House Oversight Committee

When Joe Biden’s personal physician, Kevin O’Connor, pleaded the Fifth Amendment yesterday during the ongoing congressional hearings about Biden’s mental acuity while in office, it didn’t put suspicions to rest – it amplified them. Why would O’Connor refuse to testify if he had nothing to hide from Congress? He can claim doctor-patient confidentiality all he wants, but it’s not like Congress was asking to see X-rays or blood-test results. What didn’t Biden know and when didn’t he know it? This is about more than just setting straight the historical record. It’s political bloodsport, the Democrats know it, and the whole things smells like a coverup.

America’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, is already taking his job more seriously than his predecessor ever did. Unlike Kamala Harris, Homan does not need to be goaded into doing the job assigned to him by the president. Homan, the former director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is already hitting the trail, telling prospective illegal immigrants to turn the caravans around and warning America’s bluest cities that a new sheriff is coming to town. During a swing through Chicago, Homan told the Windy City’s residents that “your mayor sucks and your governor sucks.” Both Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker have suggested that they plan to resist President-elect Donald Trump’s broadly popular immigration plans.

The long wait for Vice President Kamala Harris’s policy platform is over... well, at least on the economic front. Harris released her economic plan on Friday after weeks of running at the top of the ticket for the Democratic Party. The rollout, however, was less than stellar, as Harris proposed a mix of Soviet-style price controls with more popular policies pilfered from former president Donald Trump’s speeches and policy platforms.Harris said in the past week that she would end taxes on tips for service workers, which Trump promised back in June to do. The plan also runs counter to policies the Biden-Harris administration implemented that empowered the IRS to go after serviceworkers’ tips. Today, reports said Harris also intended to increase the child tax credit to $6,000.

I have been meaning to weigh in on [cue scary music] Special Counsel David Weiss’s sham indictment of Hunter Biden on felony gun charges for a few days. I am glad I waited.  It’s not that I have changed my mind about the indictments, or company man Weiss. Everyone knows he is on the job as an interior decorator, whose primary task is to produce window dressing for the Department of Injustice so that its two-tier deployment of police power is not too obvious to the casual onlooker. Weiss has supposedly been investigating Hunter Biden for the last five years. Wouldn’t you know it, the statute of limitation on many of the tax charges is passing by like that herd of cows outside your train window even as I write.

Confronted with devastating evidence of Biden family grifting, the president’s advocates are abandoning their old defenses and trying some new ones.  Some are attempting to change the subject. Nancy Pelosi offers a sterling example. Asked about the latest evidence connecting Joe Biden with Hunter’s corrupt schemes, she replied that she was too busy defending women’s reproductive rights. Not exactly a full-throated defense of the president. Still others are repeating the familiar refrain, “But Trump is worse.” (More on that in a minute.)  Finally, a shrinking band of Biden supporters are sticking with their old line: you may have caught everyone who shares Joe’s DNA, but you haven’t caught ol’ Joe himself.

Hunter Biden will plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and has struck a deal with federal prosecutors over a felony gun charge. According to a court filing released by US Attorney David Weiss on Tuesday, Biden was charged with two counts of “willful failure to pay federal income tax” and for “possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance.”  Weiss, who has overseen the federal probe into Biden’s taxes since 2018, has agreed to recommend probation for Biden’s tax violations and it is unlikely he will serve jail time for either his tax and gun charges, according to the Washington Post. If Biden complies with the terms of his pretrial diversion, he could have the gun charge removed from his record in two years.

Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has admitted to misleading Congress, in an apparent violation of the US Code that can carry a sentence of up to five years to prison. In a Friday news dump filled just hours after the news of former president Donald Trump’s indictment, Granholm confessed to making a false statement before the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee on April 20.  At issue is Granholm telling Senator Josh Hawley that she owns no individual stocks, “whereas I should have said that I did not own any conflicting stocks,” she wrote in a letter shared with E&E News.

“Because that’s where the money is.” That was the answer that Willie Sutton, an expert in his chosen field, gave when asked why he robbed banks. Maybe the Bidens, Joe and Hunter, should consider employing a kindred candor about their business activities in Romania, Ukraine and elsewhere back when Joe was Obama’s VP.   So far, they have been disappointing on that score. Here’s the state of play: an FBI whistleblower revealed the existence of a complicated bribery scheme that allegedly funneled millions of dollars into the Bidens’ coffers via a network of at least twenty shell companies set up to launder the dough.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, free speech was primarily defended by civil libertarians and the Democratic Party. This was in the 2000s, when a handful of civil libertarians on the right and many more on the left worried about how the Patriot Act would enhance the government's ability to monitor its own citizens. They also opposed the growing power of the intelligence community, which they thought could pressure companies into providing private information that the government could not legally grasp for itself. The past is a different country. Yesterday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee with three former Twitter executives illustrated as much. Democrats repeatedly made the case that the hearing was a distraction, unimportant, even conspiratorial.

A high-ranking Biden administration official has left the Department of Energy following months of lawsuits and inquiries from Congress about her conflicts of interest. In December, Kelly Speakes-Backman quit her job as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, or EERE, to become a vice president of public affairs at Invenergy, a green energy company. One of Invenergy’s focus areas is energy storage and batteries. Electric batteries are a top priority of the Biden administration, specifically the Department of Energy. Intriguingly that was exactly what Speakes-Backman was working on both during and before she joined the administration, where she led the agency's office on energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Is someone in the Deep State finally blowing the whistle on the Trump presidency? Meet Tricia Newbold, the 18-year veteran of the White House Personnel Security Office, who is alleging that Trump’s camarilla received 25 security clearances that should never have been cleared. Blackmail, drug abuse, criminal conduct, financial peculation — you name it and Newbold says it raised nary an eyebrow among the Trump crowd. Instead, national security clearances were handed out like jellybeans to Trump acolytes, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.In the case of ‘Senior White House Official No. 1’, most likely Kushner, Newbold explained to congressional investigators that concerns she highlighted were swept aside like so much useless ballast.