To Distract From GOP’s Biden Family Business Investigation, Media Dredge Up More ‘But Trump’ Excuses

By: Jordan Boyd February 14, 20231 of 2

Corporate media are trying to distract from the Biden family scandals by conflating that corruption with the Trump family’s conduct. One of House Republicans’ first steps after regaining the majority was to launch an investigation into President Joe Biden’s role in the Biden family’s lucrative pay-to-play business. Corporate media, however, are trying to distract from the first family’s scandals by conflating them with the conduct of the Trump family.

The Washington Post published an article last week, during the height of buzz about the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation, pointing the corruption finger at former President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. “An investment fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is backing ventures that profit the former president and his senior adviser, raising questions of conflict,” the article alleges.

Within days of the report’s publication, corporate media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, and even Rolling Stone featured anti-Trump information on their pages and networks.

The point of amplifying the report is twofold.First, it gives the media and their Democrat allies more ammo against Trump’s third presidential run.

The Washington Post is clear about that:

Now, with Trump running for president again, some national security experts and two former White House officials say they have concerns that Trump and Kushner used their offices to set themselves up to profit from their relationship with the Saudis after the administration ended.

Second, reports about the Trumps give anyone looking to escape conversations about the Biden family’s well-documented historyof enriching their bank accounts with funds from foreign oligarchs an excuse to pivot to their favorite scapegoat.

Already, leftist commentators are claiming the Biden family “deserves grace,” while the Trumps deserve investigation. Despite countless real reports and ongoing federal investigations into the Biden family’s affairs, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan evenbizarrely asserted there is “no real evidence” that the Biden familybusiness leveraged Joe Biden’s status for personal profit.

The Political Enemy Playbook

Even before Trump’s White House tenure, the corporate media did everything in their power to make him look like a corrupt politician who was sold out to foreign governments. When they weren’t amplifying the Russia hoax, a fake scandal created and paid for by Democrats, the propaganda press scrutinized Trump’s tweets, twisted his words, and tried to undermine his presidency with lies that won Pulitzers.

They also aided Democrats in orchestrating two sham impeachments against Trump, whom they claimed was guilty of treason. These political attacks were sustained with plenty of negative press coverage of Trump’s sons, daughters, and son-in-law.

Where was the media’s outrage about White House familial corruption when Hunter exploited his father’s political reputation to strike business deals with oligarchs in Ukraine and China and then likely gave a cut to his dad? Joe Biden and his youngest son are the epitomai of the scandal and corruption Democrats and the corrupt corporate media desperately want Trump and his family to be…

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/14/to-distract-from-gops-biden-family-business-investigation-media-dredge-up-more-but-trump-excuses/

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To Distract From GOP’s Biden Family Business Investigation…

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There are literal receipts of the Biden family conducting shady business dealings overseas and profiting from relationships with sworn enemies, yet publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times worked overtime to downplay and mischaracterize the findings to save the Biden patriarch from criticism and losing the 2020 election.

They didn’t want the public to know that when Biden was vice president and overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine relations, Hunter received a whopping $50,000 per month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company he had no qualifications to be on. They didn’t want the public to hear that Hunter also raked in millions from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, and they certainly didn’t want Americans to discover that just two weeks after he traveled to communist China on his dad’s Air Force Two jet, Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.

No, for the media, there was no politically advantageous reason to expose that “an arm of the Chinese government” funneled money directly to a company managed by Hunter to compensate him for offering legal representation to the vice-chairman and secretary-general of Chinese energy company CEFC, Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping, the “spy chief of China.” And there was certainly no good reason for them to communicate that Ho, who was arrested, charged, and later convicted for using millions of dollars to “bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC,” made a phone call to James Biden, Joe’s brother.

Instead of covering bombshell stories about the questionable actions of a tight-knit family whose patriarch is in charge of the U.S. government,the propaganda press is still hyper-fixated on the Trumps.

When they aren’t going after the former first family, the media are amplifying the current president’s excuses and shilling for his son, who admitted through his lawyers that the infamous laptop exposing the Biden family’s foreign dealings was his. This investigation, they have claimed over and over and over and over and over, is a politically motivated one. But it’s not.

It’s About Joe, Stupid

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has repeatedly declared Republican investigators are interested in Joe Biden’s “knowledge of and role in his family’s foreign business deals to assess whether he has compromised national security,” not Hunter.

“Evidence obtained in our investigation reveals the Biden family business model is built on Joe Biden’s political career and connections.

Biden family members attempted to sell access around the world, including individuals who were connected to the Chinese Communist Party, to enrich themselves to the detriment of American interests,” Comer said in a statement last week. “If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision making,this is a threat to national security.”

Despite the corporate media’s attempts to distract from, stifle, and smear Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family business by going after Trump again, the GOP can’t give up. Unlike when Democrats rallied their partisan network to falsely paint Trump as a Russian asset, this legitimate and evidence-based investigation is essential to determining whether U.S. national security is compromised from top to bottom because of Biden.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/14/to-distract-from-gops-biden-family-business-investigation-media-dredge-up-more-but-trump-excuses/

IRS has 'no authority' 'to regulate speech,' says House Oversight's Biggs as panel requests docs

"I view this as a form of government surveillance of the American people," said Arizona GOP Rep. Andy Biggs.

By Natalia Mittelstadt Updated: February 14, 2023 - 3:19pm

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) blasted the IRS on Monday for allegedly conducting "government surveillance" on Americans following a Just the News report on the agency's invasive questioning of an election education nonprofit, as the House Oversight Committee requested to see the underlying documents.

In action reminiscent of the Lois Lerner targeting scandal under the Obama administration when the IRS singled out conservative groups for audits, the Biden IRS last year subjected an election education nonprofit applying for tax-empt status to intrusive formal questioning the group believes infringed on its speech rights under the First Amendment.

Just the News reported the story on Sunday after reviewing documents exchanged between the IRS and the Adams, Baldwin, and Covey Foundation, Inc. (ABC) that showedthe agency grilling the foundation about its views on electionsand how it would prevent "inflammatory language" from being creeping into its educational activities.

TheIRS questions are "further evidence that the Biden administration believes it has the authority to license thought and speech, and it doesn't," Phill Kline, a founder of the organization, told Just the News.

Responding to the story Monday on "Just the News, No Noise" TV show, Biggs, who sits on the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, said the IRS is supposed to perform ministerial functions, such as receiving taxes, not regulate speech.

The queries in the IRS interrogatory are "a form of government surveillance of the American people," Biggs said, noting that he's the chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance."There is no authority for the IRS to regulate speech."

"They're doing ministerial functions, receiving your taxes, receiving your tax returns, that's their job," Biggs explained. "Their job is not to regulate speech or to adjudicate whether you have provided misinformation or not. That is a clear violation of their authority, even if you give the most broad interpretation of the 16th Amendment. And so, we're going to have to attack it through the Oversight Committee, in my opinion."

After Just the News reached out to the Oversight Committee on Monday, the committee requested the underlying documents the Sunday story was based on, which have since been provided.

"[W]e have seen this in the past, we have seen the weaponization of virtually every bureaucracy in America, in the federal government," Biggs said. "And so, this is no surprise — actuallykind of wondered why we didn't discover anything sooner from the IRS, especially since … they're in the process of hiring 87,000 new IRS agents.

"This is nothing less than the weaponization — we saw it under Obama with Lois Lerner and the attack against conservative 501(c)(3)s and nonprofits. You're seeing it again, already, and that doesn't surprise me, but you're going to see this going all over in a broad spectrum."

Saying that he "would wholeheartedly agree" with Biggs' comments, Kline told Just the News on Monday he is concerned about "the consistency" with which government agencies throughout the Biden administration are surveilling political speech, "as if it's by particular design and belief that it's the proper role of government, and it's not."

The agencies' actions are ominously "consistent with Biden's speech that half of the American people are the enemy of America," Kline observed, referring to Biden's "red speech" in Philadelphia in September, where he said, "Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic."

Kline condemned Biden's comments, saying that the government's surveillance of speech "is a greater threat to democratic principles" than the purported threat cited by the president.

The former Kansas attorney general said he is "really encouraged that our elected representatives are taking a look" at the IRS handling of organizations seeking tax-exempt status, "trying to rein in this abuse, because it's intimidation tactics and abuse of [the federal government's] authority."

The IRS told Just the News on Tuesday that "[d]ue to disclosure laws," the agency "cannot comment on private taxpayer matters."

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/rep-biggs-says-irs-has-no-authority-regulate-speech-house-oversight-cmte