National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony S. Fauci. Photo Credit: Fogarty International Center from Bethesda, MD, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
In the wake of revelations that the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci may have knowingly lied to Congress in sworn testimony, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is asking the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation.
Paul has asked U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Matthew Graves to open an investigation into testimony Fauci made to the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) on May 11, 2021, in which Fauci denied funding research at viral laboratory in China where the COVID-19 virus reportedly originated.
“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci said under oath in May.
But a month later a June 14, 2023, Government Accountability Office report concluded the Wuhan Institute of Virology did receieve NIH funding.
There are concerns the COVID-19 virus “may have been genetically engineered because gain-of-function research was taking place in Wuhan before the pandemic,” Paul reports.
Now Paul wants to determine if Fauci’s statements were illegal.
“I warned Dr. Fauci of the criminal implications of lying to Congress and offered him an opportunity to recant his previous statement,” Paul wrote in a letter to Graves. “Dr. Fauci’s testimony is inconsistent with facts that have since come to light.”
“Before Congress, Dr. Fauci denied funding gain-of-function research, to the press he claims to have a dispassionate view on the lab leak hypothesis, and in private he acknowledges gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to his colleagues. His own colleagues have acknowledged Dr. Fauci’s inconsistency. A congressional hearing, however, is not the place for a public servant to play political games – especially when the health and well-being of American citizens is on the line,” Paul writes.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 it is a federal crime to make “any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation” as part of “any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.”
The penalty for an offense includes criminal fines and imprisonment of up to five years.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk. It was first published in American Liberty News.
Ted Eytan from Washington, DC, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
ANALYSIS – Two Proud Boys leaders have been sentenced to more than a decade each in jail after being convicted of the rarely used ‘seditious conspiracy’ charge for storming the Capitol.
They tried to overturn President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, which they considered fraudulent.
These sentences are much less than the three decades of jail time proposed by prosecutors but still very long prison terms for a few hours of rioting.
And yes, I understand that the rioting was at the U.S. Capitol and that the certification of the Electoral College vote was in process. I also understand these two guys and the two others convicted on this same charge were intimately involved in organizing what became violent chaos that day.
I was there, at the Capitol, as an observer with a TV camera crew. And I denounced the violence the next day. It was outrageous.
I believe any violent rioter who attacked police or media, or anyone else, on Jan. 6 should be put in jail – as should all the BLM rioters who earlier caused $2 billion in damages throughout the country and injured 2,000 cops months earlier.
But a decade or two behind bars for ‘conspiracy’?
Biggs and Rehl are the first Proud Boys convicted of the Civil War-era seditious conspiracy charge to be sentenced for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
The sentences kicked off a series of hearings scheduled for this week and next, where punishment will be meted out against the former chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio (who was not in D.C. on Jan. 6 but was unbelievably arrested earlier for burning a BLM banner!), and two other members of the group.
All were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other crimes at a landmark conspiracy trial this spring. But was what they did really as bad as the Biden Justice Department tries to portray?
Seditious conspiracy is a broad statute that concerns attempts to overthrow the government, levy war against it or prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law. It also can be applied in cases where suspects seize any government property and carries up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Partly because seditious conspiracy allegations carry so much political weight, prosecutors have generally been hesitant to bring such charges in the past. “Seditious conspiracy charges are rarely used in American jurisprudence,” said Jeffrey Ian Ross, a criminologist and expert on political crime at the University of Baltimore. Prosecutors can be wary of issuing such charges, even in cases that may fall under its broad statute, he added.
In the only similar case in the 20th century, federal prosecutors secured a seditious conspiracy conviction against Puerto Rican nationalists who stormed the Capitol building in 1954.
These four armed Puerto Rican independence militants entered the House floor and fired dozens of bullets around the chamber, wounding five legislators.
The four shooters and co-conspirators were convicted of seditious conspiracy and spent over two decades in jail until Jimmy Carter commuted their sentence in 1979.
In that case, however, the perpetrators had firearms and used them to try to kill Congressmen. That’s a pretty big difference.
The last successfully prosecuted seditious conspiracy was in the mid-1990s, when authorities charged Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine Islamist co-conspirators for plotting to bomb the United Nations, the FBI building, and several other landmarks around New York City.
Again, this was very serious and involved planning mass murder and terrorism.
There is little or no evidence that any Jan. 6 rioters planned any offensive violence.
To date, of those charged in relation to Jan. 6, former Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes holds the record with an 18-year sentence, after he was convicted of seditious conspiracy earlier this year.
Even Rhodes, who is not believed to have actually stormed the building, is alleged to have plotted to bring weapons to the area and coordinate militia movements.
In the weeks before the insurrection, Rhodes allegedly purchased tens of thousands of dollars worth of weapons and began communicating to other Oath Keepers in an encrypted group chat. “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” he messaged days after the presidential election. One Oath Keeper admitted as part of a plea deal last year that he brought an M4 rifle to a Comfort Inn hotel near the Capitol, while Rhodes and others allegedly discussed “quick reaction force” teams that could move into Washington DC with firearms. Once inside the Capitol, prosecutors state in their indictment that one group of Oath Keepers moved in a military “stack” formation and went in search of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
And at first glance, this does seem serious.
But Rhodes claims that despite earlier texts about possible ‘civil war,’ Oath Keepers who entered the Capitol went “totally off mission” and that he was only there to prevent his militia members from getting into trouble.
He has also stated that the armed ‘reaction force’ in Virginia was there to respond if armed leftist antifa thugs attacked pro-Trump protestors.
In the largest manhunt in FBI history, more than 1,100 people have been arrested on charges related to the Capitol assault. Of those, 597 defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences. About 366 of them have been given jail time.
The vast majority of these Jan. 6 defendants, though, accepted plea deals for minor, nonviolent offenses such as trespassing or obstructing an official function. Many of them still got jail sentences totally out of proportion to their alleged crimes.
And these four got the worst of it.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk. It was first published in American Liberty News.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Michael J. McCord provide testimony at a Senate Armed Services Committee budget hearing, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., March 28, 2023. (DoD photo by Chad J. McNeeley)
ANALYSIS – ‘Gold Star’ families of U.S. troops killed in the August 2021 Abbey Gate bombing at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan, are blasting Team Biden excuses over the disastrous retreat. Saturday marked the two-year anniversary of the terrorist attack during Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from the country.
At least 183 people were killed in the attack, including the 13 U.S. service members (12 Marines and a sailor).
Shamefully, Biden allowed the Taliban to retake the country almost 20 years to the day of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Washington, DC, and New York City.
AND HERE, TWO YEARS AFTER THE AFGHAN COLLAPSE, WE STILL DON’T HAVE ANSWERS, AND NO ONE HAS BEEN HELD ACCOUNTABLE.
As I wrote about earlier, senior Biden defense officials spent the days before and after the deadly 2021 attack in Kabul obsessing on getting Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to sign off on their Climate Change plan rather than focus on the chaos and death in Afghanistan.
Now, several of these Gold Star families spoke at a House Foreign Affairs Committee roundtable where they expressed their anger at the Biden administration, including Chairman of the Chiefs Mark Milley, who they blame, in part, for the bombing that killed 13 service members.
As the hearing was about to commence, Milley released a statement in which he said the U.S. owes Gold Star families “everything.”
“We owe them transparency, we owe them honesty, we owe them accountability. We owe them the truth about what happened to their loved ones,” Milley said.
But the families didn’t appear impressed. Instead, they were angry about the “excuses” and misinformation they received.
Fox News reported on their justified anger and venting. Kelly Barnett, the mother of Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Taylor Hoover, said “I don’t want to hear lies, I don’t want to hear excuses from Joe Biden, from the administration.”
Hoover’s father, Darin Hoover, called on top Pentagon brass to resign.
He poignantly noted: “Today is the date, two years ago, that we received our kids home at Dover. Two years ago today, where we were disrespected with stories of Biden’s son and him looking at his watch. And today, here we sit as their families, begging you two years later, to find these answers.”
Christy Shamblin, mother-in-law of Marine Corps Sergeant Nicole Gee, who was pictured prominently with an Afghan baby in her arms prior to her death, asked why credible warnings were ignored in the days leading up to the attack.
Some even accused the Pentagon of giving them ‘made-up stories’ about their loved ones in the aftermath of the attack.
…[in a Fox interview] Cheryl Rex, whose son, Lance Corporal Dylan Merola, was killed in the Kabul airport attack in 2021 reacted to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley saying that he believes military briefers gave all the information to the families of those killed in the bombing all the information they could by stating that the briefing on her son was completely inaccurate…
…[When Rex was asked] “Do you believe that all the information was there, or do you agree with other families that it wasn’t about the information, it was about the warnings that were ignored?”
Rex answered, “Me personally, he did not — the brief report was not correct. They changed my son’s location a couple of times. They were trying to accommodate his wounds that were not even in the right spots of his body according to his autopsy report. He did not — the brief report is nothing [like] what we were actually told… I feel it was made-up stories that they were trying to cover up the wounds.”
These Gold Star families deserve answers and accountability. And so do the American people.
Has the left finally gone too far with its extreme ideology? Check out what Amanda Head had to say about musician Carlos Santana’s latest comments below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
President Joe Biden hugs his family during the 59th Presidential Inauguration ceremony in Washington, Jan. 20, 2021. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took the oath of office on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. (DOD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Carlos M. Vazquez II)
ANALYSIS – Where there’s smoke there’s fire. And there is a lot of smoke surrounding Joe and Hunter Biden. It is increasingly clear that Joe Biden has repeatedly lied about his involvement in, and knowledge of, his son Hunter’s overseas influence peddling businesses.
And with Biden’s Department of Justice (DoJ) and FBI dragging their feet with documents requested by congressional investigators, an official impeachment inquiry may be the only way to get to the truth.
And that official inquiry may be coming very soon.
Republicans could open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden over ties to his son Hunter’s shady and unethical business entanglements when Congress reconvenes on September 12.
In the final presidential debate of the 2020 U.S. election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joseph Biden, moderator Kristen Welker asked Biden: “there have been questions about the work your son has done in China and for a Ukrainian energy company when you were vice president; in retrospect, was anything about those relationships inappropriate or unethical?”
“Nothing was unethical. My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China,” Biden replied.
Biden also said he never discussed business with his son.
Well, to put it in Biden terms, that was all a bunch of malarkey.
Now, nearly three years later, Hunter has rebutted Joe Biden’s assertions directly. In court testimony in late June, Hunter acknowledged that he had been paid substantial sums in China – the first official confirmation that this was the case.
This direct contradiction creates a major problem for the White House, and Republicans insist there’s a lot more to find out.
“A lot of the things the president said about his family’s shady business dealings, we’re proving every day that they’re not true,” Republican James Comer, Chair of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, said.
An impeachment inquiry is the next logical step to find out what is true.
The Epoch Times (ET) reported: “House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said that initiating an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden would be a ‘natural step forward.’” This, following unresolved questions from the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s investigations into the Biden family’s business dealings.
The speaker said on Monday that the impeachment inquiry could start soon. McCarthy added that an impeachment inquiry would provide Congress “the apex of legal power to get all the information they need” to investigate whether President Biden misused his office to assist family businesses.
ET continued:
McCarthy said on Monday that the inquiry was needed to overcome stonewalling of congressional investigators looking for transparency about the Biden family’s business records following testimony from former Hunter Biden associate Devon Archer that President Biden met with son Hunter Biden’s business partners during the time he was vice president, as well as concerns raised by whistleblowers at the IRS regarding Hunter Biden’s tax records.
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee has so far subpoenaed six different banks, receiving thousands of bank records of businesses and individuals connected to Joe Biden’s family members.
Those records showed that more than $20 million in payments from foreign sources have been made to the president’s relatives, including Hunter Biden, and their business associates while Mr. Biden was acting as U.S. vice president from 2009 to 2017.
Romanian, Chinese, and Russian nationals were among those making payments to the Biden family and their associates. The records also revealed that the funds were funneled through a network of at least 20 shell companies before being transferred to Biden family members.
An inquiry doesn’t mean the House will impeach Biden. But it does give Republicans far more legal power to force reluctant Biden DoJ bureaucrats and others to come forward with the truth.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk.
The New Headquarters Building (NHB) of the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A nonprofit legal watchdog has filed a federal lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency, seeking documents and records over an election-year government effort to cover up reporting seen as damaging to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
In particular, the group seeks information on the agency’s role in a letter signed by 51 intelligence officials that falsely claimed the Russian government “planted” evidence of criminal activity on a laptop owned by Biden’s middle-aged son Hunter.
Judicial Watch filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CIA for all “communications of the spy agency’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) regarding an October 19, 2020, email request to review and ‘clear’ a letter signed by 51 former intelligence community officials characterizing the Hunter Biden laptop story as having ‘all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign,’” the group announced.
“The Deep State CIA, it seems, engaged in election interference and a political operation against the American people to help Joe Biden and hurt Trump,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And now the CIA is ignoring FOIA law to cover up its role in the scandal, censoring and suppressing the Hunter Biden/Joe Biden laptop story just before the presidential election.”
In October 2020, the New York Post broke a bombshell story revealing that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he abandoned at a Delaware computer shop, contained photographs of Hunter Biden engaged in drug use and using prostitutes, as well as emails describing what appear to be shady foreign business deals.
Fearing the story could damage Biden’s presidential campaign, social media companies attempted to suppress the sharing of the Post’s reporting.
The Biden campaign also reached out to intelligence officials, including the CIA and FBI, seeking their help in falsely discrediting the story.
“In a May 10, 2023, report the House Judiciary Committee revealed that on October 19, 2020, three days before the second presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democrat candidate Joe Biden, then-Acting CIA Director Michael Morell sent the PCRB the finalized letter for review, calling it a ‘rush job,’ and quickly secured its approval,” Judicial Watch reports.
Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the CIA failed to respond to a May 11, 2023, FOIA request for:
Records and communications of the Prepublication Classification Review Board, Central Intelligence Agency, including emails, email chains, email attachments, text messages, cables, voice recordings, correspondence, statements, letters, memoranda, reports, presentations, notes, or other form of record, regarding an October 19, 2020, email request to review and “clear” a letter involving the Hunter Biden laptop story potentially having Russian involvement or being a Russian disinformation plot.
An investigation by the House Judiciary Committee and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence found that the CIA, or a CIA employee, may have helped the Biden campaign find signers for the false letter.
One former CIA employee, David Cariens, reveals that while speaking with the PCRB in October 2020 to review materials for his memoir, a CIA employee “asked” him to sign the false letter.
“When the person in charge of reviewing the book called to say it was approved with no changes, I was told about the draft letter,” said Cariens.
“The person asked me if I would be willing to sign. . . . After hearing the letter’s contents, and the qualifiers in it such as, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement . . .’ I agreed to sign,” Cariens said.
“If accurate, this information raises fundamental concerns about the role of the CIA in helping to falsely discredit allegations about the Biden family in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election,” Judicial Watch notes.
Another former CIA officer, Marc Polymeropoulos, criticized the CIA’s involvement in his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in the following exchange:
Q. Does what [Former CIA official David Cariens] described there, that interaction with the [Prepublication Classification Review Board], sound like a quid pro quo to you?
A. I can’t comment on this. This is—to me, this is something that the [Prepublication Classification Review Board] in my experience would never engage in something like that. They are just straightforward back and forth in terms of approval. The idea they would have a comment on any other thing that they were working on, that to me is not even close to what I’ve experienced with them.
Q. Does that concern you?
A. If it’s true, it would concern me, for sure. But I just—I have a hard time believing that occurred. If it did, that’s incredibly unprofessional.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk. It first appeared in American Liberty News.
Former President Donald Trump is right: There’s no reason he should sign a GOP loyalty oath in order to participate in the candidates’ debates.
Such oaths, which the Republican National Committee employed in the 2016 presidential primary – only to see the last remaining candidates, including Trump, abandon it – aren’t just signs of a party’s weakness; they are also profoundly silly and even un-American.
Yes, we swear plenty of legally enforceable oaths – in court cases, for example, or declarations on tax forms and other legal documents. But oaths binding candidates to support someone who they’ve campaigned against, throwing elbows, mud and other rhetorical barbs at them for months to convince voters the guy was a bum?
I’ll defer to what Sen. Ted Cruzsaid of such an oath back in the 2016 presidential primary:
Cruz has dodged the question of whether the pledge still holds by insisting he will be the nominee. Though on Friday, in an apparent reference to Trump, Cruz said, “I don’t make a habit out of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my family.”
We all know that Cruz eventually did support Trump’s candidacy and became one of his biggest defenders in the Senate (which was amusing).
But the oath? Nah. The 2016 primary should have been instructive to party leaders that such commitments are transactional at best and unenforceable in fact. Which brings us to the state parties.
They have been long-time players in loyalty oaths, often attempting to bind voters to the party’s eventual nominees. While such pledges are even sillier and utterly unenforceable, that hasn’t stopped new ones from cropping up this year. Consider the case of Florida‘s pledge:
Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida GOP, said in an email that the loyalty pledge is an effort to “ensure maximum unity” headed into the 2024 general election.
“The days of outlier party grifters – such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – using Republican Party resources to secure a title and then weaponize that title against our own team must end,” Ziegler said, referring to two former House members, who are among Trump’s most vocal GOP critics.
“Contested primaries are part of the process,” he said, “but we must always remember that the Democrats are the true threat to the America we love and we must be unified to defeat every single one of them.”
The true threat to America is noxious oaths that bind us to men rather than pledges or oaths that bind individuals to uphold the law or tell the truth.
You know, like the only oath that should ever matter for a presidential candidate: the one the Constitution requires:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Every other partisan oath is legally dubious, intellectually suspect and, in the end, not worth the paper it’s printed on.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk. It first appeared in American Liberty News.
Vivek Ramaswamy speaking with attendees at the 2022 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona.
ANALYSIS- Who is this skinny guy with the funny-sounding name? (That was his opening line at the debate). Vivek Ramaswamy wasn’t supposed to be at the center of the first Republican presidential candidate debate in Milwaukee.
Ron DeSantis was supposed to be the viable GOP alternative to Donald Trump. A two-term governor of the third most populous state in the union, DeSantis, a Navy veteran who served in Iraq, is as conservative as they come.
And he has a proven track record of fighting the left in Florida – and winning.
But despite his solid bona fides and resume, DeSantis has a personality problem. He just doesn’t exude charm or confidence, and that’s hurting him – a lot.
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy the 38-year-old Trump-defending, Cincinnati-born, biotech billionaire (worth at least $950 million), son of Pakistani immigrants, kind of stole the show at the debate.
According to former FBI agent and body language expert, Joe Navarro: “[Ramaswamy] consistently looked the most comfortable on stage.”
He was also the most openly and unabashedly pro-Trump. He was the first candidate to raise their hand when asked who would support the former President as the party nominee even if he is convicted on felony charges that he’s facing.
He has also promised to pardon Trump if elected. But he went even farther than that.
“President Trump, I believe, was the best president of the 21st century,” Ramaswamy said in a clip from the debate Trump posted on Truth Social.
And Trump loved it.
“This answer gave Vivek Ramaswamy a big WIN in the debate because of a thing called TRUTH. Thank you, Vivek!”
The ever-smiling political newbie Ramaswamy, who seemed to be having a blast on stage, was also the target of many of his GOP rivals.
Maybe it was Ramaswamy’s consistent and confounding defense of All Things Trump. Maybe it was his smooth talk and culture-war acumen. Maybe it was just the fact that Ramaswamy frankly does not care how things were done before and might just have enough self-made money to go the distance.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie snarled that he had “had enough already tonight of a guy who sounds like ChatGPT,” an A.I. battery. He then dismissed Ramaswamy as someone on the same level as a political figure universally loathed in the GOP. “The last person in one of these debates… who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What is a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama. And I am afraid we are dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the stage tonight,” Christie said.
But the quick witted Ramaswamy’s riposte to Christie was a zinger: “Give me a hug like you did to Obama, and you’ll help elect me just like you did to Obama. Give me the damn hug, brother.”
Ramaswamy was referring to the 2012 incident when Christie was accused of “hugging” Obama during his visit in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy which hit days before the 2012 presidential election.
It’s a claim that Christie has been denying since then, saying: “I didn’t hug him.”
Photos at the time seem to back up Christie, but the zinger still worked.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN under Trump, and ex-South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, who is of Indian descent, hit Ramaswamy too: “You have no foreign policy experience, and it shows.”
I would agree with that assessment and believe he has made a few deeply flawed important national security statements – including on Ukraine and Israel.
But he is super smart and can learn quickly.
Then Vice President Mike Pence took a Christie-like jab at Ramaswamy, attacking the very same quality that originally helped raise Trump in the GOP base – that he is not a politician.
“Now it’s not the time for on-the-job training,” retorted Pence. “We don’t need to bring in a rookie. We don’t need to bring in people with no experience.”
AS TIME noted: “Attacks during debates are the norm but this was different. Ramaswamy’s competitors really don’t like him. Not even a little.”
However, there is one important GOP rival who seems to like Ramaswamy – Donald Trump. And that could be all that matters.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
