One ping on the motive behind Biden’s and Democrats’ intervention attempts with Israel

This will be one ping, one ping only, and a short one on the subject.

There’s a distracted and incorrect belief that President Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer are truckling to the immigrant anti-Israel vote in Michigan (and to some extent, potentially, in other states, where similar concentrations of immigrants amplify the impact of a voting bloc).

The media have been pushing the narrative about this, and many people have been accepting that vote-seeking is the motive behind Biden’s threats to deny arms sales to Israel (Democratic senators already urging that), along with his cease-fire demands in U.S. diplomacy and the UN, his insistence that it’s a non-starter for Israel to enter Rafah in order to drive out Hamas, etc., etc.

The same is said of Schumer’s public statement that Prime Minister Netanyahu is bad for Israel and needs to be removed

Bump Trump: Guide for the perplexed to last week’s Russiagate/Spygate contribution

[Note:  in the interest of getting this work in progress posted, I am dispensing with most links in the text.  Every assertion is documented, and the documentation will be found in the series of my articles appended at the end.  It’s a first-ever compilation of such a list of articles, and I hope will be of use for bookmarking.  One thing it settles is the date hacks for when I – and others – recognized the official narrative about Crossfire Hurricane was invalid:  not a reflection of reality.  I want to emphasize that references to the indispensable work of others – the Brigade of Musketeers who have labored long over Russiagate and Spygate – are credited in those articles. I am responsible for the judgments I include in this article; they are not to blame. – J.E.]

All this, and we still didn’t find out why Nellie Ohr got a ham radio license in May 2016.

My bottom-line assessment of this past week’s reporting by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi up-front:

First, this has served as a good taking-stock moment.

Here’s motive: Hindsight 20/20 on Trump’s disruption of Obama-Biden enterprises

[Note:  Because of its length, I considered breaking this article into sequential parts posted separately.  But it’s essential to take it in as a single, coherent story.  Think of it as a single-themed chapter in an extensively researched book.  The article stops a few times to marshal the facts and implication so far, a necessary technique, I believe, to keep it flowing as a single story.  By the end of it, readers will see how Trump’s tenure affected a campaign launched in the Obama administration and pursued from its earliest days.  In particular, Trump basically sent now-revealed Biden interests in that Obama campaign down the drain.  Because of the length, and because the facts not included here are laid out elsewhere, I have left much that readers will be aware of on the cutting-room floor.  This is not because I’m not aware of those facts.  It’s because including everything would make this impossibly long, and is not essential to making the main point: Trump policy killed the Obama-Biden show.  – J.E.]

On Saturday 18 November 2017, Chinese official Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, then director of the China Energy Fund Committee (CEFC), was arrested by federal authorities of the U.S. Southern District of New York on bribery charges under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).  Ho and a Senegalese national, Cheikh Gadio, were charged with a bribery scheme entailing money-laundering (through the U.S. affiliate of an international bank) and involving officials of Chad and Uganda.

The debate to nowhere

The first Republican candidates debate has come and gone.  It’s not particularly useful to comment on everyone; Ron DeSantis is the one who will survive to the primaries with realistic prospects for the nomination.  I thought DeSantis did well, although of course he could have made a greater impact if he’d been able to field more of the questions.  I did appreciate being informed of what time of day Governor Burgum of North Dakota used to shower as a young feller (night, not morning).  Some things you might have known you didn’t know if you thought about them, but I hadn’t thought about that.  So I was grateful to have that unknown-unknown knowledge void filled.

That said, my principal comment on the debate is that it ignored the mastodon in the room:  the state of American government in 2023, and how it’s heading for a great train wreck for the Republic.

The debate questions focused on some important issues.  But not one of them was as important to America’s future as the ones that went unaddressed.

The never-ending story: A new chapter opens in the epic saga of the “Trump Effect”

On 4 June 2023, sundance at Conservative Treehouse posted an excellent article calling out a very important feature of the sequential efforts to take down Trump in Russiagate, Impeachment 1, and Impeachment 2.

The gist of the matter, linking Russiagate and Impeachment 1, is that after John Carlin left DOJ’s National Security Division just before the first FISA filing for the Carter Page surveillance, his successor was Mary McCord.  (I’m assuming these names are familiar to most readers, and for brevity here will not be going into lengthy explanations of who they are.  A bit more on Carlin will come in below.  CTH has a more extensive summary.)

McCord thus stepped into the FISA request chain of command.  Her chief counsel in NSD was Michael Atkison.

And, to keep a long story short, three years later, in 2019, the same Atkison had become the Intelligence Community IG (ICIG), the man who handled the supposed “whistleblower’s” complaint about the Trump-Zelensky phone call that eventually turned into Impeachment 1.

McCord, meanwhile, had ultimately left DOJ, and was working as chief counsel for Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler,