Clintons Open to Possible Preemptive Pardon as Deep State May Abandon Them
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 13.12.2024
Former President Bill Clinton has indicated he is open to discussing a “pre-emptive pardon” for his wife, Hillary Clinton, with outgoing head of state Joe Biden, while maintaining that she has done nothing wrong.
This development was anticipated, according to Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel, who tells Sputnik that Bill Clinton is also likely to seek a pardon for himself and his daughter.
Ortel adds that the proposed pardon could cover a period starting much earlier than Hillary’s 2016 email scandal, which Bill Clinton mentioned on “The View” talk show.
The alleged fraud and pay-to-play activities involving the Clinton Foundation were significant issues, according to Ortel, who has been investigating the charity for many years.
“As in the case of the first Biden family pardon, my view is that a federal pardon for the Clinton family will have to go back, perhaps, to 1992 and continue so long as ‘The Clinton Foundation’ and its affiliates may operate,” Ortel suggests.
Earlier, Biden provided his son with an unusual blanket pardon covering all possible crimes between 2014 and 2024.
The Clintons “have been insiders in a rigged political system at the federal level” since Bill’s first presidential campaign in 1992, Ortel claims.
However, even a federal pre-emptive pardon from Biden “is likely to leave Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton vulnerable to state and foreign prosecutions, along with others,” the analyst believes.
Kash Patel Has Hillary Clinton on His “Government Gangsters” List
Bill Clinton’s readiness to discuss a pre-emptive pardon with President Joe Biden is likely influenced by FBI Director Christopher Wray’s decision to step down and Donald Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel, according to Ortel.
Ortel suggests that Wray is part of the same cabal as former FBI Director James Comey, who allowed Hillary Clinton to escape consequences for her 2016 email scandal.
In contrast, Patel has never been part of the D.C. “swamp” and played a key role in debunking the Trump-Russia collusion allegations, which, based on then-CIA Director John Brennan’s declassified memo, may have been fabricated by Hillary Clinton to divert attention from her email scandal.
According to Ortel, the Department of Justice (DoJ), FBI, and IRS have long covered up the Clintons’ apparent felonies, despite many being evident.
“When the FBI finally spoke with me in December 2018, they focused on my connections with Peter Smith, Jerry Corsi, and Roger Stone, claiming they lacked the scope to investigate why so many in the Obama and Bush administrations might be interested in covering up Clinton Foundation crimes,” Ortel says.
If Patel takes charge of the FBI, he is expected to overhaul the bureau and could investigate the Clintons earnestly, according to Ortel. Reports indicate that Hillary Clinton is on Patel’s “government gangsters” list.
Clintons Have Outlived Their Usefulness to Deep State
The globalist elites and much-discussed US “deep state” may no longer shield the Clintons, as they have outlived their usefulness, Ortel says.
“Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have outlived their usefulness to rich globalists,” Ortel states.
The election defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, along with the inability of the Clintons, Obamas, and Bidens to produce a more vibrant and popular presidential candidate, apparently exposed their political bankruptcy.
As a result, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who has long been considered an ally of the Democrats, dismissed the party’s gloom-and-doom warnings and openly signaled in October that a Donald Trump victory would be acceptable for Wall Street.
“Should the Trump administration prioritize prosecuting charity crimes, starting with wealthy donors like Bill Gates and George Soros and wealthy ‘educational public charities,’ whistleblowers and the incoming administration could make America proud by [taking down] the Clinton family and many other charity grifters who, even today, seem arrogantly unrepentant and unbowed,” Ortel concludes.
Obama and Russiagate: The Untold Story
Part 2 of our series on how Barack Obama undermined U.S. democracy
By Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke | TRUTH OVER NEWS | November 15, 2024
One of the least known aspects of the Russiagate affair is the central role that Barack Obama played in it. For years, the focus has been on individuals such as James Comey, Peter Strzok, the infamous dossier author Christopher Steele, and, of course, Hillary Clinton. And those names are indeed central to the plot, with Clinton being the one who devised the nefarious scheme to portray her opponent as a Russian agent. However, there was someone in the background, pulling many strings, who was even more crucial to the entire scheme: the then-sitting president, Barack Obama.
In this installment of our series on how Obama undermined U.S. democracy, we take a closer look at his role in both promoting and weaponizing the Russiagate hoax, which fraudulently linked Trump to Russia.
July 28 disclosure
We know from emails released by WikiLeaks that early discussions regarding the Clinton campaign’s dirty trick to associate Trump with Russia—what Clinton called the Swiftboat plan—were in full swing by February 2016. Over the following months, various components of this nefarious project came together. These included the hiring of campaign operatives Fusion GPS, commissioning the dirty dossier from Christopher Steele, and enlisting a group of IT specialists tasked with creating a false data trail linking Putin and Trump. We do not know whether Obama was privy to these early efforts. The earliest documented date we have for Obama’s involvement in the scheme is July 28, 2016. On this day, Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, came to the Oval Office and briefed Obama on Clinton’s Swiftboat project. Thus, we can say with certainty that, at the very latest, it was on this day that Obama became aware that the allegations of Russian collusion were nothing more than a fraudulent scheme concocted by Hillary Clinton.
As president, voters had entrusted Obama with the solemn responsibility of keeping the United States safe and secure. For this reason, Obama had a critical duty on July 28, 2016, to promptly put an end to the fraudulent allegations of collusion with Russia. The nominee of a major political party for president being falsely portrayed as a Russian agent posed numerous national security concerns. The fact that the entire scheme had been orchestrated by his opponent, arguably constituted an even more significant national security threat. In simple terms, of the two individuals who could become president, one was falsely accused of being a Russian agent while the other was the one who had cooked up the scam.
However, consistent with the theme throughout our series on Obama, he opted for treachery instead of truth. He wanted the country to tear itself apart, which is why, instead of telling Clinton to put an end to her devious scheme or, better yet, asking his Justice Department officials to investigate her campaign for creating a national security nightmare, Obama went full steam ahead in helping to perpetuate the hoax. Within 72 hours of the Oval Office meeting, the FBI launched its fraudulent Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump.
No peaceful transfer of power
It was a terrible betrayal of the American public who voted Obama into office, and the situation would only worsen. Over the coming months, the fraudulent Russia collusion investigation intensified. Numerous members of Trump’s campaign team were surveilled and monitored by the FBI. When an FBI analyst raised alarm bells about the fabricated Alfa Bank story—a tale concocted by Clinton’s IT operatives to link Putin to Trump—the analyst was promptly sidelined, and the matter was handed over to more pliant agents. However, it was all to no avail. Clinton lost, and Trump was suddenly the president-elect. At this point, it was once again Obama who intervened to undermine Trump and, consequently, American democracy.
The media incessantly discusses the so-called peaceful transfer of power, lamenting that Trump refused to hand over the reins in January 2021. Leaving aside that this assertion is demonstrably false—he did transfer power and retreated to his Mar-a-Lago estate—it is often overlooked in the debate about the peaceful handover of power that it was Obama who did not peacefully hand over power in 2017. Instead, he weaponized the Russia collusion hoax to undermine the incoming Trump administration. He did so fully aware that it would jeopardize Trump’s presidency, and in many ways, it indeed did. It is remarkable how much Trump accomplished despite the persistent cloud of Russia collusion allegations that loomed over him daily.
The specifics of Obama’s actions are relatively straightforward, yet they are seldom discussed. Immediately after Trump won the election, Obama, in collaboration with the intelligence community, initiated an effort to publish an official report, the Intelligence Community Assessment, that would claim that Trump had only won because of Putin’s help. This strategy served two purposes. First, it absolved Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party of accountability for a humiliating defeat. Second, and far more significantly, it created a huge roadblock for the incoming Trump administration. In addition to the persistent inquiries regarding Trump’s alleged connections to Putin, which hindered the administration’s ability to focus on other matters, Obama understood that his plan would effectively criminalize diplomatic relations with Russia. It was sabotage.
Trump’s hands were tied. He could not engage with Russia without provoking an immediate and loud outcry from Democrats, the intelligence community, and the media. Even something as mundane as meeting the Russian ambassador—an event that would ordinarily never make the news—was immediately portrayed as an act of treason. When Trump met Putin in person, the media had a massive meltdown, even accusing Putin of secretly bugging a soccer ball that had been gifted to Trump’s son, Barron. The hysteria knew no bounds, and this was catastrophic, especially given that all of this was occurring against the backdrop of escalating hostilities in Ukraine and the warming of relations between Russia and China—something that the United States should have done everything possible to prevent.
Secret meeting with journalists
And if all of that wasn’t enough, on January 17, 2017, Obama invited a group of journalists to a secret White House meeting. A 21-page transcript, which was only recently released, reveals that Obama used this meeting to carefully plant the fraudulent Russia collusion narrative in the minds of the attending journalists. He did this despite knowing that the entire situation was a hoax. But Obama ensured that the media perceived things otherwise, providing not only the presidential seal of approval to the Russia collusion hoax but also the impression of confirmation from someone with access to all the relevant secret intelligence. In other words, Obama abused the presidency to ensure that his successor would be burdened with the incessant Russia collusion narrative.
Obama’s central role in promoting the Russia collusion hoax was partially revealed by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who in 2020 disclosed details of the July 2016 meeting between Obama and Brennan. Other intelligence officials within the Trump administration, including his first Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, had access to the same information as Ratcliffe. However, instead of speaking out, they actively sought to undermine the president they were supposed to serve. Ratcliffe’s recent nomination as CIA Director represents not only a significant step toward reforming the intelligence community but also suggests that accountability for Obama may finally be on the horizon.
Against Rubio
By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | November 17, 2024
Marco Rubio’s foreign policy vision is the antithesis of America First as he advocates for wars and increased military spending in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. During the 2015/2016 GOP presidential primaries, Rubio was a fervent supporter along with Hillary Clinton, of a no-fly-zone in Syria which could have sparked World War III. “The United States should work with our allies, both Arab and European, to impose a no-fly zone over parts of Syria,” Rubio said.
Rubio has been on the America Last side of every foreign policy issue since he took office, he was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous regime change war in Libya and he opposed Barack Obama’s modest troop withdrawal in Afghanistan after his surge accomplished nothing besides making the Taliban stronger and getting more American soldiers killed.
More recently, Rubio has insisted that Israel should attack Iran “disproportionately” which is a direct call for an all out war with Iran and risks the safety of US troops in the region.
Rubio co-authored an amendment to the 2024 NDAA with Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, that would prevent Donald Trump or any future president from exiting the free-riding, war-seeking NATO alliance without Senate approval or an Act of Congress.
Regarding Beijing, he has boasted, “We need a military focused on blowing up Chinese aircraft carriers.”
Moreover, Rubio supports keeping American troops in harm’s way in Iraq indefinitely and even opposed repealing the outdated 2002 AUMF which unconstitutionally authorized the catastrophic Iraq War. Likewise, he backs the open-ended illegal US occupation of roughly a third of Syria, launched by Obama, which Trump attempted to end and finally bring our troops home.
Why Trump’s Triumph Sows Sorrow for Soros
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 09.11.2024
Billionaire hedge fund shark-turned liberal ‘philanthropist’ George Soros’ financial interests and political projects may be in trouble when Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office, with tens of millions in campaign funding, smear jobs and even involvement in the Trump prosecutions failing to stop the former president from making a comeback.
Bloomberg reported on Friday that Soros Fund Management plans to shut down its Hong Kong office as part of a surprise “administrative reorganization” after 14 years of operations.
The move may signal preparations by the Soros family to make major changes in the way their soft power empire operates with Trump back in power.
The campaign by the elder Soros and his son and heir apparent Alex to keep a Democrat in the White House has failed to pay dividends, despite the Soros’ Fund for Policy Reform’s transfer of $60 mln to Future Forward, a pro-Democrat dark money super PAC. That’s on top of a $15 mln donation by an Open Society Foundations subsidiary in 2023.
Along with money, the Soros family invested significant personal capital into the campaign against “MAGA-style Republicans” in 2024. In the spring of 2023, Alex Soros announced a dramatic scaling back of OSF’s operations in Western Europe to focus on Ukraine, Moldova, the Western Balkans, and the United States, with the effort to stop Trump becoming a top priority.
George Soros first sounded the alarm over Trump’s “America First” foreign policy in 2016, when he pumped millions into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign but failed to see his preferred candidate elected. After Trump won, Soros funded an anti-Trump “resistance movement,” manifesting itself in street protests, court challenges to his domestic agenda, secret lobbying of members of his administration, support for lawmakers promoting a neoliberal foreign policy, and even $1 mln in cash spent on the infamous debunked ‘Trump-Russia collusion’ dossier.
During Trump’s first term, Soros lobbied tech giants to regulate social media, funded a campaign to support dozens, if not hundreds, of liberal prosecutors and judges, gubernatorial candidates, congressional hopefuls, and other state and local officials in 2018 and 2020.
Soros and the OSF’s noticeable shift away from meddling abroad to interfering in US domestic politics earned the ire of Trump backers, who sought to declare him a “domestic terrorist,” strip him of his assets, and expel the Hungarian-born billionaire from the country.
When Joe Biden won in 2020, a Soros-linked think tank lobbied his administration to support policies favoring OSF principles in nearly two dozen different policy areas, and laid out $20 mln to create ‘grass roots organizations’ to sell Biden’s $1.2 trln infrastructure bill.
In 2022, Soros channeled $125 mln into a ‘Democracy PAC’ to support anti-MAGA candidates in the midterms.
In 2023, as criminal indictments began to come down on Trump, the former president immediately linked the political “witch hunt” against him to Soros and his “hand-picked and funded” Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, to whose 2021 campaign Soros is known to have donated at least $1 mln.
“I expect that Trump will be found guilty at least in some cases, and will be in jail by election day in November 2024,” Soros said in an August 2023 interview. “If I am right, he is unlikely to win the election. But if I am wrong, the US will face a constitutional crisis that is likely to bring on an economic crisis as well.”
Something seems to have gone terribly wrong in the billionaire’s calculations, with Soros’ ex-money manager, Stan Druckenmiller, warning in mid-October that the markets were “very convinced” that Trump would win.
With the Soros family dealt a major blow in Tuesday’s election and set back to where it started in 2016, only time will tell whether the OSF empire will restart its anti-Trump “resistance” movement, and if the president-elect’s inner circle – steeled by over eight years of efforts to sabotage Trump and undermine his ability to govern – will tolerate Soros-style attacks on the US political system and constitutional order.
Trump’s victory seals the coffin of “Bush-Clinton era” which lasted three decades
By Uriel Araujo | November 7, 2024
So much is being written now about Donald Trump’s victory in the United States’ presidential election. Few analyses however, if any, are paying attention to a remarkable development, namely the end of the Bush-Clinton era. You might have not paid much attention to it (in all likelihood, you never heard of it), but it started in the 1980’s, and lasted all the way to 2016. Let us go back in time, then.
This is how it worked: starting in 1981, either a Bush or a Clinton was in the White House (as a powerful Vice President or as the President himself) for years onwards. Or, later, in charge of foreign policy. If one recalls, from 1981 to 1898, Republican George H. W. Bush, also known as George Bush Senior, served as Vice President under Ronald Reagan. Being a former Director of the mighty Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it is only fair to describe Bush Senior as a powerful Vice President. As the founding father of an era, he deserves a closer look.
Those were the Cold War years, and the CIA was quite a big deal (it still is, of course). The Agency is well known for teaching torture technices to foreign groups, as well as promoting “regime changes” (code for coup d’état) false flag terrorist attacks, assassinations of foreign leaders, and the like. During the Reagan years, keeping up with such a record, Bush admittedly played a role in the so-called Iran–Contra scandal which was about the illegal sale of arms to Iran and then clandestinely using the arms sale to fund the Nicaragua anti-communist rebel group known as the Contras. The Contras were involved in death squads, cocaine dealing, terrorism and torture. To make matters worse, the CIA was accused of getting involved in the Contras narcotraffic operations.
According to diplomat Peter Dale Scott, historian Alfred McCoy, and journalists Gary Webb and Alexander Cockburn, this is in line with a long record of CIA involvement in the dope trade. Back to the Iran-Contra affair: at the time, CIA agent Barry Seal took part in bringing at least three billion dollars worth of cocaine through Mena Airport (Arkansas). This is where Bush and Clinton meet: while Bush was part of the administration running the Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton, who later became President, was the then governor of Arkansas and was accused of being complicit in this operation. That is not the only alleged connection Clinton has to the organized crime world, by the way: his brother Roger Clinton had ties to the Gambino crime family and even served time for cocaine dealing – only to be later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
Back to Bush Senior, he was so powerful a vice that when former American Nazi Party member John Hinckley Jr. shot and injured President Reagan in March 30, 1981, in an attempted murder, rumors and conspiracy theories were spread about Bush being involved in the deed so as to rise to the Presidency. The fact the Hinckley family had connections with the Bush family did not help much in that regard: for one thing, the shooter’s brother (Scott Hinckley, Vice President of the family’s Vanderbilt Energy Corp) was friends with George Bush’s son (Neil Bush). Scott Hinckley was in fact going to attend a dinner party at the Neil Bush home before the incident. It’s a small world.
George Bush Senior did not become President in March 1981, but he did in 1989, thereby succeeding Reagan. One of his greatest legacies, so to speak, is the first Gulf War. As President, he did not make it to reelection and was then succeeded in 1993 by someone very dear to him, someone whom he considered as a son, the aforementioned Democrat Bill Clinton. Again, a small world. Such was the rise of the New Democrats. For Clinton, I highlight two major achievements: pushing NATO expansion and having NATO bomb an European country which then ceased to be (the former state of Yugoslavia). The region is a ticking bomb to this day.
The family connection has remained strong – there are a number of Clinton-Bush initiatives, such as the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, and the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. It is no wonder Bushes and Clintons are so close – they took turns running the country for decades. President Clinton, preceded by Bush Senior (whom he called “dad”), was then succeeded, in 2001, by none other than Republican George W. Bush, that is, the son of Bush Senior. George W. Bush would often call Clinton his “brother”. Those were the neocon years. Bush legacies include turning the country into a de facto dictatorship with the Patriot Act, and the two-decades long occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the former being a clear neocolonial enterprise, plus yet more NATO enlargement.
So there you have it with the Bush-Clinton era. That state of affairs lasted at least 28 years, that is, until 2009, when Hillary Clinton (none other than the former President’s wife) could not make it within the Democrat Party and, in a vicious internal struggle, Barack Obama instead was nominated and won in 2009. That’s not the end of the Bush-Clinton era yet. Obama still kept a Clinton (Hillary) in charge of foreign policy, as Secretary of State until 2013. She resigned after some scandals, and was replaced by John Kerry.
Kerry, if one recalls, is George W. Bush’s fellow bonesmen (both are members of the same elite secret society) who was defeated by him in the 2004 election – small world, once again. So much for American “anyone can become President” democracy. Even though Obama was then said to be “the least Atlanticist” President, Obama-Clinton-Kerry legacy includes the empowering of terrorist group ISIS/Daesh, adding fuel to the fire in the Syrian civil war, supporting the Maidan in Ukraine, the destruction of Libya by NATO bombing – and, again, further NATO expansion.
Then Clinton lost the presidential race to Republican Donald Trump in 2016. This ends the Bush-Clinton era. Trump was then defeated by Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 and was thought to be done with. Instead, he took control of the Republican Party, sidelining the Bushes and neocons. The Clintons did not make a comeback under Biden for a number of reasons. Biden-Harris’ administration legacy in any case includes being complicit with Israeli genocide in Palestine and playing with world war by increasing tensions with both Russia and China (over Taiwan). So much for Biden’s “America is back” motto.
Now Trump is back, which seals the coffin of the Bush-Clinton era – and this time with full control of the Republican party, with a Senate majority and much more. Trump, as I wrote, is by no means a “peacemaker” and it is not quite true that his 2016-2020 presidency was marked by “no wars”. He assassinated Iranian General Soleimani for one thing and did facilitate the Abraham Accords, which lie at the root of today’s crisis in the Middle East in a lot of ways.
In any case, Trump’s previous administration certainly was no match for his Bush-Clinton predecessors in terms of war-mongering, genocide and nation-destruction – and no match for Biden, for that matter. In all likelihood this time too he will not exceed the aforementioned legacy of his precursors. If such turns out to be the case, and if the slightest restraint is exercised, this in itself should already be good news for the world. The Bush-Clinton era is over, amen to that.
FBI ran ‘honeypot’ operation on 2016 Trump campaign – whistleblower
RT | October 30, 2024
Former FBI Director James Comey personally ordered “honeypot” spies to infiltrate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to an agency whistleblower. The off-the-books operation was described by the agency insider as a “fishing expedition” to find wrongdoing among Trump’s team.
The operation was “personally directed” by Comey and launched in June 2015 without any case file being created in the FBI’s database, according to a whistleblower report handed to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and seen by the Washington Times.
At the time, Trump had just announced his first presidential campaign and neither he nor anyone on his campaign team was suspected of any crimes. Nevertheless, Comey ordered two “honeypot” agents to infiltrate Trump’s team on the campaign trail with the aim of extracting damning information from adviser George Papadopoulos, the report claimed.
A “honeypot” agent refers to an attractive woman who uses a sexual or romantic relationship to gather intelligence from a target.
Comey’s operation took place a year before the FBI’s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged contacts with Russia, which later morphed into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year ‘Russiagate’ probe. According to the whistleblower, the honeypot operation was kept “off the books” to conceal it from the US Justice Department’s inspector general, who later determined that Comey knowingly lied when submitting evidence to obtain a warrant to surveil Trump’s campaign.
Papadopoulos was eventually questioned by the FBI and in 2017 pled guilty to making false statements to agents regarding his alleged contacts with Russia the year before. He served 12 days in federal prison in 2018, and has claimed ever since that he was entrapped by FBI agents posing as Russians with damaging information on Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.
He complained about sloppy FBI agents “dropping information in my lap that I did not want regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails in the hands of the Russians” during the Crossfire Hurricane probe, and claimed to have been targeted by at least one “honeypot” beforehand. However, Papadopoulos thought that the woman was working for the CIA and “affiliated with Turkish intelligence,” he said in 2019.
The operation was canceled when a newspaper obtained a photograph of one of the agents and was about to publish it, the whistleblower claimed. The FBI allegedly contacted the newspaper claiming that the woman in question was an informant, and not an agent, and would be killed if the photo was released, successfully preventing its publication. One of the agents was then allegedly transferred to the CIA so she would not be available as a potential witness.
“The FBI employee personally observed one or more employees in the FBI being directed to never discuss the operation with anyone ever again, which included talking with other people involved in the operation,” the report states.
The Judiciary Committee told the Washington Times that it “plans to look into” the report. Trump fired Comey in 2017, describing him as a “liar” and a “slimeball.”
Biden’s ‘Performative’ Lecture on Democracy at UN Belies True US Role in World
By John Miles – Sputnik – 25.09.2024
Biden has made his claimed struggle for democracy a primary argument for the Democratic Party’s campaign against former President Donald Trump, but a closer look reveals the malign role of the United States in preserving countries’ sovereignty and self-rule.
US President Joe Biden spoke before the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, taking the opportunity to deliver what is likely one of the final major speeches of his political career.
The yearly gathering of world leaders and diplomats, which takes place each September in New York City, has served as the backdrop for several significant moments throughout its almost 80-year history. Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara addressed the assembly in 1964, touting Havana’s literacy campaign and assailing US intervention in Latin America. Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi delivered a highly memorable speech in 2009, as did ex-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who blasted George Bush, neoliberalism, and the US War on Terror in a 2006 broadside.
The week-long event provides an important forum for developing nations, who are briefly granted equal footing with great world powers. But the General Assembly is often criticized as a “talk shop” by those who claim the recognition granted to countries is more symbolic than tangible. Author and analyst Caleb Maupin joined Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program Tuesday to discuss the 78th session of the annual event and break down Biden’s address before the international audience.
“He talked about democracy and how he’s committed to democracy,” said Maupin, noting that Biden touched on themes he has frequently spoken about during the 2024 presidential election season. “He talked against Russia. He talked against Venezuela. He talked against the Palestinians. He talked up support for Israel. Joe Biden made a series of remarks going over standard US foreign policy.”
“Joe Biden really likes to do these kinds of performative, ideological shows, and that’s what his summit for democracy that he bragged about in his UN speech was,” the analyst claimed. “He loves to do these little performances where he talks about how he’s sticking up for democracy and democratic ideals.”
Biden has made his claimed struggle for democracy a primary argument for the Democratic Party’s campaign against former President Donald Trump, but a closer look reveals the malign role of the United States in preserving countries’ sovereignty and self-rule. A 2015 study found the US provides military support to 73% of nations labeled “dictatorships,” with Saudi Arabia and Juan Orlando Hernández’s oppressive former regime in Honduras providing perhaps the most prominent examples.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, still lauded as one of America’s most admired and consequential statesmen, made his contempt for democracy clear in 1970, when he vowed to intervene in Chile if the country elected an anti-imperialist leader. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” said the controversial figure, who spearheaded a campaign of social and economic subversion of the Latin American country after the election of Salvador Allende.
Three years later Chile’s democratically-elected president would be removed in a bloody US-backed military putsch, ushering in almost two decades of bloody dictatorship resulting in the death and torture of tens of thousands. The model was duplicated in Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina in a campaign of state terror and repression known as Plan Cóndor.
The US has worked to support coups and subvert democracy in dozens of countries around the globe, but its role in Palestine has generated perhaps the most attention in recent years. The United States has frequently undermined the influence of the UN and the force of international law in the name of defending Israel from criticism, recently downplaying the importance of a vote by the UN Security Council that called on the country to end its campaign in Gaza. The US has also led a group of Western countries in defunding the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), a crucial lifeline for refugees facing hunger and displacement that Israel has long viewed as an impediment.
“There is a lot of criticism that can be leveled at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency,” noted Maupin. “[With] Israel though, in particular, there is a political issue there, which is the UN frequently criticizes Israel and calls out Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians.”
“Israel considers any connection with the legitimate elected government of Gaza, which is Hamas… support for terrorism,” he continued. “If the UN set up a health care clinic and an elected official who’s part of the government in Gaza – that would be a member of Hamas – showed up and got health care, that would be considered aid to terrorism.”
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed the country’s actual views on democracy in leaked audio of comments from 2006, in which she demonstrated that the United States’ support for democratic elections is highly contingent upon voters choosing candidates in line with views and policies supported by Washington.
“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” Clinton said of the ballot that brought Hamas’s armed resistance movement to power in Gaza.
“If we were going to push for an election then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win,” she claimed, appearing to suggest the United States should have intervened to rig the outcome.
Hillary Clinton’s Sordid History of Secrecy and Censorship
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | September 23, 2024
“You could drop Hillary into any trouble spot, come back in a month and… she will have made it better,” former President Bill Clinton declared in a 2016 speech championing his wife’s presidential candidacy. But Hillary’s entry into the brawls surrounding the 2024 presidential election will leave many Americans wishing to drop her elsewhere.
As the race enters the home stretch, Hillary Clinton is riding in like Joan of Arc to rescue truth—or at least to call for hammering government critics. But Hillary has been a triple threat to American democracy for fifteen years.
Last Monday evening, Hillary declared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC talk show that the federal government should criminally prosecute Americans who share “propaganda”—which she made no effort to define.
Hillary has long been one of America’s foremost censorship advocates. In 2021, she announced that there must be “a global reckoning with the disinformation, with the monopolistic power and control, with the lack of accountability that the [social media] platforms currently enjoy.” Hillary made her utterance at a time when freedom in much of the world had been obliterated by governments responding to a pandemic that occurred as a result of U.S. government funding reckless experiments in Chinese government labs. The U.S. denial of its role in the lab leak was perhaps the biggest deceit of the decade but Hillary never kvetched about that scam regarding a program that contributed to millions of deaths. But that wasn’t disinformation—that was public service.
In 2022, Hillary wailed that “tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability” and endorsed European Union legislation to obliterate free speech. But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.
That awkward fact didn’t deter Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz from declaring last month, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Who knew the Minnesota version of the First Amendment has a loophole bigger than Duluth?
After the New York Post shot down Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as chief of a White House disinformation task force to find ways to protect women and LGBTQI+ politicians and journalists from vigorous criticism on the Internet (“online harassment and abuse”). Harris declared that such criticism could “preclude women from political decision-making about their own lives and communities, undermine the functioning of democracy.” To save democracy, the government must suppress criticism of women.
Five years ago, at an NAACP Detroit “Freedom Fund” dinner, Harris proclaimed, “We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.” She did not specify the precise degree of alleged rancor required to nullify a speaker’s constitutional rights. Based on Harris’s prior comments, she will likely sharply increase repression of her critics on social media if she wins in November.
Biden administration censorship schemes have been denounced by federal courts and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), chair of the House Cybersecurity Subcommittee, sent the White House a letter last week noting that the Biden administration always “advertised its willingness to manipulate the content of social media sites” and called for a cessation of all federal censorship tainting the 2024 election. Mace requested copies of all official “communications with social media companies…concerning the concealment or suppression of information on their sites.” At last report, nobody on Capitol Hill was sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for an informative White House response.
Hillary’s own career exemplifies a political elitist righteously blindfolding all other Americans.
When she was secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Clinton exempted herself from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), setting up a private server in her New York mansion to handle her official email. The State Department ignored seventeen FOIA requests for her emails and said it needed seventy-five years to comply with a FOIA request for Hillary’s aides’ emails. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shrugged off Hillary’s aides using a program called BleachBit to destroy 30,000 of her emails under subpoena by a congressional committee. Federal Judge Royce Lamberth labeled the Clinton email coverup “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.” An Inspector General report slammed FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence. The IG report “questioned whether the use of a subpoena or search warrant might have encouraged Clinton, her lawyers… or others to search harder for the missing devices (containing email), or ensured that they were being honest that they could not find them.” The FBI’s treatment of Hillary Clinton vivified how far federal law enforcement will twist the law to absolve the nation’s political elite, or at least those tied to the Democratic Party.
During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department gave grants to promote investigative journalism in numerous developing nations as part of its “good governance” programs. But exposing abuses was only a virtue outside U.S. territorial limits. Clinton vigorously covered up debacles in the $200 billion in foreign aid she shoveled out. From 2011 onward, AID’s acting inspector general massively deleted information on foreign aid debacles in audit reports, as The Washington Post reported in 2014. Clinton’s machinations helped delude Washington policymakers and Congress about the profound failures of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
Pirouetting as a champion of candor is a novel role for the former secretary of State. Shortly before the 2016 election, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of voters believed Hillary was honest and trustworthy, and only 35% trusted Donald Trump. The Clinton-Trump tag team made “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year.
Hillary believes that the lesson of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is that good citizens should shut up and grovel. In her 2017 memoir, Hillary claimed that Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed the peril of critics who “sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.” Did Hillary think Orwell dedicated the novel to Stalin? Hillary’s book noted that the regime in Orwell’s novel had physically tortured its victims to delude them. Hillary is comparatively humane, since she only wants to leave people forever in the dark—well, except for the scumbags who undermine the official storyline.
Hillary was a key player in the Barack Obama administration that believed that Americans had no right to learn the facts of the torture committed by the CIA after 9/11. When she was secretary of State in 2012, she declared, “Lack of transparency eats away like a cancer at the trust people should have in their government.” But the more secrets politicians keep, the less trust they deserve.
Hillary’s vision of democracy permits only token interference by underlings. She believes that poohbahs like her have the right to rig elections to sanctify their power. In 2015, when she was running for the presidency, she condemned voter identification requirements as part of a “sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people.” A Washington Post headline aptly summarized her message: “Hillary Clinton Declares War on Voter ID.” This is the bargain Hillary offered; voters didn’t have to identify themselves and she didn’t disclose what she did in office. Subsequent Democratic Party attacks on Voter ID were more successful, leading to sixty million ballots for Biden, millions of which were counted but not verified.
To sanctify censorship, Hillary is again invoking the Russian peril. A 316-page report last year by Special Counsel John Durham noted that in mid-2016, after the shellacking she suffered from her email scandal, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” President Barack Obama was briefed on the Clinton proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though no FBI personnel apparently took “any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence.”
The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. In 2019, an Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign.
Hillary’s scams were even too much for federal scorekeepers. The Federal Election Commission last year levied a $113,000 fine on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier, which spurred the FBI’s illegal surveillance of Trump campaign officials.
In Hillary’s new improved version of the Constitution, there is no free speech for “deplorables”—the vast swath of Americans she openly condemned in 2016. But this is the same mindset being shown by the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Harris has scorned almost every opportunity to explain how she would use the power she is seeking to capture over American citizens. Instead, she is entitled to the Oval Office by acclamation of the mainstream media and all decent folks—or at least those who drive electric vehicles and donate to her campaign.
Is “disinformation” becoming simply another stick for rulers to use to flog uppity citizens? Denouncing disinformation sounds better than “shut up, peasants!” But if politicians have no obligation to disclose how they use their power and can persecute citizen who expose their abuses, how in Hades can American freedom survive? How can we permit our rulers to selectively squelch citizens based on alleged hateful comments when, as historian Henry Adams pointed out a century ago, politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
Ambitious politicians never lack pious pretenses for destroying freedom. But will censorship by the Biden administration steal the 2024 election for Harris? Unfortunately, according to Hillary Clinton, you are not worthy of knowing the answer.
Hillary Clinton Advocates for Criminal Charges for Americans Spreading “Propaganda”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 17, 2024
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has has decided to ignore the First Amendment and has advocated for punitive measures aimed at Americans who contribute to the spread of what she calls “propaganda.” Speaking to MSNBC on Tuesday, Clinton suggested that holding American individuals accountable through civil or criminal charges could serve as a warning to deter the distribution of “disinformation.”
While Clinton acknowledged the importance of indicting foreign actors, namely Russians, directly responsible for meddling in US elections, she argued that Americans who play a role in amplifying “disinformation” should not be overlooked.
“I think it’s important to indict the Russians… who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting [former US President Donald] Trump back in 2016,” Clinton said. “But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence.”
Clinton, who ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential race, endorsed the ongoing efforts of the State and Justice Departments to reveal the extent of Russian influence in US elections. Clinton has long maintained that her loss in 2016 was due to Russian interference. She described these efforts as merely scratching the surface of a much larger issue, adding, “There is a far distance to go.”
Her comments also touched on the broader issue of foreign influence in American politics, as Clinton warned that adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran are seeking to sway the US electorate.
She underscored the call for greater vigilance in safeguarding the democratic process, stating: “We are not going to let adversaries, whether it’s Russia, China, Iran, or anybody else, basically try to influence Americans as to how we should vote in picking our leaders.”
Clinton’s call for potential criminal penalties against US citizens who share “disinformation” is a controversial step toward restricting free speech. The idea of penalizing individuals for spreading information, regardless of its origins, raises concerns about the boundaries of government power and the potential for misuse of such laws to suppress dissenting views.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits Congress from making laws that abridge the freedom of speech. Under this protection, the idea of prosecuting individuals for the mere act of sharing information—regardless of its veracity—presents a potential conflict with these foundational rights.
Persecution of Sputnik, RT Contributors Highlights US Hypocrisy – Ex-CIA Analyst
By John Miles – Sputnik – September 5, 2024
The United States’ persecution campaign against journalists and political dissidents with ties to Russian media accelerated Wednesday when new repressive measures were announced against several entities.
New sanctions were announced against 10 individuals and two organizations under the umbrella of the Rossiya Segodnya media group, including RIA Novosti, RT, Sputnik and Ruptly. The sanctions target these entities for alleged “hostile interference in the presidential elections,” the US Treasury Department claimed. The measures also target editor-in-chief of Rossiya Segodnya and RT Margarita Simonyan and several top managers at RT.
Ex-CIA analyst and former State Department counterterrorism expert Larry Johnson spoke with Sputnik Wednesday about the startling development, the latest attempt by the Biden administration to shape political discourse online and in the media.
“The latest stunt pulled by the Biden Department of Justice to declare all of these sanctions on Russia for alleged interference in the US political system is a level of hypocrisy that is staggering in its magnitude and in its foulness,” Johnson said.
“Let’s be clear about one thing: the one country in the world that has been involved with more interference in the internal political affairs of every other country is the United States. During the reign of President Eisenhower in the 1950s, there were 170 different covert actions carried out against other countries.”
“This year [the US has] allocated almost $4 billion to interfere or meddle in the political affairs of other countries,” he continued. “$315 million of that goes to the National Endowment for Democracy. $300 million is specifically what they call counter-Russian influence. And another $2.9 billion is for ‘democracy’ programs. And these have been used basically to run propaganda, to pay people, to organize ‘democracy’ programs in places like Georgia.”
The US frequently funds pro-Western media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in foreign countries it targets for regime change to pave the way for a pro-US government to come to power. Author and journalist William Blum documented over 50 examples of significant US interference in other countries since World War II in his classic book Killing Hope, largely based on the shocking revelations of ex-CIA agent Philip Agee.
More recently the US has interfered in countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Ukraine, paving the way for the latter country’s extremist anti-Russia government through its support for the Euromaidan coup in 2014.
“I don’t know how many millions of dollars are allocated to the Central Intelligence Agency for additional covert actions designed to plant stories in media, to create electronic media, to influence social networks across the board,” Johnson continued. “It’s the United States that’s meddling. With respect to the entire bogus claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, we now know without a doubt that that was a Democrat operation led by Hillary Clinton and her team,” he added.
“Everything we were told about Donald Trump and the Russians was a lie. I was one of the few writing about it at the time to call it out… The notion that RT is manipulating and influencing the presidential election is beyond laughable,” he claimed, noting that the Russian television channel’s app is banned from many app stores in the West while its content has been removed from YouTube and other websites.
“How is a news network that’s not allowed to broadcast and that’s shut [out] of social media in the United States supposed to influence [the election]? … It just goes across the board that they’re going to try to attack any kind of alternative voice in the media.”
Johnson noted that he has been subjected to a “pre-interview” with most television news outlets he has appeared on, such as the BBC, MSNBC, Fox News, CBS and the CBC, during which employees for each outlet attempted to ascertain what he would say when interviewed live on air. RT was one of only two outlets that never subjected him to the practice, he said.
“It’s the so-called ‘free democracies’ that want to run that litmus test,” he said.
Johnson said the recent persecution of figures connected to RT and Sputnik is merely another attempt to run the “Russiagate” playbook, attempting to discredit alternative media outlets that critique US foreign policy. “Electoral interference” continues to take place, Johnson claimed, but it is not the Russians but the US government that is engaged in an attempt to influence and control the popular narrative for its own benefit.