The Federal Elections Commission’s fines of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee for concealing payments for the anti-Trump Steele dossier at the center of the Russia collusion hoax have been described as a slap on the wrist.
The Clinton camp must pay only $8,000 and the DNC just $105,000.
But constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, a lifelong Democrat, argues in a column Thursday that it’s “the basis” of the FEC’s penalties “rather than the size of the fine that is so notable.”
On Tuesday, the FEC announced it found that payments from the Clinton campaign and the DNC to the company that oversaw the work of former British spy Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, were funneled through the law firm Perkins Coie and Elias.
The Clinton campaign denied funding the dossier. But the FEC found that the payments were concealed as “legal advice and services.”
Perkins Coie, commissioned by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, paid Fusion more than $1 million for the dossier in 2016.
Turley pointed out that journalists discovered the Clinton campaign had lied about the payments weeks after the 2016 election campaign, hiding them among $5.6 million in “legal fees” paid to Perkins Coie.
When New York Times reporter Ken Vogel tried to report the story that the campaign lied about the funding, Marc Elias – the former general counsel for the Clinton campaign and partner at Perkins Coie – “pushed back vigorously.”
Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote: “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
“Just in” was the message on the CNN chyron in a segment Wednesday on the morning show “New Day,” signaling to viewers that they were about to hear breaking news.
It turns out that amid a Justice Department investigation of Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, reported the network’s Evan Perez, the president’s son was being paid a handsome sum monthly by a Ukrainian energy firm that was under investigation while Joe Biden was overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine. Which, the CNN reporter deftly pointed out, “raised questions of a conflict.”
The fact that there was a conflict of interest worthy of serious investigation was well established long before the 2020 election, as WND and other alternative media outlets reported. But when Joe Biden was running for president, CNN anchors repeated the line that there was “no evidence” of any wrongdoing (see video supercut below). When the New York Post published stories shortly before the election with evidence that Joe Biden not only lied about his knowledge of his son’s business deals but profited from them, the network joined the establishment media chorus of “Russia disinformation,” based on a letter from former security officials who admitted they had “no evidence” to support their claim.
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, for example, began a question to Biden during a presidential debate this way: “President Trump has falsely accused your son of doing something wrong while serving on a company board in Ukraine.”
Now that the New York Times has belatedly acknowledged what has been available all along to anyone interested in the truth – the authenticity of damning messages on a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden that indicate Joe Biden’s family ran a multimillion-dollar global business peddling access to the White House to Chinese communist operatives, corrupt Ukrainian companies, Russian oligarchs tied to Vladimir Putin and many others – establishment media are covering the story. Particularly as it appears that Justice Department prosecutors are preparing to indict the president’s son on charges that could land him in prison.
On Wednesday, Perez and anchor Brianna Keilar discussed the “new details” in the Hunter Biden investigation. Perez noted that while Hunter Biden has not been indicted, “a lot of activity has picked up” recently, including witnesses testifying to a grand jury in the next few weeks.
In a discussion after Perez’s report, CNN’s John Harwood acknowledged it “seems pretty clear that Hunter Biden was trading on his father’s name to make a lot of money.”
But Harwood insisted that “until someone makes a nexus between what Hunter Biden has done and official activities of Vice President Biden or President Biden, it’s a not-pretty picture, but it’s not really of much public import in terms of the policy of the United States or the administration of the government.”
“There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done,” he maintained.
See Harwood’s remarks:
However, during the hearings for the Democrats’ first impeachment of President Trump in October 2019, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent testified that he raised concern at the State Department that Hunter Biden’s lucrative position with the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma – paying him $1 million a year – posed a conflict of interest but was rebuffed. An email by Kent that was withheld from Trump’s team during the impeachment proceedings warned that Hunter Biden’s job could “undercut” American efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine, which happened to be the No. 1 policy objective.
Joe Biden boasted in a panel at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations that as vice president he leveraged $1 billion in military aid to pressure Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time. Defenders of the then-vice president insist Biden pressed for Shokin’s ouster because the prosecutor wasn’t pursuing any corrupt individuals or companies.
But that, at the very least, sounds to most legal minds like a classic disagreement over the facts warranting an investigation.
In fact, as John Solomon reported for The Hill in September 2019, hundreds of pages of memos and documents from the American team helping Burisma stave off its legal troubles conflict with Biden’s narrative, including a plan to stop Ukrainian prosecutors from interviewing Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Among the Biden family’s profits from Russia – the messages on the laptop show Hunter Biden’s funds were intermingled with Joe Biden’s while one message showed a 10% cut from a Communist Party-tied Chinese firm was reserved for the “big guy” – was a $3.5 million wire transfer from an oligarch whose name was on a U.S. Treasury list of figures tied to the Kremlin who were under consideration for sanctions.
In a report released one month after the 2020 election, two Republican-led Senate committees concluded from their investigation that members of Joe Biden’s family engaged in deals with Chinese nationals who had “deep connections” to the Communist Party that “bore financial fruit” when Joe Biden “was vice president and after he left office.”
The report warned that the “connections and the vast amount of money transferred among and between them don’t just raise conflicts of interest concerns, they raise criminal financial, counterintelligence and extortion concerns.”
A post-election survey found more than one-third of voters who chose Joe Biden were not aware of the evidence linking the former vice president to corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter. Had they known, according to the survey commissioned by the Media Research Center, President Trump would have won the election, garnering at least 289 Electoral College votes.
The Biden administration has caused massive damage to our nation. However, without Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in Congress, everyone might be a lot worse off.
The FBI broke up a deadly plot by three ISIS-sympathizing teens who planned a murderous spree targeting a Chicago-area Shia mosque before continuing to another mosque or Jewish synagogue.
It is Christ…who also makes intercession for us….the Spirit…makes intercession for the saints… ROMANS 8:34, 27
Do we need any more arguments than these to become intercessors– that Christ “always lives to make intercession” (Hebrews 7:25), and that the Holy Spirit “makes intercession for the saints”? Are we living in such a relationship with others that we do the work of intercession as a result of being the children of God who are taught by His Spirit? We should take a look at our current circumstances. Do crises which affect us or others in our home, business, country, or elsewhere, seem to be crushing in on us? Are we being pushed out of the presence of God and left with no time for worship? If so, we must put a stop to such distractions and get into such a living relationship with God that our relationship with others is maintained through the work of intercession, where God works His miracles.
Beware of getting ahead of God by your very desire to do His will. We run ahead of Him in a thousand and one activities, becoming so burdened with people and problems that we don’t worship God, and we fail to intercede. If a burden and its resulting pressure come upon us while we are not in an attitude of worship, it will only produce a hardness toward God and despair in our own souls. God continually introduces us to people in whom we have no interest, and unless we are worshiping God the natural tendency is to be heartless toward them. We give them a quick verse of Scripture, like jabbing them with a spear, or leave them with a hurried, uncaring word of counsel before we go. A heartless Christian must be a terrible grief to our Lord.
Are our lives in the proper place so that we may participate in the intercession of our Lord and the Holy Spirit?
We are all based on a conception of importance, either our own importance, or the importance of someone else; Jesus tells us to go and teach based on the revelation of His importance. “All power is given unto Me.… Go ye therefore ….”
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