In a brutal blow to Hunter Biden, a judge has rejected his sweetheart plea deal. What comes next?
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – From the beginning, conspiracies surrounded the Capitol Riot on January 6, 2021. Stunned conservatives couldn’t believe Republicans caused that mayhem. Some called it a deliberate false flag operation by the feds to entrap innocent Trump supporters and launch a massive witch hunt.
Both last two things did occur.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and media called the afternoon event an attempted coup and later more steadily ‘the insurrection.’
It was neither. But it also wasn’t a well-orchestrated false flag operation. The truth is just as bad but less planned.
I was at the Capitol on Jan 6 as a security contractor for a foreign TV news crew, and I condemned the violence the next day. I wrote that the, at times, violent riot wasn’t a coup, or an insurrection but the violence was criminal behavior, and should be punished.
I also noted that the rioters all appeared to be passionate Trump supporters, and not likely a false flag operation by the feds, or ANTIFA infiltrators.
Since then, I have defended many of the peaceful protesters unfairly caught up in the FBI dragnet and harshly charged for minor nonviolent crimes.
I have also written about the large number of undercover police and federal agents and their informants since identified at the Capitol that day. And I have noted how the Democrats in charge of the House and Senate that day refused National Guard support, as did the Democrat mayor of DC.
At least until it was too late.
Now, former Capitol Hill Police Chief Steven Sund has added his insight into the events. And he claims that it seems as if they wanted something to happen.
Sund resigned from his post shortly after the riots. He had been chief of the Capitol Police since 2019 and had served as a police officer for more than 30 years in total.
Newsmax reported on his untelevised interview with Tucker Carlson taped before Carlson was fired from Fox News:
“Everything appears to be a cover-up,” Sund told Carlson. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist … but when you look at the information and intelligence they had, the military had, it’s all watered down. I’m not getting intelligence, I’m denied any support from National Guard in advance. I’m denied National Guard while we’re under attack, for 71 minutes …”
… “Could there possibly be actually … they kind of wanted something to happen? It’s not a far stretch to begin to think that. It’s sad when you start putting everything together and thinking about the way this played out … what was their end goal?”
Sund told Carlson he believes that Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had intelligence of what was coming on Jan. 6 but failed to communicate it and subsequently covered it up.
“If I was allowed to do my job as the chief we wouldn’t be here; this didn’t have to happen,” he said.
Carlson also said on Russel Brand’s podcast that Sund told him: ‘Oh yeah, that crowd was filled with federal agents.’
This all fits neatly with much of what I have noted previously. But while I blamed Democrat leaders for holding back needed support to defend the Capitol for other political reasons, Sund seems to believe they held it back because they started hoping for a big chaotic show they could then turn into a political circus.
And the chaos ensued, and so did their circus.
Sadly, Donald Trump and some of his supporters fell for the trap.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Expert election prognosticator and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver called on President Biden to immediately resign and let Vice President Kamala Harris carry out the remainder of his term.
Silver’s argument came in response to a Washington Post article about Biden’s recent trip to Brazil that began like this:
MANAUS, Brazil — President Joe Biden was in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, unprotected from mosquitoes, fire ants and loud, squawking macaws. But there was another pest he did manage to avoid: the pack of reporters traveling with him.
For a short speech in front of about two dozen people, the journalists were initially instructed to watch Biden on a flat-screen television placed amid sand and lush trees as the president spoke about 50 feet away, though they were eventually moved closer. As Biden finished his remarks, maracas rattled by a local group prevented him from hearing reporters’ shouted questions about Ukraine.
During a six-day foreign trip to Peru and Brazil that wrapped up Monday, the president rarely spoke in public, answering almost no questions despite repeated efforts to engage him. One television producer took to writing messages on a large pad of paper, holding it up as Biden boarded and departed Air Force One.
The story went on to note that Biden has been conspicuously quiet about the results of the 2024 presidential election, which he “repeatedly called the most important election in history” and “warned would change the country forever if [Donald] Trump prevailed.”
Silver was unamused by Biden’s performance as described by the Post.
“Is there any particular reason to assume Biden is competent to be president right now?” he asked rhetorically on X. “It’s a very difficult job. It’s a dangerous world. Extremely high-stakes decisions in Ukraine. He should resign and let Harris serve out the last 2 months.”
ANALYSIS – Tucker Carlson’s misguided attempt to use cherry-picked moments of the newly released video of Jan. 6 to argue that nothing bad happened at the Capitol that day, is horribly timed and very dumb.
As I wrote the day after I personally observed events at the Capitol that day, January 6 was neither a deadly coup, insurrection nor peaceful guided tours of the Capitol.
It was a mixture of some of those things, none of those things, and everything in between.
And Tucker would have been far more effective, and credible had he used the video to show that the Left’s Jan. 6 narrative was incomplete, distorted, and totally one-sided, rather than trying to say it was totally false.
Because the truth is that Jan 6 was like the story of the blind men and the elephant, each one grasping one part of the animal, like the leg, tail, or trunk, and describing the giant beast as something totally different.
On Jan. 6 what began as a massive peaceful rally of tens of thousands of pro-Trump protesters, soon degraded when smaller elements (a few hundred) of the much larger peaceful crowd broke off and did conduct a violent attack on parts of the Capitol.
Hundreds more just stupidly followed the initial ‘attack mob’ inside.
In the first group, some had military training, used stack formations, and were very organized and intent on forcefully breaching the building.
While none were found with, or used firearms, during the riot, there was violence with sticks, flagpoles, and pepper spray.
I called these violent rioters, thugs, and criminals.
They were similar to the violent BLM rioters who had violently attacked police at the White House in the summer of 2020 or besieged the Portland Federal Courthouse for months.
On Jan. 6 police officers were similarly attacked and beaten, and the Capitol was ultimately breached unlawfully.
Inside, one non-violent protester, Ashley Babbitt, an Air Force security forces veteran, was shot by a Capitol Police Officer. Likely, unjustly.
She was the only person killed during the riot.
All this occurred in the span of just a few hours.
But the Capitol complex is massive, and what was happening violently on one end was not being replicated at other parts of the Capitol.
As much of the Tucker video showed truthfully, in many places and entrances, Capitol Police had allowed protesters inside, in some cases escorted them around.
In other cases, the police simply stood by as the ‘tourist’ protesters milled around and took selfies or acted stupidly.
Still, ever since then, there has been a profound narrative battle pitting those fanatics on the right who said nothing at all happened and the fanatics on the left who claim Jan. 6 was worse than Pearl Harbor or 9/11, and an insurrection that risked the essence of American democracy.
Sadly, neither side is correct, but only the most extreme one-sided ‘insurrection’ narrative was put forward by the left and last Congress’ Democratic-run Jan. 6 committee, and repeated daily by the partisan, anti-Trump media.
The insurrection narrative was pushed by cherry-picked videos and photos of the same short-lived Capitol violence from different views and angles, repeated in a nearly constant loop for the most distorted and dramatic effect possible.
But now Tucker has done the same.
Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger wrote in an internal message to officers that Carlson’s Monday night primetime program “conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video” to incorrectly portray the violent assault as more akin to a peaceful protest. He added that Carlson’s “commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these less tense moments.”
And many Republican leaders agreed.
The timing is also horrible.
As Politico reported:
“It’s definitely stupid to keep talking about this … So what is the purpose of continuing to bring it up unless you’re trying to feed Democrat narratives even further?” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) said in an interview, noting the videos didn’t show “anything we don’t already know.”
“I don’t really have a problem with making it all public. But if your message is then to try and convince people that nothing bad happened, then it’s just gonna make us look silly.”
So how should we view the events of the January 6 riot accurately and fairly?
Probably the best description was provided by Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) when he said he has “a hard time with all of it.”
He added that Jan. 6 “was not a peaceful protest. It was not an insurrection. It was a riot that should have never happened. And a lot of people share the blame for that. The truth is always messier than any narrative.”
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Joshua Steinman, the former senior director for cyber on President Trump’s National Security Council (NSC), has issued a stark warning to the incoming president that demands immediate attention. Steinman, who loyally served from Trump’s first day in office to his last, cautions that mistakes in NSC staffing could spell disaster for the administration’s second term, leading to either ineffectiveness or outright betrayal. His insights form a compelling argument for a complete overhaul of the NSC as the cornerstone of Trump’s efforts to govern effectively.
The NSC, as Steinman explains, is not merely a bureaucratic appendage. It is the quarterback of the White House—the entity tasked with ensuring that the president’s directives are executed seamlessly across the vast machinery of the federal government. “If the president is the owner of the football team, the NSC is the quarterback,” he asserts, underscoring the centrality of this institution in driving the administration’s policy agenda. And yet, Steinman’s concerns suggest that the team surrounding this quarterback may not be up to the task.
Reflecting on Trump’s first term, Steinman identifies a critical error: the decision to retain approximately 50% of the NSC staff from the Obama administration. This hesitation to implement a sweeping purge, according to Steinman, allowed disloyal actors to undermine Trump’s policies. Some of these holdovers allegedly continued to operate under Obama-era guidance until explicitly instructed otherwise. Steinman’s message is clear: “Removing people like this isn’t personal; it’s just prudent.”
The stakes are high. Steinman contrasts Trump’s initial approach with the swift and decisive action taken by President Biden, who executed a comprehensive purge of Trump-aligned NSC staff upon taking office. This move ensured that Biden’s team could implement his agenda without interference from ideological adversaries. Critics labeled Biden’s actions a “purge” and raised concerns about the politicization of traditionally non-partisan roles, but his administration’s determination to align its personnel with its policies proved effective in consolidating its power.
Steinman’s critique does not stop at holdovers. He raises alarms about new hires, questioning their loyalty and expertise. Among those rumored to join Trump’s team is Adam Howard, GOP Staff Director for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), who is set to take the critical role of senior director for intelligence programs. Steinman questions whether Howard’s background equips him to confront potential interference from the intelligence community—a task vital to ensuring Trump’s agenda is not derailed.
The urgency of Steinman’s warning lies in the fundamental truth that personnel is policy. For Trump’s administration to succeed, the NSC must be staffed with individuals who are not only loyal to his vision but also possess the subject-matter expertise to navigate the complexities of their roles. Steinman’s concerns about Anne Neuberger, the Biden-appointed NSC cybersecurity director, exemplify this need. Her alignment with policies on artificial intelligence and tech censorship could undermine Trump’s objectives, should she remain in place.
Trump’s response to these challenges is beginning to take shape. Key appointments to his NSC include:
While these appointments reflect a renewed emphasis on loyalty and alignment, Steinman’s cautionary tale lingers. The success of Trump’s second term hinges on avoiding the missteps of the first. The NSC’s ability to serve as an effective quarterback depends entirely on the quality of its staff. As Steinman aptly puts it, “The Intel Senior Director position is one of the most CRITICAL posts in U.S. Government.”
The broader implications of Steinman’s warning extend beyond Trump’s presidency. The debate over Biden’s NSC purge highlighted the tension between ensuring policy alignment and maintaining non-partisan governance. Critics, including the Heritage Foundation, argued that Biden’s actions undermined the apolitical nature of advisory roles, while supporters contended that loyalty is essential for effective governance. Trump’s administration must navigate this delicate balance, prioritizing mission alignment without descending into the partisanship that critics decry.
As Trump prepares to assume office once more, the lessons of his first term and Biden’s purge are clear: the NSC must be reimagined, restructured, and resolutely loyal to the President’s agenda. Failure to act decisively could jeopardize the very goals Trump has championed—from ending unnecessary conflicts to revitalizing the economy. Steinman’s call to action is both a warning and a roadmap: “Fix the NSC, fix the presidency.”
Sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping independent journalists overcome formidable challenges in today’s media landscape and bring crucial stories to you.
ANALYSIS – During Joe Biden’s two-year term in office, the number of illegal migrants swarming into the U.S. has swelled to its highest number in decades.
Many of these illegals have serious criminal records and Team Biden can’t confirm how many or who they are.
So, what does the administration do?
Rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Joe Biden’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Chris Magnus was forced to resign over the weekend by Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas.
While Magnus, an incompetent leftist ideologue, failed miserably as CPB chief, his firing was purely political, making him a scapegoat for Team Biden’s broader border and immigration disaster.
Analysts believe Magnus was forced to resign to avoid him testifying at future GOP-led House committee hearings.
The real villain here is Mayorkas who really needs to go.
As a Senate-confirmed cabinet official, he has been derelict in his constitutional duties to protect the U.S. homeland.
He needs to resign or be impeached by the GOP House next year.
As Senator Ted Cruz,( R-Tx.), told Fox News Digital:
The Biden administration found their fall guy for the chaos at the border. Responsibility for the border crisis lies with Joe Biden and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and real accountability starts with Mayorkas being impeached. Every moment the border continues to remain open only heightens the present humanitarian and national security crisis.
Other GOP lawmakers echoed Cruz’s remarks. Fox News reported:
“The Biden administration has completely failed to protect our borders, and now it’s trying to find a scapegoat,” Burchett said. “Mayorkas should be the one to resign.”
“When Republicans take over the House, we’re gonna bring some rational thought back to our border security operations,” he continued.Texas Republican Rep. August Pfluger also called on Mayorkas to hit the road, telling Fox News Digital the DHS secretary tried to use Magnus’ departure as a cover-up of his own “failures.”
And Texas congressman Lance Gooden tweeted about Magnus’s resignation: “Accountability would be DHS Secretary Mayorkas joining him.”
Now, GOP lawmakers with the House Homeland Security Committee confirmed that Mayorkas cannot guarantee that no convicted criminals are among the roughly two million border crossers and illegal aliens who have entered the U.S. since Joe Biden took office.
Breitbart News reported:
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) grilled Mayorkas over the roughly 1.4 million border crossers and illegal aliens that have been released into American communities since February 2021, as well as the 600,000 illegal aliens who are known to have successfully crossed the southern border in Fiscal Year 2022.
“Now can you answer definitively … that none of the 600,000 individuals who are now in the United States amongst our communities that got away are gang members or criminals?” Cammack.
“Your question highlights precisely why we have sought to prioritize national security and public safety threats in our Immigration and Customs Enforcement apprehension and removal efforts,” Mayorkas said, evading the question.
Breitbart continued:
Mayorkas also did not provide data on how many of the nearly 30,000 convicted criminal illegal aliens apprehended in Fiscal Year 2022 went on to claim asylum after arriving at the southern border.
Cammack pressed Mayorkas on whether criminal records exist for those released into the U.S. under the Biden administration thus far.
“In Fiscal Year 2022, you have now released 1.4 million into the United States and my question to you now is can you guarantee that none of those people have criminal records?” Cammack said, to which Mayorkas did not answer directly.
This failure to respond by Mayorkas, and failure to account for, and confirm the identity and whereabouts of a large number of criminal illegal aliens in the U.S. under his watch, is cause for impeachment.
As Breitbart noted: “In April, Mayorkas failed to guarantee to lawmakers that none of the illegal aliens on the FBI Terrorism Watch List or No-Fly List, apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border at the time, had been released into American communities.”
For all these reasons, and many more, Mayorkas has failed in his constitutional duties and he should be the first Biden cabinet official to go when the GOP takes over Congress in January.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
You can’t help but smile when you see this…
Watch Amanda explain the controversy below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – ‘Run, Ron, Run.’ – It’s about as official as it can get without a formal filing – Florida’s conservative Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is running for the GOP nomination to be President of the United States.
And he is clearly not afraid of Donald Trump.
With the end of the Florida legislative session now over – after making an exception to allow Florida officeholders to run for President or Vice President without resigning their office – DeSantis seems to have unofficially launched his campaign.
He is expected to formally file within two weeks but is already making waves with his speeches and weekend stops in Iowa, shortly after Trump canceled his planned Iowa stop due to “bad weather.” And even the New York Times took note with a story titled: DeSantis Impresses in Iowa, Showing Up an Absent Trump.
While echoing some of the policies and positions of Trump, DeSantis took some veiled shots at the former president who is leading massively among GOP primary voters, blasting Republicans (aka: Trump) as having been losers.
And that seems to be his initial strategy. Attacking Trump without attacking him directly.
This despite Trump striving to make his own GOP nomination appear inevitable and having launched numerous broadsides directly at DeSantis who he sees as his biggest potential GOP rival.
Trump has called DeSantis disloyal and said that his political career would have been over had Trump not endorsed the governor’s ultimately successful 2018 campaign.
“He was dead as a dog; he was a dead politician. He would have been working perhaps for a law firm or maybe a Pizza Hut, I don’t know,” Trump told reporters aboard his plane enroute to Iowa back in March, reported Politico.
Asked if he regretted endorsing Ron DeSantis for governor in 2018, Trump responded this March: “Yeah maybe, this guy was dead. He was dead as a doornail.”
Whether that is true or not, DeSantis has gone on to be a highly popular and effective governor. He has also won over conservatives with his battles against wokeness and Disney. During his time as governor, Florida has also gone from being a battleground state to one that is solidly Republican.
As Newsmax reported: “We had a lot of those folks in places like Miami who had been Democrats and voted for Democrats and they came on our side – not only voting for me, but now they’re registering as Republicans,” DeSantis said. “So don’t buy this idea that we can’t expand our bases of support.
“Of course, you can do that, he added. “You can’t win big with just Republicans, and we proved that. But here’s the thing: We didn’t do it by trimming our sails. We didn’t comport ourselves to be anything that we’re not. We lead boldly. We lead conservatively, and we delivered results and people responded.”
Trump appears to be having trouble picking an insulting nickname for DeSantis, something that proved effective against previous rivals. He has called him ‘Ron DeSanctimonous,’ but that one doesn’t seem to be sticking.
The former president has also reportedly nixed calling him ‘Meatball Ron,’ as being too crude. Meanwhile, in Iowa, DeSantis continued to reference Trump without naming him. DeSantis told the small, but passionate, crowd:
If we make the 2024 election a referendum on Joe Biden and his failures, and if we provide a positive alternative for the future of this country, Republicans will win across the board. If we do not do that, if we get distracted, if we focus the election on the past or on other side issues, then I think the Democrats are going to beat us again, and I think it will be very difficult to recover from that defeat.
DeSantis added his warning about the current and future state of our nation under Democrat rule:
I think our country is floundering, in part because so many of our institutions have become unmoored from the truth: They’ve been lost in a sea of relativism. And this is important because we’re really at a crossroads as a country.
As bad as things are going right now, if things do not go well for us Republicans in 2024, it’s going to get a whole lot worse. The left in this country is really playing for keeps. They are more aggressive and more strident than at any time in my lifetime.
Amen to that.
Still, even after being found liable for sexual assault and defamation, Trump’s status as the GOP front-runner was amplified Wednesday night during a CNN’s town hall event.
The fireworks are just beginning.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
It’s like these businesses will never learn…go woke, go broke.
The latest company to forge its way into the gender ideology Olympics is sadly the America Girl Doll Company…
Watch Amanda break down the controversy below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – I rarely watch TV news. And I didn’t always agree with Tucker Carlson. Sometimes I strongly disagreed – such as on Russia.
But I often did agree.
And he challenged the left AND the GOP establishment every night on Fox.
He will be missed.
He also challenged the woke leadership at the Pentagon. And for that he should be greatly applauded.
Carlson was never anti-military.
On the contrary, he was opposed to its current emasculation by Joe Biden and his team. Carlson was also opposed to the divisive, destructive, and subversive neo-Marxist ideology being imposed on our troops.
Sadly, the lefty spinmeisters in the media and those same leftist ideologues, partisan hacks, and simply misguided folks at the Department of Defense (DoD) keep trying to paint a different picture.
Politico’s Lara Seligman tries to paint Carlson as anti-military by conflating his criticism of the woke brass with the entire armed forces. In her piece, ‘Good riddance’: Pentagon officials cheer Tucker Carlson’s ouster, she writes:
From maternity flight suits to diversity policies to Ukraine aid, the military was a favorite punching bag for Tucker Carlson. Now that he’s off the air, some Pentagon officials are quietly cheering his departure.
Her flawed journalism is also obvious as she mostly quotes a couple of unnamed (likely Biden Pentagon appointee) sources.
Per her two “DoD officials”:
“We’re a better country without him bagging on our military every night in front of hundreds of thousands of people,” said one senior DoD official, who like others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive topic.
“Good riddance,” said a second DoD official.
Seligman goes on to quote these unnamed sources, writing:
Carlson “made a mockery” of the free press and “repeatedly cherry-picked department policies and used them to destroy DoD as an institution,” said the first senior DoD official.
What nonsense. The leftist ideologies in charge are the ones destroying DoD, not a cable TV talk show host.
Still, she voids most of her own reporting when she admits that most of the American military agreed with Carlson, and it’s the Pentagon leadership that is grossly out of touch:
Carlson’s criticism of Biden-era personnel policies appealed to many of the rank-and-file, which has a large bloc of conservative members. But at the upper levels of the Defense Department, news of Carlson’s firing from Fox News on Monday was met with delight and outright glee in some corners.
Then there is the un-self-aware liberal executive editor of Defense One, Kevin Baron, who never served in the military, who absurdly claimed “Tucker Carlson Helped Turn Americans Against the Military.”He writes: “For all the ways Tucker Carlson left his mark on U.S. politics, few are as startling as helping to turn right-wingers against the troops they once revered.”He also ignorantly called the notoriously independent Carlson a “partisan firebrand” when he criticized GOP establishment politicians almost as much as the left.
Well, I can tell Baron that, as one of those ‘right wingers’ who still reveres the troops – and was once one of them – he is a lefty ideologue.
And sadly, Baron doesn’t realize it.
That makes him a biased, partisan journalist who tries to appear not to be.
Every point he makes is suffused with his anti-Trump rancor and lefty disdain. And many of his arguments are unsupportable, false, or make the opposite case.
Baron writes:
Right-wing scholars and editorial boards interpreted the data to say that Biden’s “woke” policies were to blame, noting that half of respondents said it was a contributing factor. But that ignores the partisan cross-section: 68% of Trump voters were more upset about wokeness, while just 44% of Biden voters were. That’s the Carlson effect.
Well, that gives a cable TV talk show host with 3 million viewers a lot of sway in a country of 330 million and a dozen liberal media outlets that reach many tens of million.
But Baron best undermines his own case most when he concludes:
The most recent Reagan Forum poll found that 80% of Biden voters and 83% of Trump voters said they still have either “a great deal” or “some” confidence in the U.S. military. That shows that even his audience knows the difference between the performance art of partisanship and the apolitical service to one’s country.
Yes, Mr. Baron, we absolutely understand. Sadly, you clearly don’t.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
