Democrats – The Optimistic Conservative

The enterprise highlighted by a timeline on FBI encounters with the Hunter Biden laptop

When it absolutely, positively has to be buried before the election.

A 25 July 2022 letter from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray is making the rounds. In it, the senator informs Garland and Wray that he has received information from “whistleblowers” about biased assessment and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop and related probes in the fall of 2020. The biased behavior allegedly came from Timothy Thibault, Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO), and FBI intelligence analyst Brian Auten.

The whistleblowers came forward in response to a May 2022 letter from Grassley asking for information on Thibault, in light of the special agent’s biased, partisan social media postings. Grassley sent a letter on the same topic to the DOJ IG, also requesting information.

The timeline on the reported activities of Thibault and Auten is put in a very interesting light by juxtaposition with the known sequence of events surrounding the laptop. A brief initial summary: Continue reading “The enterprise highlighted by a timeline on FBI encounters with the Hunter Biden laptop”

Nuke talks: Why Iran doesn’t need or want an actual deal

Peace in our time.

There have been some excellent editorial pieces written in the past week on the nuclear negotiations in Vienna. As is to be expected, given that the “deal” gets worse by the day, they are uniformly pessimistic; see Melanie Phillips, for example (apologies for the paywall), along with Charles Krauthammer and Joseph Klein.

Informative articles raise troubling questions about any potential “deal,” like “The Secret Side of the Iran Nuclear Deal” (Eli Lake and Josh Rogin). Clauses in the “deal” that will never be made public are not a reassuring feature.

That’s especially the case when Obama and Kerry are claiming that they are ready to walk away from a bad deal, while at the same time the Obama administration is preparing to put intense political pressure on Democrats – calling up a Soros-funded dark money group, in fact, as an arm-twister – to back Obama’s play. Administrations don’t usually anticipate having to put political guns to people’s heads for good deals. Continue reading “Nuke talks: Why Iran doesn’t need or want an actual deal”

Corrupt mistreatment of federal whistleblowers, including threat to gun rights

Throw them all out.

While there’s no connection alleged between this DHS whistleblower’s case and the Clinton corruption machine, it should be no surprise that the topic of concern for whistleblower Taylor Johnson – the EB-5 visa program – is one in which there’s a Clinton angle.

The whole situation reeks of the corruption that inevitably ensues when government gets too big. It isn’t possible for government to have as much power as it has in America today, without corruption becoming entrenched, and starting to have very particular effects for individuals, along with the general effects for taxpayers and the people’s relationship with government.

One individual who felt such very particular effects is Taylor Johnson, a senior special agent in the Investigations division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Her troubles began when she investigated the EB-5 visa program, a special immigration program that effectively allows the purchase of a green card for a $500,000 investment in commercial activities in the U.S. … Continue reading “Corrupt mistreatment of federal whistleblowers, including threat to gun rights”