3am Today

In what could only be considered a bad horror movie written by Steven King, classified documents keep appearing all over the place, leaving one to somehow only wonder, why!?

Classified documents are those that have a designation of “written, recorded audio or recorded video information that a government body deems to be sensitive; information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular group(s) of people with the necessary security clearance and need to know.”

Looking back at history, it’s not hard to find many times and ways that governments from around the world have and continue to send spies to other countries in search of classified documents to give back to their country; allowing them to prepare for a possible war or to gain an advantage in manufacturing or technology to bolster that counties GPD, making it a formatable competitor.

With billions of people around the world now being connected to the internet, the spying is like child’s play and most certainly a lot easier than sending covert spies to other countries. The company Bytedance, creators of Tik-Tok would be a classic example.

Huawei Technologies, makers of cell phones and network equipment would be another example. Huawei Technologies software that runs their devices was found to have spyware as part of their operating system. It’s really no surprise to learn about Tik-Tik handing over mass troves of information on billions of it’s users to the Chinese government.

But what if employees of your own government were selling classified documents?  Then what?  In short, it would be called treason against your country. There is no other explanation.

This too has come to light in recent days, that the US government seems to have a problem figuring out who is trustworthy and reliable. The case of Sam Brinton would be one of thousands of classic examples. Who hired this person (spelled: fruitloop)?  Or the thousands of others that now consume oxygen in the nations capital, a place where there are uncountable tons of paperwork floating around.

All of this, once again is like child’s play in comparison to the three – and associates – individuals we are going to talk about today. It’s also worth noting that they are all human and prone to being fallible, with one being ever so slightly more jaded than the other two could ever hope to be.

Valerie Jarrett, former President Obama’s chief adviser and family friend, proudly announced that his administration had been scandal free during his eight years in office. We, however, after wiping up all the coffee that left our mouths at a high rate of speed, disagree. Here is a very short list of scandals that rocked his presidency and the nation as a whole.

1) The great “stimulus” heist. Mr. Obama grabbed almost a trillion dollars for “stimulus” spending, but created virtually zero private sector jobs, allowed a great deal of the money to vanish and spent the rest of his presidency complaining he needed hundreds of billions more to repair roads and bridges.

2) Operation Fast and Furious. Mr. Obama’s insane program to use American gun dealers and straw purchasers to arm Mexican drug lords so the administration could complain about lax regulations on American gun sales to restrict American Second Amendment constitutional rights. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jamie Zapata, plus hundreds of Mexican citizens, died as a result of the blotched operation. Attorney General Eric Holder escaped charges claiming he didn’t know what his subordinates were doing.

3) Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress. Because of Operation of Fast and Furious. the White House, Democrats and the press protected him. Mr. Holder said it was “politically motivated.”

4) ObamaCare. ObamaCare would not be affordable said Jonathan Gruber, Ph.D., MIT professor of economics and chief architect of ObamaCare which passed March 23, 2010, without any Republican vote.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” he said in San Francisco in 2012. “And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

The lies started earlier. On June 23, 2009, Mr. Obama said, “We will keep this promise to the American people … if you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period.”

That was the “lie of the year,” said Politifact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times.

On April Fool’s Day 2010 after he signed ObamaCare in March, Mr. Obama said, “If you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you.” In fact, the exact opposite happened and millions were forcefully stripped of their healthcare insurance.

We heard in one presidential debate, “If you’ve got health insurance, you keep your own insurance, you keep your own doctor.” It was a lie.

5) Spying on journalists. AP reporters and James Rosen of Fox News, etc. The spying wasn’t to find out what kind of food they were eating, it was a cooperative effort with Pegasus. Spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group.

6) The IRS scandal. Selective targeting of conservative groups, i.e., pro-life and Tea Party groups, by a politicized IRS, denying tax exempt status. IRS officials lied allowing scandal kingpin Lois Lerner to retire taxpayer funded.

7) Benghazi. In a failed attempt to send arms to Syrian rebels, four Americans died because Mr. Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to send help. They then lied about the cause of the attack for weeks afterward, prompting Mrs. Clinton to ask “What difference at this point does it make?”

8) Hillary Clinton’s secret server. Subverting rules, she was guilty of sending classified email on her home-brew server, and Mr. Obama knew about it. If that wasn’t enough, during the investigation, it was discovered that Clinton had instructed here flaky “IT guy” to use a program called “bleachbit” to completely wipe out the mail server to hinder the rest of the investigation, not to mention the blatant destruction of government owned cell phones, with a hammer no less.

9) The Pigford scandal. Abuse of a program using taxpayer dollars meant to compensate minority farmers for racial discrimination exploded.

10) NSA spying scandal. Edward Snowden’s pilfering of sensitive National Security Agency data damaged national security, creating diplomatic problems and AG Eric Holder thanked Mr. Snowden for performing a public service by exposing surveillance programs the Obama administration didn’t want to talk about.

11) Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. He left his post, went over to the Taliban, soldiers died looking for him, yet Mr. Obama traded five high profile Taliban prisoners for him, flouting the law and lying.

12) Iran nuclear deal and ransom payment. Pushed with lies and media manipulation, Mr. Obama allowed Iran to pursue nuclear power, paying it billions of taxpayer dollars to use for worldwide terrorism.

13) Polluting the Colorado River. The Environmental Protection Agency turned the river orange unleashing water from closed copper mines. EPA officials escaped punishment.

14) GSA scandal. General Services Administration wasted taxpayer money on lavish parties; the administration tried to cover it up.

15) VA death list scandal. Department of Veterans Affairs put veterans on secret death lists and executives turned in phony status reports and signed themselves up for big bonuses. Mr. Obama spun the news with hollow promises.

16) Solyndra. The green energy scandal wrote “crony capitalism” into the American political lexicon, cutting corners and wasting $535 million of tax dollars.

17) Secret Service gone wild. White House fence jumpers, tipsy Secret Service agents driving a car into a security barrier and agents soliciting hookers in Columbia.

18) Shutdown theater. During the government shutdown of 2013, Mr. Obama did everything he could to make citizens feel maximum pain, from barricades to keep veterans away from memorials, to releasing illegal alien criminals from detention centers, an infuriating lesson for voters in how every dollar they get from government is a dollar that can be used against them when are they impudent enough to demand spending restraint.

The crime family’s mess is not over with yet, to the complete dismay of the voters in the US, former vice president Joe Biden was elected to be president and the shear volume of destruction has only exploded to just slightly less than all out war.

Joe Biden faced a plagiarism accusation while in law school.

A faculty report at Syracuse Law School in Dec, 1965 found that Biden, in an academic paper, had “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution.” Biden defended himself at the time, insisting that his “intent was not to deceive anyone. For if it were, I would not have been so blatant. If I had intended to cheat, would I have been so stupid?” The answer is yes, yes he would have been that careless and stupid.

Biden claimed that he didn’t understand how to properly cite sources.

“I was wrong, but I was not malevolent in any way,” Biden said in 1987, when he was running for president for the first time and the media surfaced the 22-year-old law-school plagiarism kerfuffle. “I did not intentionally move to mislead anybody. And I didn’t. To this day I didn’t.”

Due to his failure to properly provide quotes or attribution in the paper, Biden was given an F for the course. He retook the class the following year.

In 1987 he faced charges that he plagiarized portions of speeches.

Joe Biden, Britain’s Sky News claimed Thursday, “is best known in the UK for ripping off a Neil Kinnock speech.”

To be fair, Biden’s probably best known in the United Kingdom for serving as Barack Obama’s vice president. But his use of language and themes from a speech by Britain’s then Labour Party leader has dogged him for years.

Here’s Kinnock in 1987 in what Britain’s The Telegraph called “a dramatic and powerful piece of political rhetoric.”

“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.”

And here’s Biden, in a speech a few months after Kinnock’s moving oration.

“Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go a university? Why is it that my wife is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come home after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.”

Biden’s also been accused of lifting from the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

At the time, Biden said the controversy over his use of Kinnock’s language was a “tempest in a teapot.” The then 44-year-old presidential candidate “said it was ‘ludicrous’ to expect a politician to attribute all the quotations of others” that he or she uses in speeches, The New York Times reported.

Back in 2015, former President Donald Trump, then still a long-shot for the Republican presidential nomination, said he’d welcome squaring off with Biden in the general election. “I’ve had a great record,” Trump said. “I haven’t been involved in plagiarism.”

Biden wasn’t a very good student.

In his first year-and-a-half as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware in the mid-1960s, The New York Times reported that Biden’s “grades were C’s or D’s, with three exceptions: two A’s in physical education courses, a B in a course on ‘Great English Writers’ and an F in R.O.T.C. The grades improved somewhat later but were never exceptional.”

Biden graduated from Syracuse Law School in 1968. He was 76th in his class. Nine places away from the bottom.

He didn’t participate in protests during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. He sure did use that line in a recent speech on MLK day.

“I was not an activist,” Biden admitted during his first presidential run in 1987. “I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a small dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans.”

He added. “When I was at Syracuse, I was married. I was in law school. I wore sports coats. You’re looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am. I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts. You know, that’s not me.”

He opposed the busing policy that sought to integrate schools.

Integrating schools was a hot-button issue in the early 1970’s when Biden arrived in the US Senate. The new senator wanted schools to be integrated but he ultimately objected to “forced busing,”  taking students out of their own neighborhoods, sometime for long bus rides every day to distant schools.

Here was his argument, at a time when some white communities were violently protesting having African-American kids brought into their better-funded schools.

“I think the concept of busing that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride, is a rejection of the entire black-awareness concept where black is beautiful, black culture should be studied, and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, their own individuality.”

He poorly handled Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas.

This is the big one for many Democrats.

In 1991, Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill, a young law professor at the time, accused Thomas of sexual harassment at two previous jobs, causing a furor.

Biden has been widely criticized over the years for allowing Republicans on the committee to launch ad hominem attacks on Hill, and he’s also been criticized for refusing to allow other women to testify against Thomas.

Thomas, a conservative jurist nominated by President George H.W. Bush, was confirmed and is still on the Supreme Court.

Biden reportedly called Hill earlier this month to apologize for the way he handled the hearings 28 years ago.

“The focus on apology to me is one thing,” Hill told the New York Times in response to Biden’s phone call. “But he needs to give an apology to the other women and to the American public because we know now how deeply disappointed Americans around the country were about what they saw. And not just women. There are women and men now who have just really lost confidence in our government to respond to the problem of gender violence.”

Listening to Clarence Thomas talk about it, seems to be in stark contrast to the uproar of the time. Thomas is quoted as saying “the whole time I sat in the hearings, I, for the life of me, could not figure out what Biden was saying.”

Biden offered Barack Obama weird praise during the 2008 Democratic primaries.

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Obama clearly took no offense. A few months later, he chose Biden to be his vice-presidential running mate, and the two men remain close friends and confidantes.

His physical approach to connecting with people has led to the nickname “Creepy Uncle Joe,” with some women accusing him of unwanted touching, much less the accusations from his own daughter, stating “he used to force his way into the shower with me.”

Former Nevada Assemblywoman Lucy Flores recently said Biden kissed the back of her head during a 2014 campaign event. “He made me feel uneasy, gross and confused,” she said in a public statement. Other women also have said Biden made them feel uncomfortable by touching them.

This is not a “oppss” moment. This is the work of a cold calculating brain damaged pedophile.

The former vice president responded by saying he recognized that social norms had changed in recent years and that he would be cognizant of that change. At his next public speech, however, he embraced International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers President Lonnie Stephenson on stage.

“I just want you to know,” he joked to the crowd. “I had permission to hug Lonnie.”

Amy Lappos, one of the women who said Biden’s friendly touching had unnerved her, didn’t see the humor.

“Biden’s consent joke is a clear indication Biden doesn’t get it and doesn’t take the voice of the women who have come forward seriously,” she told The Washington Post. “A man who jokes about consent isn’t on the right side of women’s issues.”

Some Republicans, including former President Trump himself already have tried to use Biden’s longtime hands-on campaigning style as a way of defanging sexual-assault accusations against President Trump.

Republicans used to like him.

Believe it or not, bipartisanship used to be relatively common in the United States Congress, especially on big issues such as national security. Biden came of age as a politician when Republicans and Democrats socialized together and worked together.

When the plagiarism brouhaha reared up during Biden’s first presidential run in 1987, Sen. Alan Simpson, an influential conservative Republican from Wyoming, backed the Democratic senator.

“Hang on tight,” Simpson told him in a public statement. “You have at least had the guts to throw yourself in the public arena, to run for the presidency. And that’s better than a lot of faint-hearted detractors will ever do in this world, and they will be the ones who will try to sully you and pull you down. And so more power to you as you grapple with that one.”

Even after partisanship started to become toxic in the 1990’s, Biden continued to work for legislative compromises that would satisfy both Republicans and Democrats.

Michael Grunwald, author of “The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era,” offered up an insightful Twitter thread this week about Biden’s role in seeking consensus during the battle over the stimulus package early in Obama’s presidency.

• Hunter Biden’s trash gun. In March, Politico reported on a 2018 incident in which a gun belonging to Biden’s son Hunter was briefly lost in the trash outside a Delaware grocery store after Hallie Biden, Hunter’s sister-in-law, the widow of his late brother Beau took the gun away from Hunter and tried to dispose of it there. It was eventually found by a man collecting recyclables. Anonymous sources told the publication that, while the gun was still missing, Secret Service agents tried to take possession of gun-store paperwork that documented Hunter’s original purchase of the weapon. The gothic slapstick of it all was undermined by the news that, according to a police report, Hunter believes Hallie confiscated the gun out of fear that he might harm himself. Despite involving a facially credible allegation of an abuse of power, the idea is that the Secret Service might have tried to take the paperwork to prevent Hunter from being linked back to the then-missing gun if it ended up being used in a crime. This story hasn’t developed any further.

• T.J. Ducklo. This one is not funny even in a Veep kind of way, but ranks below Tanden because of how minor a figure was involved, namely T.J. Ducklo, a deputy press secretary who resigned after Vanity Fair reported that he’d threatened to “destroy” a Politico reporter who was working on a story he didn’t like; Ducklo also told the reporter that he believed she was jealous of him for some reason involving a different man not being interested in having sex with her (the reporter). Very convoluted, but unquestionably inappropriate for the workplace.

Hunter. Again?

His father is teetotal, but Hunter started drinking as a teenager and confessed to abusing cocaine as a college student.

He has been in and out of rehab.

In 2013, he signed up for the US Navy Reserves and took the oath of office before his father – then the vice-president – in a White House ceremony. On his very first day at the naval base, he tested positive for cocaine use and was discharged, something he later said he was “embarrassed” by.

According to the New Yorker, he drank excessively after the death of his older brother, Beau, from brain cancer in 2015, sometimes only leaving the house to buy vodka.

“He and Beau were one,” his daughter Naomi once wrote on Twitter. “One heart, one soul, one mind.”

During an acrimonious divorce filing in 2017, Ms Buhle accused Hunter of “spending extravagantly on his own interests, including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills”.

Breaking her silence in June on how their 24-year marriage unraveled, Ms Buhle told Good Morning America “He was struggling under a massive drug addiction, and that’s heart-breaking and painful and that wasn’t who I was married to.”

In his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things, Hunter confesses that his infidelity to Ms Buhle was the final straw in their marriage.

A DNA test in 2019 found he was “the biological and legal father” of a child born to an exotic dancer, Lunden Alexis Roberts. Hunter claimed to have “no recollection” of their encounter in his memoir. But he has settled a paternity suit with Ms Roberts and now pays her child support.

And before his split from Ms Buhle was finalized, Hunter began a relationship with his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, for two years, bonding over the shared and “very specific grief” of their loss, he told The New Yorker.

Mere weeks later, Hunter wed South African filmmaker Melissa Cohen after a whirlwind six-day romance. They had a son.

Speaking out in 2019 on his struggle with addiction, he said: “You don’t get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it.”

In Beautiful Things, he credits his survival to his family’s love, recounting an intervention when his father held him in an embrace, saying “I don’t know what else to do. I’m so scared. Tell me what to do.”

The New York Times reported that he had turned to painting as a form of therapy, quoting him as saying that it “keeps me away from people and places where I shouldn’t be.”

But a 2021 art exhibition to sell his paintings – for up to $50,000 a piece – created an ethics dilemma for the Biden White House. Mixing government family and business.

After graduating from Yale Law, Hunter worked at MBNA America, a bank holding company headquartered in Delaware and later acquired by Bank of America.

What was Hunter Biden doing in Ukraine and China?

However, his father’s close relationship with the bank – one of the largest employers in Delaware and a top contributor to his political campaigns – earned him the unfavorable moniker of “the senator from MBNA.”  As the younger Mr Biden rose to the rank of executive vice-president, his father pushed bankruptcy reform legislation favorable to the bank through the Senate.

In the early 2000’s, while still receiving consulting fees from the bank, Hunter opened a Washington lobbying practice that – according to Politico Magazine – saw him land “clients with interests that overlapped with his father’s committee assignments and legislative priorities.”

The father-son relationship at the time, he told The New Yorker, was that neither would speak to the other about lobbying work. President Biden has maintained this to be true in the case of more recent allegations of wrongdoing as well.

In 2006, with then-Senator Biden set to re-assume chairmanship of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, his son and another relative made an ill-fated purchase of a hedge fund group, Paradigm Global Advisors.

Their tenure at Paradigm extended through Joe Biden’s 2008 run for president and selection as vice-president to President Barack Obama. During this time, the fund was connected with several alleged criminal frauds, including a Texas financier convicted of running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in US history. The Biden’s denied any wrongdoing and faced no charges. In 2010, they liquidated the fund and returned money to investors.

Where is Hunter?

Former President Trump and the Republican party have argued that foreign business dealings involving President Biden’s son were questionable and had conflicts of interest.

From 2013 to 2016, he held a board seat at the Chinese private equity firm BHR Partners, first as an unpaid member and later owning a 10% equity stake in the fund.

After his father left the White House in 2017, Hunter also partnered with Chinese billionaire Ye Jianming, an oil tycoon on a natural gas project in Louisiana. The deal appears to have collapsed after Ye was detained by Chinese authorities on corruption charges and subsequently went missing.

But it has been business dealings in Ukraine that have stoked the most controversy.

In 2014, Hunter joined the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, where he was reportedly paid up to $50,000 per month.

At the time, his father was actively engaged in anti-corruption work in Ukraine. Vice-President Biden rallied other Western leaders to call for the firing of the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who faced criticism for blocking corruption investigations. Mr Shokin was removed by the Ukrainian parliament in 2016.

Allegations of corruption by the Biden’s formed the centerpiece of the campaign to impeach former President Trump in 2019, after he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a telephone call to investigate Hunter’s dealings with Burisma.

He has since resigned from the boards of both BHR Partners and Burisma Holdings.

During the 2020 election campaign, it emerged that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was abandoned at a repair shop and contained a 2015 email in which a Burisma adviser thanked him for the invitation to meet his father, then the US vice-president, in Washington DC.

Without providing evidence, the elder Mr Biden called the allegations a “smear campaign” engineered by Russian disinformation. And though the email has since been authenticated, his representatives have repeatedly denied such a meeting ever took place, adding that Joe had never discussed going into business with his relatives.

The FBI reportedly seized the laptop from the repair shop and is inspecting its contents as part of the federal investigation into the president’s son. After years of being in the FBI’s possession, nothing has come of it, despite it being known that the contents on the laptop were of national interest.

An NBC News analysis concluded that Hunter’s firm brought in about $11m through its work in Ukraine and China from 2013 to 2018, including nearly $5m from the Louisiana gas venture alone.

It also reportedly revealed spending of more than $200,000 a month at one point on luxury hotel suites, sports car payments and cash withdrawals, among other expenditures. Federal investigators in Delaware are now scrutinizing his finances and foreign ties, and Hunter – who denies any illegal activity – says he is “cooperating completely.”

“I’m absolutely certain, 100 percent certain, that at the end of the investigation, I will be cleared of any wrongdoing,” he told CBS News in 2021.

Congressional Republicans are also looking into reports that a wealthy Hollywood lawyer has loaned $2 million to help Hunter pay off his back taxes, CBS reported this year.

President Biden has defended Hunter on multiple occasions.

During a presidential debate in the last election, Mr Trump savaged his opponent: “Hunter got thrown out of the military, dishonorably discharged for cocaine use, and he didn’t have a job until you became vice-president.”

An emotional Joe Biden responded “That is simply not true. My son – like a lot of people – had a drug problem.” While it is true that millions of people around the world have grappled with drug addiction, they are not the president’s son and in this case, Hunter is still having issues with drugs.

Unfortunately for me, I could sit here for a year writing about an unlimited number of times these three members of the government have and continue to screw the American people out of life and liberty. For now though, I’m going to leave it with this list of screw-ups.

On final thought, lets not forget the failed Afghanistan withdraw where hundreds of people lost their lives – civilians and military personnel – in one of the most corrupt embarrassments of all times or the fact that the revelation of classified documents stored at Joe Biden’s home, dating back 36-plus years.

During that time, the smug leader claimed that we would not have a Vietnam style withdraw “you will not see helicopters lifting people off the rooftops.” Yet, to the dismay of all of the world to see, there it was, people being lifted off the rooftops.