2020 Presidential Election
March 12, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
Days after Jan. 6, 2021, Army Col. (Ret) Mike Ford, a highly decorated infantry officer and a former colleague of mine, was sitting in church with his wife. The pastor read a prayer that had been sent to congregations in the area by the District Bishop. Below is an abridged version of the prayer: Compassionate God, we come before you with heavy hearts. We are grieved by the violence that
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March 10, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
My ears always perk up when I hear about a lifelong liberal suddenly experiencing a profound change in their political beliefs. Like many of us, liberal author Dr. Naomi Wolf, a one-time advisor to former President Bill Clinton, watched Tucker Carlson’s presentation of excerpts of previously unseen surveillance footage from Jan. 6, 2021 on Monday night. To say she was moved by what she saw is an understatement. What followed
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February 28, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I noted the work of Aaron Maté in connection with the Russia hoax in “A Twitter Files footnote (10)” (interviewing former New York Times investigative reporter Jeff Gerth). He writes frequently for the RealClearInvestigations portal of RealClearPolitics, as in “Unchastened by Russiagate, the NY Times Doubles Down in Its Special Counsel Coverage.” Sitting in for the comedian/host of the Jimmy Dore Show, Maté devoted a segment to what I have
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February 21, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Steve Krakauer is the author of Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy With Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People, published today by Hachette. Fox News has posted his column on the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and James Clapper’s claptrap on behalf of the Deep State 51 leading the charge. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler took Clapper’s claptrap at face value. Kessler
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February 19, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The current issue of Imprimis carries an adaptation of John Daniel Davidson’s February 7 Hillsdale College lecture on the Twitter Files. The title of the lecture is “The Twitter Files Reveal an Existential Threat.” Davidson begins with a point I have made several times in my own comments on the Twitter Files: Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt
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February 18, 2023 — Scott Johnson
In a nearby post I link to Dominion’s brief in support of its motion for summary judgment in the defamation case it has brought against Fox Corporation and Fox News Network (FNN). The Fox entities have also moved for summary judgment dismissing the claims. Fox Corporation’s 32-page opening brief denying responsibility is posted here. FNN’s 192-page opening brief is the one of interest and is posted here. Deadline has posted
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February 18, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Are you Trump-sensitive? Have you ever been Trump-sensitive? Do you have an autonomic response to slights of President Trump with formulations such as “GOPe” and ad hominem attacks on those who don’t see the world exactly as you do? I responded to readers who disparaged Power Line in a steady stream of emails and comments following the 2020 presidential election in “Confessions of a limp noodle.” I mocked the allegations
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February 15, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday I wrote about (former Director of National Intelligence James) “Clapper’s claptrap.” David Harsanyi took up the subject in the Federalist column “Clapper can’t stop lying.” Can’t Stop Won’t Stop! The Washington Free Beacon also took it up in editorial “Intel officials fresh laptop baloney.” The Free Beacon editorial gets at a few of the more peculiar angles to the story. It has several, to say the least. The editors
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February 14, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is one of the Deep State 51 who lent his credibility to the open letter to the castigation of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. According to Clapper et al., the emails reported by the Post “ha[ve] all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Given to Natasha Bertrand, the letter was published by Politico in conjunction with the
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February 9, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The New York Post editorial “AOC serves up disinformation about Hunter Biden — and us” has just rotated off our Picks. Let us pay tribute to it here as the editorial of the day. The Post editors write: “I believe that political operatives who sought to inject explosive disinformation with the Washington Post couldn’t get away with it — and now they’re livid,” railed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Wednesday’s hearings about
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February 9, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Miranda Devine characterizes the Dems’ performance in the House Oversight’s first committee hearing of the new Congress yesterday as “The Democratic litany of Hunter Biden’s laptop lies.” Having helped break the laptop story in the pages of the New York Post in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, Devine is the go-to source for comments on developments in the case. Here she is on yesterday’s hearing featuring the testimony
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February 6, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Last week I characterized Hunter Biden’s threatened legal assault on the purveyors of his abandoned laptop as “Battle of the Bulge, Biden style.” Hunter Biden’s new legal team invited the authorities to bring privacy claims and alleged defamation claims against a variety of parties that had the temerity to bring the contents of the laptop to the attention of the public. The news was notable for a number of reasons
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February 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Underneath the image of the New York Post cover above, Miranda Devine comments in her Devine Online email newsletter (sign up for free here) this morning: For more than two years Joe Biden has maintained the fiction that the laptop his son Hunter abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware was a “Russian plant.” Well, yesterday, Hunter finally admitted the laptop is his, only now he says his data
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February 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Once upon a time the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop were deemed akin to Russian “disinformation” by former law enforcement and national security authorities, candidate Joe Biden, and the media regurgitating the party line on Biden’s behalf. Anyone with an ounce of sense could see the party line a fairy tale, to put it kindly. Now lawyers representing Hunter Biden seek criminal investigations of those involved in the dissemination
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December 30, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has reviewed additional sets of Twitter Files and will post threads summarizing his findings just in time to disrupt my holiday weekend. At his TK News site on Substack, he previews his findings with a focus on the government-related issues that have been the subject of my interest. He anticipates that “the broader picture will eventually describe a company that was directly or indirectly blamed for allowing Donald
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December 29, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Adam Goldman was one of the national security establishment’s go-to reporters for promotion of the Russia hoax. Indeed, Goldman “was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for national reporting on Russia’s meddling in the presidential election.” That’s the way the Times puts it. Those of us who don’t only get our news from the Times now know that it was the FBI more than any
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December 28, 2022 — Scott Johnson
George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley comments on the drivel released by the FBI last week in response to the Twitter Files: It is not clear what is more chilling — the menacing role played by the FBI in Twitter’s censorship program, or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. The FBI has issued a series of “nothing-to-see-here” statements regarding the Twitter Files. In its latest
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