evacuate 40 children and 70 patients to a private home in a safer part of the city. Among those delicately evacuated were children on oxygen, he said.

Ulysse identified those responsible as members of the Brooklyn gang, led by Gabriel Jean-Pierre, best known as “Ti Gabriel.” Jean-Pierre also is the leader of a powerful gang alliance known as G-Pep, one of two rival coalitions in Haiti.

The Brooklyn gang has some 200 members and controls certain communities within Cite Soleil, including Brooklyn. They are involved in extortion, hijacking of goods and general violence, according to a recent United Nations report. Earlier this year, at least 20 armed gang members burst into a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders and snatched a patient from an operating room. The criminals gained access after faking a life-threatening emergency, the organization said.

UN: Haitian Gangs Invading Central Haiti source and read more here

By the way, the United Nations actually has a permanent peacekeeping office in Haiti….so much for that, even while the United States is often encountering migrants fleeing from Haiti. Oh yes, Human Rights Watch is completely tied to policies from the United Nations also.

Now let’s move back over to Ukraine shall we?

CBS News reported only last week about 19,000 children kidnapped by Russian forces and the real numbers could be as high as 300,000 in total.

As an example:

Last October, Nikita was living in a boarding school for disabled children when the Russian authorities ordered all 86 kids there to be transferred deeper into Russian-controlled territory.

Polina (translated): I came home after work, I opened Instagram and there was a picture of my child– Nikita. With a caption, Russia is taking children.

Polina says the Russians played a cruel game of hide and seek – moving Nikita at least three times in eight months – including to an orphanage in Russia

Then The Guardian reported last March the following in part:

What do we know about the Ukrainian children taken by Russia?
The court’s pre-trial judges said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population, and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children”. The judges said they had chosen to unseal the names of the suspects in an effort to prevent further crimes.

Reports first emerged last spring that Ukrainian children in occupied territory were being taken to Russia, and even being adopted by Russian families. Russia has presented its actions as a humanitarian mission to save Ukrainian children from the war. But Ukraine has accused Russia of genocide and described its actions as a war crime.

Who are the children involved?
The alleged abductees include children taken from Ukrainian state institutions in the occupied areas, children whose parents had sent them to Russian-run “summer camps” from which they never returned, children whose parents were arrested by the Russian occupying authorities, and children who were orphaned by the fighting.

Where are the children from?
The vast majority of Ukrainian children taken by Russia are from occupied areas of southern and eastern Ukraine: Kherson region, Kharkiv region, Zaporizhzhia region, Donetsk and Luhansk region, as well as a small area of Mykolaiv region.

How many children have been taken?
Russia has admitted to holding at least 1,400 Ukrainian children it describes as orphans, though it said at least 2,000 had travelled to Russia unaccompanied. In addition, several hundred children from the occupied territories remain in Russia after they attended “re-education” camps with the consent of their parents but were then not returned.

What has happened to the orphans?
Since the invasion, at least 400 Ukrainian orphans have been adopted by Russian families, according to the Ukrainian Regional Center for Human Rights, which has calculated its figure from statements by the Russian state. Russia has said 1,000 more are waiting to be adopted.

Lvova-Belova, the Russian children’s commissioner, has herself described “adopting” a 15-year-old child from Mariupol, the south-eastern Ukrainian city that was devastated and occupied by Russian forces.

But many of these Ukrainian children have living relatives, who are often desperately searching for them. About 90% of Ukrainian children who were living in state care at the time of the invasion were “social orphans”, meaning they had relatives but those family members unable to take care of them.

How about China? Well they have an estimated 40,000 child slaves in Congo mining for cobalt and lithium for batteries, mostly for the EV industry. Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) published a summary from a congressional hearing the exploitation of children in Africa for the economic and global agenda for China.

There is a foundation called Walk Free Foundation that studies modern day slavery and publishes an index. The estimate is 30 million people worldwide are living in modern day slavery from places such as India, China and Africa.

Bringing it closer to home, with the protests across America to Free Palestine, no one says enough about the fear from violence and theft for individuals and businesses with smash and grabs and now crash and grabs, meaning stolen cars are used to break into businesses.

So. exactly where are the leaders of any sort? Where is the Human Rights Watch? Where is the Department of Justice which by the way formed a legal team to work at the Hague for the International Criminal Court? How about Interpol and Red Notices or the FBI? How about the District Attorneys do some real work on car-jacking, human trafficking, the sex trade, migrant crime., cartel narcotic trafficking…and all the rest.

Where are the protectors if no one is above the law?

 

MAGA Supporters are the Hunted per the FBI

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In full disclosure, I have followed William Arkin’s work for many years and he has been on my radio show twice, although not recently. But, he did an investigation on domestic violence tapping information from several agencies especially the FBI….MAGA supporters are the hunted.

Perhaps after you read through this summary, you will have some of the same questions I do which include:

  1. why nothing about ANTIFA?
  2. why nothing about BLM?
  3. who exactly does not want to make America great again>
  4. When local, state and the Federal government makes regulations or policy that infringes on our protected liberties, should there be anger, which of course is to say that should never lead to any kind of violence?
  5. I have also watched countless hearings held both in the House and Senate and the Left and President Biden find a way to shame or to expand the pervasive threat of MAGA extremists and just recently Congressman Jamal Bowman went to far as to use Nazi in the description.
  6. Anything about the violence of those weird tree people protesting the police training center in the Atlanta suburb? nah
  7. Anything about the threats to the pro-life centers or of the Supreme Court Justices protests?
  8. why no mention of the climate change activists that block public spaces and roads so people cannot get to work or to a hospital?

But read on…your thoughts and comments are invited.

***

Newsweek:

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump‘s army of MAGA followers.

The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations—even though the vast majority of its current “anti-government” investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.

“The FBI is in an almost impossible position,” says a current FBI official, who requested anonymity to discuss highly sensitive internal matters. The official said that the FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism and any repeat of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the Bureau must also preserve the Constitutional right of all Americans to campaign, speak freely and protest the government. By focusing on former president Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters, the official said, the Bureau runs the risk of provoking the very anti-government activists that the terrorism agencies hope to counter.

“Especially at a time when the White House is facing Congressional Republican opposition claiming that the Biden administration has ‘weaponized’ the Bureau against the right wing, it has to tread very carefully,” says the official.

Newsweek spoke to over a dozen current or former government officials who specialize in terrorism in a three-month investigation to understand the current domestic-security landscape and to evaluate what President Joe Biden‘s administration is doing about what it calls domestic terrorism. Most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly, were reluctant to stray into partisan politics or feared the repercussions of speaking frankly.

Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether “terrorism” is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions.

“The current political environment is not something that the FBI is necessarily responsible for, nor should it be,” says Brian Michael Jenkins, one of the world’s leading terrorism experts and senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation.

In a statement to Newsweek, the FBI said: “The threat posed by domestic violent extremists is persistent, evolving, and deadly. The FBI’s goal is to detect and stop terrorist attacks, and our focus is on potential criminal violations, violence and threats of violence. Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism is one category of domestic terrorism, as well as one of the FBI’s top threat priorities.” The FBI further said, “We are committed to protecting the safety and constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity, including a person’s political beliefs or affiliations.”

The White House declined to comment. The Trump campaign was given an opportunity to comment but did not do so.

What the FBI Data Shows

From the president down, the Biden administration has presented Trump and MAGA as an existential threat to American democracy and talked up the risk of domestic terrorism and violence associated with the 2024 election campaign.

“Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country,” President Biden tweeted last September, the first time that he explicitly singled out the former president. “MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections but elections being held now and into the future,” Biden said.

Biden’s Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall said: “The use of violence to pursue political ends is a profound threat to our public safety and national security…it is a threat to our national identity, our values, our norms, our rule of law—our democracy.”

For Attorney General Merrick Garland: “Attacks by domestic terrorists are attacks on all of us collectively, aimed at rending the fabric of our democratic society and driving us apart.”

Though the FBI’s data shows a dip in the number of investigations since the slew of January 6 cases ended, FBI Director Christopher Wray still says that the breach of the Capitol building was “not an isolated event” and the threat is “not going away anytime soon.” In a joint report to Congress this June, the Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security say that “Threats from…DVEs [domestic violent extremists] have increased in the last two years, and any further increases in threats likely will correspond to potential flashpoints, such as high-profile elections and campaigns or contentious current events.”

The FBI and DHS report concludes: “Sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence.”

The threats listed in that paragraph are all clearly associated with America’s right and in particular with Trump’s MAGA supporters. Right after January 6, the FBI co-authored a restricted report (“Domestic Violent Extremists Emboldened in Aftermath of Capitol Breach, Elevated Domestic Terrorism Threat of Violence Likely Amid Political Transitions and Beyond”) in which it shifted the definition of AGAAVE (“anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism”) from “furtherance of ideological agendas” to “furtherance of political and/or social agendas.” For the first time, such groups could be so labeled because of their politics.

It was a subtle change, little noticed, but a gigantic departure for the Bureau. Trump and his army of supporters were acknowledged as a distinct category of domestic violent extremists, even as the FBI was saying publicly that political views were never part of its criteria to investigate or prevent domestic terrorism. Where the FBI sees threats is also plain from the way it categorizes them—a system which on the surface is designed to appear nonpartisan. This shifted subtly days after the events of January 6 when it comes to what the Bureau calls AGAAVE.

“We cannot and do not investigate ideology,” a senior FBI official reassured the press after January 6. “We focus on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence or criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security.”

But the FBI went further in October 2022 when it created a new subcategory—”AGAAVE-Other”—of those who were a threat but do not fit into its anarchist, militia or Sovereign Citizen groups. Introduced without any announcement, and reported here for the first time, the new classification is officially defined as “domestic violent extremists who cite anti-government or anti-authority motivations for violence or criminal activity not otherwise defined, such as individuals motivated by a desire to commit violence against those with a real or perceived association with a specific political party or faction of a specific political party.”

Though Trump and MAGA are never mentioned in the official description of AGAAVE-Other, government insiders acknowledge that it applies to political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters.

“What other name could we use?” asks one FBI officer who spoke with Newsweek, and who defends what he says is merely a record-keeping change in response to Congressional pressure to track things better. “Obviously if Democratic Party supporters resort to violence, it [AGAAVE-Other] would apply to them as well. It doesn’t matter that there is a low likelihood of that. So yes, in practical terms, it refers to MAGA, though the carefully constructed language is wholly nonpartisan.”

In its statement to Newsweek, the FBI said that the AGAAVE threat “includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists—some of whom are motivated by a desire to harm those with a real or perceived association with a political party or faction.”

Another senior intelligence official who requested anonymity told Newsweek, “We’ve crossed the Rubicon.” In emailed responses to questions, he said, “Trump’s army constitutes the greatest threat of violence domestically…politically…that’s the reality and the problem set. That’s what the FBI, as a law enforcement agency, has to deal with. But whether Trump and his supporters are a threat to national security, to the country, whether they represent a threat of civil war? That’s a trickier question. And that’s for the country to deal with, not the FBI.”

The revelations that some Trump supporters are being specifically targeted by the FBI fits with accusations from among them that the Bureau has them in its sights and is the political tool of a repressive deep state in Washington, D.C., bent on preserving the hold of the political establishment at the cost of democracy.

Such views are not only from the furthest fringe. Some of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have called for the FBI to be defunded over such accusations and the prosecution of Trump supporters over the January 6 attack. The fight over the FBI is in itself helping to stoke the political temperature ahead of the 2024 election.

“For perhaps the first time in our history, the FBI’s counterterrorism operational tempo remains high for international terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism and domestic terrorism, simultaneously,” FBI director Wray declared at Texas A&M University this summer.

A senior intelligence official who works at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it is hard to digest all the evidence. “When you are used to hearing that the sky is falling every day, when that’s the nature of the cable news and Twitter worlds we live where everything is overstated, there’s a lot of room for doubt,” he says.

“But I say this as a citizen as much as a government analyst,” the senior official says. “We are in a unique moment and the numbers are daunting.”

The FBI official says that those who are charged with upholding the law see numbers that are worrying but that there is also a struggle to characterize the specific threat to America—and whether it really should be called terrorism—as well as the proper response.

“This is not media hype. But it’s also not easily quantifiable,” the FBI official says. “Are we talking just a few thousand Proud Boy types or are we talking 30 percent of the country that are core Trump voters? Are we talking extremists bent on political violence or just a lot of disgruntled and frustrated citizens? I don’t know the answer, and I can assure you the answer isn’t in any secret intelligence that the government possesses.”

The FBI and the other intelligence agencies responsible for domestic matters track the number of terrorist-related disruptions, arrests and investigations, based on its caseloads and its various characterizations. According to the FBI, the number of domestic terrorism-related open cases grew by 357 percent from 1,981 in fiscal year 2013 to 9,049 in fiscal year 2021, a number that has been widely quoted in the media as evidence of a widespread domestic terror threat. The FBI also says the number of FBI domestic violent extremism and domestic terrorism investigations has more than doubled since the spring of 2020—to approximately 2,700 investigations at the end of fiscal year 2022, another marker that’s been widely quoted.

Though Trump and MAGA are never mentioned in the official description of AGAAVE-Other, government insiders acknowledge that it applies to political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters.

“What other name could we use?” asks one FBI officer who spoke with Newsweek, and who defends what he says is merely a record-keeping change in response to Congressional pressure to track things better. “Obviously if Democratic Party supporters resort to violence, it [AGAAVE-Other] would apply to them as well. It doesn’t matter that there is a low likelihood of that. So yes, in practical terms, it refers to MAGA, though the carefully constructed language is wholly nonpartisan.”

In its statement to Newsweek, the FBI said that the AGAAVE threat “includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists—some of whom are motivated by a desire to harm those with a real or perceived association with a political party or faction.

This is hardly the end of the article…so for consumption of the wh0le piece, click here. 

Hunter is also in Violation of the Mann Act

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Primer: The Mann Act (also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910) is a federal law that criminalizes the transportation of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” More here.

Hunter also used the prostitution expenses as deductions on his income tax filings…when EVER they got filed, if they did in the first place.

Primer #2: Chateau Marmont is a members only hotel

Chateau Marmont says 70% of its clientele are repeat guests.  Chateau Marmont says 70% of its clientele are repeat guests. Photo Credit: 4kclips/Shutterstock source

WT:

Hunter Biden once denied putting “a [expletive] hole in any wall” at the Chateau Marmont, a swanky California hotel where he was alleged to have been banned for drug-fueled antics.

An IRS agent said investigators retrieved the photos showing “the destruction” Mr. Biden wrought on the rooms.

Agents said they also obtained, through a search warrant, WhatsApp messages from Mr. Biden’s iCloud account. Among them is a striking instance in which he uses his father as a threat to a Chinese Communist Party member and business associate.

Agents said they interviewed prostitutes whom the younger Mr. Biden hired and flew out, sometimes paying for first-class tickets, to meet him and engage in sex — and then wrote off the payments as business expenses. Agents talked with the owner of a sex club to which Mr. Biden paid $10,000, which he then wrote off on his taxes as a golf club membership.

For a Washington that is often burned by too-good-to-be-true stories such as the Steele dossier, the revelations about Hunter Biden by two IRS criminal investigators may seem, well, too good to be true.

IRS Special Agent Gary Shapley and another agent, known in congressional committee documents as “Mr. X,” testified for hours, under oath, that they had the goods to back up what they were saying.

In some cases, they have already provided it to Congress, either in documents or by reading messages into the transcript of the testimony they delivered.

They spent years building a case against Hunter Biden on tax law violations. They said they interviewed 60 witnesses, issued subpoenas and followed the trail of his income, businesses and expenses, particularly those he tried to write off on his taxes.

That was why they were interested in the Chateau Marmont in the first place.

“So he deducted a lot for the Chateau Marmont, and he actually was blacklisted and thrown out of the Chateau Marmont. We actually have videos — or we have photos of the rooms and the destruction that was done to the rooms,” Mr. X told the House Ways and Means Committee on June 1.

Mr. Shapley said they were investigating Mr. Biden’s 2018 tax return, which he didn’t file until 2020, in which he was writing off business expenses such as $25,000 to a girlfriend and $10,000 for a “golf membership.”

“We’ve talked to the person that owned that sex club, and they confirmed that he was there,” said Mr. X. “And the guy has to pay $10,000, and the girl — whoever is referring him there doesn’t have to pay anything. So that was deducted on the tax return.”

One woman whom Mr. Biden labeled as his West Coast assistant was part of the sex club situation, the agent said.

“Some ended up being his girlfriends. So they all kind of morphed and changed. So I want to be accurate in how I represent them. But there were a lot of females that I believe he was having sexual relationships with that I ended up interviewing,” said Mr. X, adding that the women were being paid for sex.

He said the Justice Department had been compiling data on cases in which Mr. Biden had prostitutes cross state lines in violation of a federal law known as the Mann Act.

“I know there was an effort at some point to compile them, but I don’t know what ultimately happened with them,” Mr. X said.

The write-offs weren’t mistakes, the agents said. They saw Mr. Biden’s highlighting of his bank statements where he was picking what exactly he wanted to deduct and what he wouldn’t deduct.

It was so bad that his accountants, as if to distance themselves from the factual claims on the forms, made him sign a representation letter, in which he tells his tax preparers that all the income and deductions he is reporting are accurate.

“I’ve never seen that in my career,” Mr. X told Congress.

The IRS agents, in addition to the iCloud account, also gained access to QuickBooks accounts and a Dropbox account and retrieved data from the laptop that Mr. Biden left at a Delaware repair shop.

The agents revealed that the laptop was actually three pieces — a laptop, a hard drive and another external hard drive. They were in the FBI’s hands in 2019, and the bureau had verified that the data was Mr. Biden’s by November that year.

That was nearly a year before high-level former intelligence officials, some from the FBI, along with Hunter’s father during a presidential debate, dismissed the laptop as Russian misinformation amid the heat of the 2020 campaign.

iPhone messages were on the hard drive, but they were encrypted. It wasn’t until agents found a business card with the password that they were able to gain access, Mr. Shapley said in a set of Oct. 22, 2020, notes detailing the timeline of the laptop.

The notes were entered into the committee’s transcript of his testimony.

After the testimony was taken by the committee but before its public release, Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanors and the prosecution agreed not to ask for prison time. Another charge, a gun felony, will be resolved with a diversion, which means that if Mr. Biden keeps his nose clean while on probation, the charge will be dropped.

The agents’ work can’t definitively answer whether Hunter Biden should be facing more serious criminal charges, but it does give the public an unparalleled look at some of the evidence prosecutors had in hand when they cut the deal.

Hunter Biden has a court date scheduled for late next month, when a federal judge will decide whether to bless the deal.

Dean Zerbe, a leading IRS whistleblower lawyer who is serving as Mr. X’s attorney and who used to serve as tax counsel for the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said it was striking to have two career agents with years of experience testify to essentially the same pattern of facts.

“We never had anyone of this stature coming forward from the IRS to speak to us about problems,” he said, citing his years on Capitol Hill. “That alone sets these guys apart.”

The testimony was released Thursday and set social media afire. President Biden’s defenders blasted the two agents for delivering a “fairy tale” or a fabrication. Some questioned the existence of the emails that the agents, under oath, had read to the committee.

Former MSNBC host turned podcaster Keith Olbermann opined that the agents had “no evidence” to back up their claim that Attorney General Merrick Garland hamstrung the investigation.

Christopher Clark, Mr. Biden’s attorney, issued a statement saying there were “serious questions” about the WhatsApp message where Hunter Biden used his father’s goodwill as a bargaining chip with a Chinese business associate.

The WhatsApp message may be the most explosive part of the testimony the Ways and Means Committee released last week. It suggests that Hunter Biden made a practice of using his father, at the time the former vice president was pondering his own presidential bid, as a threat.

Mr. Shapley said agents obtained it through a search warrant against Hunter Biden’s iCloud account.

The White House didn’t address whether President Biden was present when Hunter Biden sent the message but insisted he was not involved in his son’s transaction with Henry Zhang, the Chinese business associate.

“The president was not in business with his son,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

Mr. Biden, asked Monday by reporters whether he had lied about any business dealings with his son, replied “No.”

Mr. X said Hunter Biden had tax issues dating to the early part of the century, including filing late and owing massive bills.

He said his investigation, which began in 2018, covered 2014 through 2019. He said charges should have been brought for each year. Those included failure to timely file or to pay taxes in 2016, 2017 and 2019; failure to timely pay in 2015; filing a false return and evasion of tax assessment in 2014; and failure to timely file and pay tax, filing a false return and evasion of tax assessment in 2018.

The 2014 and 2018 charges rose to the level of felonies, Mr. X said.

Hunter Biden did begin making $10,000 monthly payments on his delinquent taxes in 2017, in what the IRS investigators called an arrangement with his tax team. He stopped making the payments on March 5, 2018.

“There’s an actual email where he asked how long he can go without paying his taxes,” said Mr. X said, pointing out that Hunter Biden earned $2.4 million from Hudson West III, a firm with connections to Chinese money, but he “can’t make the $10,000 payment he was making on his taxes.”