I Still Do Not See The Burisma Moneys?
I Still Do Not See The Burisma Moneys?
Or, 'Son of Russiagate'
I have been out of the loop on most political matters for some time now. Boredom takes the blame. When I checked in this weekend to see what progress the Republican congressional investigation into the Biden family business has made, I was not expecting much, anyway, when I found none since last I looked. Republicans did after all decide to waste legislative time recently over a leadership dispute, which I had heard something about but also paid little mind. Now the country is once again being funded by continuing resolution after continuing resolution.
This eternal emergency is a 21st century phenomenon that came into Congress with tea parties. Trumpism has assimilated much of that outsider-energy, making it too easy to conflate the two phenomena as a single counternarrative. Take Trump out of the Republican Party and the tea stains will remain. In the meantime, I am still waiting for the big, bad Burisma monies to appear. I was promised the big, bad Burisma monies, allegedly ten millions of dollars of such monies, in addition to the “salary” that Hunter “earned” by serving on the company board. I still do not see the big, bad Burisma monies. Republicans are still failing to show them to me. I am starting to wonder if they even exist at all.
I am beginning to think they might just be more Russian disinformation, instead. I am starting to worry that the American nation has been hoodwinked a second time with yet another stupid conspiracy theory, wearing the clothes of truth, that was cooked up in the dark forest of eastern European politics and Russian influence and Rudy Giuliani’s state of perpetual financial bankruptcy.
Christopher Steele’s infamous dossier should never have seen the light of day as it did, being raw HUMINT (human intelligence, i.e. conversational reporting) rather than objective facts. HUMINT must be cross-referenced and correlated with other streams of information to be useful instead of misleading. It is far too easy to insert disinformation into real information and rile people up forever over nonsense. For example:
The whole point of Russian disinformation campaigns was to distract Americans into an endless maze of partial-truth details. Just provide the scare, and we can do the rest ourselves. We censor ourselves on social media with innovative quasi-government apparatuses. We allow censorship of news outlets to stifle stories about laptops, because democracy cannot be trusted to sniff out a nothingburger, so we must instead create an eternal what-if burger that festers uneaten in a dark corner of the mind.
Disempowerment is the point. Attacking free societies is a matter of making them feel unfree. Putin wanted Americans to turn on one another — check; he wanted Americans paranoid about his power — check; he wanted Americans to do most of the work themselves — mission accomplished.
Ripped from the pages of a Robert Ludlum novel, it is difficult to believe, perhaps, that this inhumane psychology experiment took place in the United States of America. “We did things I wish we had not done,” Annie Jacobsen’s S-4 source tells her. “We performed medical experiments on handicapped children and prisoners.” And: “People were killed.” How much of this is real, and how much is false, cannot be safely determined, for the word of a MIB is worthless.
[…] “Within the UFO community it was assumed that the CIA, the National Security Agency and others were tools in the cover-up of the Truth, but the Bennewitz affair suggested that the opposite might be the case, that these agencies were in fact responsible for much of the UFO mythology,” Pilkington writes.
The Burisma big moneys are beginning to seem like yet another ‘pee tape,’ a detail too good to be true that is supposed to stimulate endless rumor-mongering. I am happy to be proven wrong. However, all that Republican inquiries have managed to prove using bank statements and other financial receipts is that Biden family business monies were fungible.
While this contradicts Joe Biden’s public statements about that very topic, it does not convict him of a crime. It does not remove him from office. George Santos was elected to Congress just a year ago and is already facing expulsion for “fraudulently exploit(ing) every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.” Any big, bad Biden Burisma moneys should have appeared already in that same timeframe, frankly. Time to find them is running out while Republicans figure out what they actually want.
Washington insiders use their power and influence to profit both in and out of office. It has always been a form of legal grift. As established in lawsuits against the Bidens, investing in the family business did not buy influence, or outcomes, only access. Nevertheless, if Joe “loaned” his son $5 million, and then Hunter “repaid” said “loan” with a stacks of the big bad Burisma moneys, that is a national security scandal that will remove him from office.
If Joe “loaned” his son $500,000 and Hunter “repaid” said “loan” with his “salary” from Burisma, on the other hand, it is just the usual sleaze that every voter hates. It is just politics, anymore, and no one is interested in politics.
Americans are exhausted by politics. Americans are so disinterested in political news these days that they are tuning out the news altogether, which is precisely the political technology that Vladimir Putin perfected in his rise to dictatorship. Ahem.
My view is that Donald Trump is unlikely to make it to next November. Catching up with his trial news, I see no improvement in his position. One judge in Colorado notwithstanding, Trump will be quite occupied by his trials, plural, between now and 5 March, when Colorado Republicans vote on a nominee. So much can happen between now and next November. Perhaps the Republican base will nominate Trump again, anyway, and perhaps he might win, but to this writer he seems more likely to be the only person in America capable of re-electing Joe Biden.
A full review of the Republican field is beyond the scope of this post. However, a do-over of 2024 is clearly unpopular with Americans. They intuit that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election by a laptop any more than Trump won the 2016 election by a Russian Facebook page. Only the partisans of these personalities really want to relitigate everything. Everyone else would like a pardon from being forced to think about it all, all over again, please.
Imagine an exhausted, battered American voter asked to repeat the previous exercise, but in a news environment that they loathe, that is filled with half-baked information and disinformation that leads away from knowledge, towards oblivion, a la Putin’s rise to unchallenged autocracy. This is poisonous to democracy. It is fertile ground for dictatorship and tyranny and dangerous ideology and all of the bad things. Actual fascism, maybe even. A downward spiral. Who wants that?
Which brings us to the institution most reponsible for American counterintelligence. Documents obtained by Public “suggest that the FBI’s Security Division has knowingly retaliated against at least one whistleblower and is improperly using security clearance investigations to single out others,” Alex Gutentag reports.
Veterans, Covid skeptics, religious agents, and conservatives have all told the House Judiciary Committee that they were targeted for purges and punishments on a partisan basis. The FBI, committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) says, has engaged in anti-Trump bias and anti-Republican bias.
Yet there is a countervailing narrative, one that Jordan does not wish to consider, according to the whistleblower in question.
Johnathan Buma, the FBI agent who identified Rudy Giuliani as an agent of foreign influence enamating from the since-contested Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, and then suffered retribution through reassignment, was subect to an FBI raid last week.
According to Business Insider, a full “squad of federal agents in tactical gear executed a search warrant on Monday” at Buma’s home, seizing “nine laptops, three smartwatches, six tablets, two phones, and one desktop computer” used by his entire family. “At the time of the raid, Buma was on medical leave from the bureau, Horton added; he had already turned in his gun, badge, bureau car and bureau phone at an appointment with his supervisor earlier on Monday,” BI reports. Emphasis mine:
[Scott] Horton, Buma's attorney, told BI that the Monday raid at Buma's home in Orange County, California, was retaliation for Buma's actions as a whistleblower. "They deployed the level of personnel that would be customary for a major mafia figure for a single active-duty FBI agent suspected of having cooperated with a congressional investigation," Horton said. "That is his offense. This continues to raise grave concerns about how the bureau's counter-intelligence activities targeting the Russian intelligence services are undermined by political shenanigans on the part of senior bureau management."
The Buma raid raises larger concerns about the bureau's treatment of whistleblowers more generally, Horton added: "Under federal law, whistleblowers who cooperate with Congress and who file whistleblower complaints are strictly protected against retaliation. Senior management of the Bureau are signaling that they believe they are not bound by this law."
Let that sink in. Senior FBI officials are allegedly prioritizing the protection of Donald Trump’s close ally Rudy Giuliani over the laws of the United States or American national security, or even their purported political crusade.
Of all the individuals claiming political persecution by the FBI, the agent exonerating Joe Biden is the only one suffering this level of payback for speaking out. One would expect Democrats to talk more about him than they do.
Jim Jordan does not want to speak of him at all, either, because he is inconvenient to the project of activating propaganda tales about big stacks of bad Burisma moneys and Joe Biden and Ukraine and NATO that prove Trump was somehow right about everything.
As always, the patriots are the ones being punished for their good deeds and objective neutrality has no political protector. If you want tyranny, this is a great way to get there. We are well along the way. Doing great, in fact.