Tuesday, June 27, 2023
The GOP ‘bribery’ allegations against Biden remain transparently thin
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/13/gop-biden-allegation-analysis/
Two members of Congress who have seen the 1023 told the New York Post that the executive at issue was Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky. In 2020, former Giuliani aide Lev Parnas — then himself under indictment on federal charges — told Politico that Giuliani had met privately with Zlochevsky in mid-2019, in the middle of Trump’s effort to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into Biden.
“Asked to detail any contacts he had with Joe Biden from 2013-2019, and whether Hunter ever facilitated any meetings,” Politico’s Natasha Bertrand wrote, “Zlochevsky replied: ‘No one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden’s engagement.’ "
Giuliani, Parnas said, was furious at that answer.
Why are Republicans accusing Joe and Hunter Biden of bribery?
The increasing legal jeopardy facing former president Donald Trump, and news of the plea agreement between the Department of Justice and President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, has led Republicans in Congress to make increasingly outlandish accusations against the 46th president and his family, even as evidence to support their claims continues to be lacking.
Web of biblical cities depicts King David as major ruler, says Israeli archaeologist
In a new academic paper, Prof. Yosef Garfinkel of the Institute of Archaeology at Hebrew University claims he has found evidence of urban settlement in organized cities dating to around 1,000 BCE, during the reign of King David.
His article, published Monday in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology, a peer-reviewed publication of Hebrew University, supports the theory that King David ruled over a well-developed kingdom, complete with roads connecting between cities. This runs counter to the belief of some scholars from the minimalist school of thought who have previously suggested that since there is scant evidence of cities during King David’s reign, his position as a ruler of a great kingdom as written in the Bible could be exaggerated.
"Planted by scoundrels": Trump melts down on Truth Social after DOJ reveals evidence against him
Trump has repeatedly argued that the President Records Act, which defines the scope of presidential records and states they belong to the government, exonerates him from prosecution for hoarding classified materials.
Legal experts, however, clarified for Salon last week that Trump is not facing charges for violating the PRA but rather the Espionage Act, which instead pertains to national defense records from agencies like the CIA that the indictment accuses him of willfully retaining.
Missionaries targeting Orthodox Jewish communities in Jerusalem
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/373303
"It could very well be that he is merely boasting to raise funds, but I can testify, as someone who walks the streets of Jerusalem a lot, that their number is much greater than what we knew before the coronavirus," King warns. "I hear about materials in mailboxes in every neighborhood in the city, including Givat Shaul, Har Nof, Givat Mordechai, etc. They arrive everywhere and that means a lot of people, beyond the streetcar in the Safra square and the Western Wall. When you reach so many people, you have to be much more connected. He may be from Paris, but there is no doubt that there is a much larger number of Messianic Jews and missionaries on the streets of Jerusalem."
University under fire for 'anything but orthodox' adver
An advert placed in the New York Times by a prestigious American university has been criticised by orthodox Jews for being 'tone-deaf' towards its Orthodox students.
“Brandeis was founded by Jews. But, it’s anything but orthodox,” reads the ad, which runs across a two-page spread.
Trump Audio 'Even More Damning' Than Indictment: Ex-Prosecutor
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-audio-even-more-damning-indictment-prosecutor-1809157
In a statement to Newsweek Monday night, a spokesperson for Trump's campaign said via email that the tape proves "once again" that the former president is innocent and called it "bait" for "Trump-haters."
"The audio tape provides context proving, once again, that President Trump did nothing wrong at all," the campaign spokesperson said. "The President is speaking rhetorically and also quite humorously about a very perverted individual, Anthony Weiner, who was deep inside the corrupt Clinton campaign. The media and the Trump-haters once again were all too willing to take the bait, falling for another Democrat-DOJ hoax, hook, line, and sinker."
Trump's campaign also shared a statement on behalf of the former president, which read, "As we've been saying from the moment President Trump rode down the golden escalator, the President did nothing wrong."
Jan. 6 Convict Tells the Truth About Trump: He’s a Cult Boss
“I started debunking them and they got mad at me and they started getting more mad at me and started a smear campaign on me,” Hemphill recalled. “That I was a fed agent. That I was antifa. Just silly children, high school stuff.”
Donald Trump Responds to New Leaked Audio About Secret Docs He Kept
Posting to Truth Social after the release of the audio, Trump took aim at prosecutor Jack Smith and claimed, without explaining, that the audio is an exoneration of his alleged crimes.
“The Deranged Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, working in conjunction with the DOJ & FBI, illegally leaked and ‘spun’ a tape and transcript of me which is actually an exoneration, rather than what they would have you believe,” Trump wrote.
The former president added: “This continuing Witch Hunt is another ELECTION INTERFERENCE Scam. They are cheaters and thugs!”
Monday, June 26, 2023
So far, Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ amount to ‘a tempest in a teapot,’ expert says
https://news.northeastern.edu/2022/12/05/twitter-files-elon-musk/
The info dump fueled longstanding right-wing distrust of “big tech” by suggesting a nexus between pre-Musk Twitter and the Democratic Party. But on the left, it elicited a collective yawn. That’s because the files so far reveal little more than how Twitter bungled the response to the Hunter Biden story, airing disagreements between Twitter employees about how the company handled it initially, which was to block the story and prevent users from sharing it, before correcting course.
The ‘Twitter Files’ Is What It Claims to Expose
Specifically, Musk delivered a vast trove of internal Twitter documents to two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, who have long endorsed aspects of the GOP’s indictment of the platform. Taibbi and Weiss proceeded to publish a pair of exposés on Twitter’s inner workings. Dubbed “the Twitter Files,” these reports featured a couple genuinely concerning findings about pre-Musk Twitter’s operations. But they were also saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity. Musk’s commentary on the Twitter Files, meanwhile, proved even more demagogic and deceptive than the exposés themselves.
For these reasons, the Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn — that of social-media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends.
Ex-Twitter officials reject GOP claims of government collusion
"I'm aware of no unlawful collusion with or direction from any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation," James Baker, who served as Twitter's deputy general counsel, told the committee.