China
June 28, 2023 — Scott Johnson
In the matter of the Biden family business — CBS News has covered the testimony of IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley. This is a significant development. The story is posted under the headline “IRS whistleblower in Hunter Biden probe says he was stopped from pursuing investigative leads into ‘dad’ or the ‘big guy.'” I have posted video of the segment below. Something is happening here. The New York Times has confirmed
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June 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Over the past weekend President Biden discussed the Chinese spy balloon that captured our attention earlier this year. “I don’t think the leadership knew where it was, and knew what was in it, and knew what was going on,” Biden told reporters as he headed to Philadelphia for his first campaign rally of the 2024 election. “I think it was more embarrassing than it was intentional.” I attributed Biden’s description
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June 21, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Defenestration of Prague (1618) is not to be confused with the defenestration of Jan Masaryk in Prague (1948). It means throwing someone out a window. In Communist China, they do these things differently. They throw someone off a roof. If we had a word for it akin to defenestration, it might be detectation. I prefer to think of it as defenestration, Chinese style. Consider the case of the Wuhan
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June 20, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Students of ancient history may recall that when Secretary of State Dean Acheson spoke to the National Press Club in January 1950, he addressed America’s “defensive perimeter” in Asia. He defined the American “defensive perimeter” in the Pacific as a line running through Japan, the Ryukyus, and the Philippines. Acheson left South Korea and Taiwan outside it. Observers immediately decried Acheson’s speech as giving North Korea the “green light” to
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June 18, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The New York Post reports on President Biden musing to the press before he boarded the plane to hit the campaign trail in Philadelphia yesterday. The White House has helped us along with a transcript. Here we have a pure case of projection, Biden style: President Biden kicked off his first day of campaigning for re-election by making excuses for communist China — saying that President Xi Jinping never meant
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June 12, 2023 — Scott Johnson
In Friday’s Wall Street Journal Warren Strobel and Gordon Lubold broke the story “Cuba to Host Secret Chinese Spy Base Focusing on U.S.” (in the newspaper: “China plans spy base in Cuba”). According to Strobel and Lubold: “China and Cuba have reached a secret agreement for China to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island, in a brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the U.S., according to U.S.
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June 6, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The AP reports on the the Shangri-La Dialogue, “an annual forum bringing together top defense officials, diplomats and leaders.” Secretary of Defense Austin attended, as did General Li Shangfu, China’s State Councilor and Minister of National Defense. I gather he is is Austin’s Chinese counterpart. Despite the “dialogue” advertised in Shangri-La, Li Shangfu let China’s Navy do the talking in the Taiwan Strait over the weekend of the conference (the
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May 13, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I called Peter Schweizer this past Wednesday to ask for help in understanding the Chinese connection to the Biden family business. Peter cited his most recent book, Red-Handed, published last year by Harper Collins. Peter also pointed me to his contemporaneous New York Post column “Chinese elite have paid some $31 million to Hunter and the Bidens.” The headline is a bit misleading. For “Chinese elite” read “Chinese intelligence establishment,”
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May 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Peter Schweizer researched the Chinese Communist Party’s investment in the Biden family corruption for his best-selling book Red-Handed. He reviewed his findings in remarks to a Gatestone Institute audience in New York that Gatestone posted online last month under the heading “Does this compromise President Biden?” I called Peter yesterday to ask for his take on the 36-page bank records memo released by the House Oversight Committee yesterday. He returned
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May 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Rep. James Comer called a press conference this morning to release the House Oversight Committee’s second bank records memorandum on the Biden family business. The committee press release is posted online here. The 36-page bank records memo released today is posted here. I have posted video of the press conference below. There is a lot of information to digest here and I haven’t done so. The 50-minute press conference provides
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April 20, 2023 — Scott Johnson
One has to turn to the national and international press for the news that Minneapolis may serve as the host to one of the six or seven clandestine Chinese “police stations” reportedly operating on American soil. The New York Post reports on the matter in “After FBI busts Chinese ‘police station’ in NYC, six more exposed in US” and the Daily Mail in “China may have up to six more
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April 10, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
Following six hours of talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke to a Politico reporter and two French journalists aboard COTAM Unité, France’s Air Force One this weekend. He discussed his concept of “strategic autonomy for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a third superpower.” Specifically, Macron said Europe’s “greatest risk” is getting “caught up in crises that are not ours,” such as a potential conflict
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April 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
RFK Jr. filed a statement of candidacy with the FEC last week. He apparently intends to challenge President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. The AP could have framed the filing with the message of good will that he intends to promote, but instead covered the filing in a relentlessly hostile story by Michelle Price. The AP story is posted here. The AP story suggests what it could to do
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April 3, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
Many Americans were horrified that President Joe Biden allowed an enormous, high-tech Chinese spy balloon to float across the U.S. mainland in February, moving slowly over strategic military installations as it went, collecting data and sending it off to Beijing in realtime, before shooting it down over the Atlantic Ocean. Administration officials assured us they were able to jam the balloon’s data collection mechanisms to block it from receiving –
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March 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson
John noted President Biden’s apparent need for adult guidance when he hit the ground in Durham, North Carolina yesterday. Biden’s remarks on the ground in Durham were at least equally notable. The White House has posted the transcript here. Nick Arama has posted excerpts and accompanying video here at RedState. Biden omitted his usual tribute to chocolate chip ice cream and skipped to exploitation of the tragic murder of students
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March 18, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday Joe Biden made the mistake of listening to a question from a reporter at the White House, and briefly trying to answer. I understand that the reporter was from another country; I don’t suppose a liberal American “reporter” would be so bold as to question Slow Joe on the subject of his China connections: Two points to note. First, even in this very brief clip, Biden’s mental and physical
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March 18, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
The utter failure of the Anchorage, Alaska, meeting between top U.S. and Chinese diplomats held in March 2021 set the tone for relations going forward. Diplomacy flew out the window at the get-go and did not return. The hostility coming from the Chinese was impossible to miss. It was made immediately and abundantly clear that then-Chinese Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi had neither
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