David B. Gleason from Chicago, IL, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
ANALYSIS – In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down Affirmative Action at top universities as unconstitutional, the same race-based policies used to achieve ‘diversity’ elsewhere are being scrutinized nationwide, including at the Pentagon.
And now we learn that Joe Biden’s pick to replace Army General Mark Milley as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, himself had racist hiring practices.
That could make him ineligible to be the nation’s top military officer.
Air Force General Charles Q. (CQ) Brown, a man of color, is accused of making “discriminatory comments and potential unlawful impact on military personnel,” according to the American Accountability Foundation (AFF).
The AFF was set up in early 2021 to expose the leftist backgrounds of Biden’s top nominees.
Multiple sources have reported that Brown made statements while chief of staff for the Air Force and during his previous tour as Pacific Air Forces commander suggesting that he hired personnel and promoted them based on race, rather than merit, to force diversity in the Air Force.
“Race-based hiring has no place in the military. Our men and women in uniform deserve to be led on missions by the most qualified and skilled officers and leaders our nation has, who will give them the best chance of success and getting home safely,” said the AFF in a statement.
Considering the accusations against Brown, the AAF filed a complaint with the Air Force Inspector General and requested an official investigation into Brown’s allegedly discriminatory comments and practices.
While serving as the Air Force’s chief of staff and before that as Pacific Air Forces commander, Brown made statements suggesting he selects individuals for certain roles and promotions based on their race to build purposefully diverse organizations, multiple sources show. Brown could be violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) argues, making him ineligible to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The DC added:
If Brown has acted upon his “publicly stated beliefs on what should be official hiring policy of the U.S. Air Force [race-based hiring], it would present a significant likelihood of violating the civil and constitutional rights of military personnel” as well as Department of Defense (DOD) codes of conduct, AAF said.
And records appear to show that Brown did exactly that. Brown’s diversity policies appear to have prioritized bringing on non-white officers and recruits. The Air Force Times reported that 2022, Brown changed the Air Force’s demographic goals for officers to 67% of them being white, down from 80% in 2014.
But things have only gotten worse under Brown. According to a February 2023 Air Force newsletter, the Air Force also recently pledged to track officer promotions based on “race, ethnicity and gender.”
So now the discrimination Brown has implemented isn’t only against white men, its against straight white men as well.
I agree with AFF’s concerns, if these allegations are confirmed they should make ‘CQ Brown ineligible to serve as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the United States Senate should not confirm him to that lofty role.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Elvert Barnes, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
ANALYSIS – In what is again an egregious example of disparate treatment for rioters with different political views, New York City has agreed to pay violent Black Lives Matter (BLM) rioters $13.7 million after being sued over the mass arrests in 2020.
If approved by a judge, it would reportedly be one of the most expensive payouts ever over mass arrests.
Each BLM rioter can receive a payout of nearly $10,000 ($9,950 to be exact) as part of the settlement, whether they were arrested or not if their First Amendment rights were found to have been suppressed or infringed on by police.
The settlement applies to protestors at 18 marches or demonstrations in Brooklyn and Manhattan between May 28 and June 4 of 2020.
Meanwhile, many nonviolent Jan. 6 Capitol rioters are still in jail pending trial after a massive nationwide FBI manhunt. And others are receiving outrageous prison terms.
The message here is – if you are a left-wing rioter in a left-wing city you can expect to be rewarded, but if you are a conservative rioter in the ‘People’s Republic of DC,’ and Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DoJ) oversees prosecutions, you will get fried.
Attorneys from the left-leaning National Lawyers Guild accused the NYPD of violating rioters’ First Amendment rights by being excessively violent and making illegal arrests.
However, the riots in NYC were far more violent, and damaging, and lasted far longer than the few hours-long Capitol riot in DC.
During the two years of litigation, NYC attorneys argued police tactics had been appropriate to the situation and noted that rioters had thrown projectiles at police and torched police cars.
In New York, police arrested just over 2,000 people between May 28, three days after Floyd’s death, and June 7, according to the New York State attorney general’s office.
Thousands of people protested in New York City, some violently. Rioters injured dozens of police officers, damaged dozens of police cars — setting some of them on fire and graffitiing them — and looted or damaged at least 450 businesses.
In one instance, two NYPD officers in Brooklyn were shot and one was stabbed in the neck as they tried to prevent looting during a protest. The mayor placed the city under a curfew for the first week of June, the city’s first curfew in 75 years, but the curfew was frequently violated by protesters.
Overall, at least 10,000 people were arrested across the country during the summer 2020 BLM riots. They caused nearly $2 billion in damages, the largest from riots in U.S. history.
According to court documents, the NYC did not admit fault in the lawsuit, but settled to avoid rehashing the events at trial and “resolve the issues raised in this litigation without further proceedings.”
On a positive note, violent BLM rioters who were arrested for trespassing, property destruction, assaulting police, arson, weapons charges, and perhaps those who blocked police from arresting other rioters, will not be eligible for a payout.
The settlement must still be approved by a judge.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Washington D.C., USA - January 22, 2015; A Pro-Life woman clashes with a group of Pro-Choice demonstrators at the U.S. Supreme Court.
ANALYSIS – Most conservatives understand that one of the left’s major weapons in the war of ideas is manipulating language and using well-researched buzzwords and phrases to change reality and mask their more extreme ideas.
We see it every day with the constant use of ‘gun violence’ rather than shooting or murder committed by a criminal. We see it with ‘global warming’ becoming ‘climate change’ when the facts don’t support the narrative.
We also see it with the insanely deceptive and grotesque ‘gender-affirming care’ rather for genital-mutilating sex-change surgery.
And of course, we see it in spades with abortion, where supporting the unrestricted killing of unborn babies in the womb becomes ‘reproductive health care rights,’ previously known as being ‘pro-choice.’
The new term is far better politically since it appears to somehow be about rights and health, not deception and killing. Plus, ‘pro-choice’ has been thoroughly sullied by its accurate association with being ‘pro-abortion.’
And we can’t have that.
And now, since the Dobbs decision correctly returned the abortion issue to the states where it always belonged, the battle to control the language, and hence the narrative on abortion, is intensifying.
And it just got a lot worse.
The latest words and phrases chosen by the left to describe or refer to abortion fly in the face of fact and science.
But the leftist language warriors are now being reinforced by the power behind the news media – the Associated Press—and its widely used ‘Stylebook.’
The Associated Press recently released a guide for news outlets for reporting on abortion that’s so biased in favor of the procedure, its guidance often runs contrary to medical science. The new guide has the ability to significantly distort how Americans perceive the abortion issue.
The AP’s “Abortion Topical Guide” is part of the widely used “AP Stylebook” that many outlets across the country, including The Daily Signal, use as a guide for everything from grammar to punctuation to best practices for terms and phrasing.
One glaring problem among many? The guide frequently cites the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to back up its guidance. ACOG claims to be the premier professional membership organization of OB-GYNs. But on the issue of abortion—a procedure that most OB-GYNs don’t perform—ACOG is wholly committed to lobbying for extreme abortion policies that don’t reflect its membership’s views.
In typical Orwellian fashion, the leftists at AP cudgel writers into referring to an unborn child’s “heartbeat,” which is detectable via ultrasound from the very early stages of life to the deliberately bland and mostly meaningless term “cardiac activity.”
The Stylebook also inappropriately enters the scientific realm as self-made medical experts when it advises writers not to refer to unborn children as “pain-capable” until after at least 24 weeks.
This, even though the beloved doctors who actually perform surgeries on ‘preemies,’ or premature babies in utero, regularly use anesthesia for those babies under 24 weeks because they feel pain.
The AP’s demonic advice also contradicts the massive, and growing, body of research showing unborn babies can feel pain at just 15 weeks or even earlier.
And most importantly, the Stylebook admonishes writers to never, ever use the accurate but uncomfortable phrase – ‘late-term abortion.’
Polls show a solid majority of Americans are opposed to late-term abortions, so best to religiously (pun intended) avoid the term.
The AP guide misses the mark throughout. Of course, that’s inevitable when the goal is not objective reporting of fact but rather promoting pro-abortion propaganda. Try as the AP might, it’s a fool’s errand to put lipstick on a pig.
I go further by saying AP is part of the left’s far-flung language-distorting media empire intended to manipulate words, in order to manipulate news, in order to manipulate you.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
By Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) - Director Wray Installation Ceremony, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63667603
The election of Donald Trump in November 2016 was, for the entrenched political class, a thunderclap. It was not supposed to happen. The experts, the pollsters, the seasoned operatives had assured the country that Hillary Clinton’s victory was inevitable. Yet by the morning of November 9, the White House was preparing to receive a president unlike any in modern history: a political outsider with no government experience, an instinctive distrust of Washington, and a willingness to discard its conventions. For some in the outgoing administration and the permanent bureaucracy, this was not merely a surprise. It was a crisis to be managed, or better yet, undone.
That undoing began in earnest just four months into Trump’s presidency, when Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, with the approval of FBI Counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap and General Counsel James Baker, authorized a criminal investigation into the sitting president of the United States. This probe did not arise from fresh evidence of presidential misconduct. It rested on the same thin reeds that had underpinned the Russia collusion narrative since mid-2016: opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, laundered through the Steele dossier, and presented as intelligence. It was a case study in how partisan disinformation can metastasize into official action when it finds a willing audience inside the government.
To understand how extraordinary this was, one must appreciate the context. Intelligence reports later declassified in the Durham Annex revealed that, as early as March 2016, the Clinton campaign had hatched a plan to tie Trump to Russian operatives, not as a matter of national security, but as an electoral tactic. These plans were known to senior Obama administration officials, including John Brennan, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, before the election. Yet when Trump won, the machinery they had assembled did not wind down. It shifted purpose: from preventing his election to destabilizing his presidency.
The first casualty in this internal campaign was Michael Flynn, Trump’s National Security Adviser and one of the few senior appointees with both loyalty to Trump and an understanding of the intelligence community’s inner workings. In late January 2017, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama holdover, warned the White House that Flynn had misled them about conversations with the Russian ambassador. The FBI had already interviewed Flynn, in a meeting arranged by Comey that bypassed standard White House protocol. Even Peter Strzok, one of the interviewing agents, admitted they did not believe Flynn had lied. Nevertheless, the incident was used to force Flynn’s resignation on February 13, with Vice President Pence publicly citing dishonesty over sanctions discussions. In hindsight, it is clear this was less about Flynn’s conduct than about removing a man who might have quickly uncovered the flimsiness of the Russia allegations.
Next came Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Trump loyalist but a DOJ outsider with no prior experience in its leadership. Under pressure over his own contacts with the same Russian ambassador, Sessions recused himself from any matters related to the 2016 campaign on March 2. This decision, encouraged by DOJ ethics officials from the Obama era and accepted without challenge by Pence and other advisers, effectively ceded control of any Trump-Russia inquiries to deep state officials and Obama holdovers. It was the opening the FBI needed.
By mid-May, after Trump fired Comey at the recommendation of Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the FBI’s leadership was in open revolt. McCabe, Priestap, and Baker, all veterans of the Obama years, debated whether Trump had acted at Moscow’s behest. They even discussed the 25th Amendment and the idea of Rosenstein surreptitiously recording the president. These were not jokes. On May 16, McCabe authorized a full counterintelligence and criminal investigation into Trump himself, premised on the possibility that he was an agent of a foreign power. This was the first such investigation of a sitting president in US history.
Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]
The evidentiary basis for this move was paper-thin, much of it drawn from the Steele dossier, a work of partisan fiction that its own author was unwilling to verify. Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, was a personal friend of Michael Sussmann, the Clinton campaign attorney who had helped funnel the dossier to the Bureau. Priestap, who signed off on the investigation, had overseen its use in obtaining FISA warrants to surveil Trump associates. They knew the source was tainted and the allegations were fiction. They proceeded anyway.
The day after the investigation formally opened, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as Special Counsel, locking the inquiry beyond Trump’s reach. Mueller’s team, stocked with Democratic donors and Obama DOJ and FBI veterans, inherited the case and its political overtones. For nearly two years, the president governed under a cloud of suspicion, his every move interpreted through the lens of an unfounded allegation.
The impact on Trump’s presidency was profound. Key legislative initiatives stalled. Allies in Congress, warned privately by Pence and others that the investigation was serious, kept their distance. Figures like John McCain, Paul Ryan, and Jeff Flake acted in ways that hampered Trump’s agenda, from blocking Obamacare repeal to threatening his judicial nominations. Inside the executive branch, FBI Director Christopher Wray, another newcomer with no institutional knowledge of the Bureau’s internal politics, declined to purge the officials who had driven the investigation, allowing them to operate until they were forced out by Inspector General findings.
By the time Mueller submitted his report in March 2019, concluding there was no evidence of collusion, the damage was done. Trump’s first term had been defined in large part by a manufactured scandal. The narrative of foreign compromise, though disproven, had justified a Special Counsel, sustained hostile media coverage, and ultimately greased the skids for an unfounded impeachment over Ukraine.
The Durham Annex, unearthed years later, stripped away any lingering doubt about intent. It documented that the Russia collusion story was conceived as a political hit, that it was known to be false by the time it was weaponized in 2017, and that senior intelligence and law enforcement officials chose to advance it rather than expose it. In Madison’s terms, the accumulation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers in the same hands, here, the unelected leadership of the FBI and DOJ, amounted to tyranny.
That Trump survived this onslaught is remarkable. Few presidents, faced with a hostile bureaucracy, disloyal appointees, and a media eager to amplify every leak, could have done so. That the plot failed to remove him does not make it less a coup. It makes it a failed coup, one whose near-success should alarm anyone who values electoral legitimacy.
The lesson is clear. The intelligence and law enforcement apparatus of the United States must never again be allowed to become an instrument of partisan warfare. The use of fabricated opposition research to justify surveillance, investigations, and the effective nullification of an election result is a violation not just of political norms but of the constitutional order. It took years for the facts to emerge. It will take far longer to repair the trust that was lost.
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.
That’s the thing about celebrities, they never seem to recognize when their immense wealth and status have officially removed them from what would be considered a “common man.”
Drew Barrymore, a longstanding name in Hollywood, thanked President Joe Biden for a “great year.”
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)
A Virginia mother charged with lying about her drug use when purchasing a handgun, which her six-year-old son took to school and used to wound a teacher, is asking a federal court for leniency – citing the light sentence given to President Joe Biden’s adult son Hunter for the same crime.
“Deja Taylor, 25…has pleaded guilty to lying about her marijuana use when she applied for a gun purchase. Her 6-year-old son used the 9 mm semi-automatic pistol on Jan. 6 to shoot his elementary school teacher in Newport News, Virginia, in a case that has received massive media coverage,” The Washington Times reports.
Taylor faces as much as two years in federal prison for not reporting her drug use on her gun purchase application, but her sentencing will come weeks after Biden, the wealthy white son of the President, got a sweetheart plea deal to his offense of not reporting his drug use.
While Taylor’s marijuana use is legal under Virginia law, Biden’s crack cocaine was illegal under both Delaware and federal law.
Biden received no jail time for his offense, and will likely have his guilty plea erased from his criminal record after participating in a pretrial diversion program.
Taylor may not be as lucky.
“In our sentencing memo, we will surely raise the inconsistency in the government’s approach to a vulnerable and scared very young mother, who does not have a privileged background and connections,” defense attorney Eugene Rossi told The Washington Times.
“Why does the prodigal son of a president get diversion on the same gun charge — along with the sweetheart deal on the tax crimes?” Rossi told the Times. “The disparity is a bit hard to comprehend — let alone swallow.”
While Taylor’s gun was left unsecured, and used in a school shooting, observers note Biden’s handgun was left discarded in a public trash can near a Delaware school.
Others are noticing the double standard, too.
“Biden’s DOJ is giving Hunter a sweetheart deal for lying on a firearm background check,” tweeted U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN.) “Meanwhile, the same DOJ is sending Deja Taylor to prison for 18-24 months for the exact same offense.”
“What happened to equal justice under the law?,” Blackburn asked
Biden’s DOJ is giving Hunter a sweetheart deal for lying on a firearm background check.
Meanwhile, the same DOJ is sending Deja Taylor to prison for 18-24 months for the exact same offense.
ANALYSIS – No surprise to me. I ran against this disgrace in 2010 in the GOP primary. I highlighted his obscene corruption, but much of the GOP establishment backed him to the hilt.
In the ‘you can’t make this up’ category, the discredited GOP ex-congressman David Rivera has been arrested by federal officials for conspiring to lobby on behalf of America’s Latin American nemesis, socialist Venezuela.
This, despite being the GOP’s South Florida poster boy for ‘anti-communism,’ an image he assiduously cultivated for years to curry favor with the Miami conservative base and deflect from his myriad failings.
When I ran against Rivera in the South Florida 2010 GOP congressional primary as a Tea Party outsider, my motto was ‘the Marine vs. the Machine’ due to Rivera’s lifelong ties to the GOP establishment.
During that race, Rivera, a termed-out state representative, got a massive number of Republican congressional leaders to back him, even though I was beating the drum about his corruption and lack of integrity.
Rivera won that primary, in part because a politically unknown woman, and possibly Democrat-linked spoiler, named Marili Cancio jumped into the race and siphoned off about 12% of the GOP voters I would have gotten.
Rivera then went on to win the congressional seat.
However, his corruption finally caught up with him and he lost his reelection to an equally distasteful Democrat – Joe Garcia.
That was the first time the GOP had lost that seat in 30 years, and Rivera became radioactive to most in the GOP afterward.
Thankfully, Democrat Joe only lasted one term himself.
Scandals have marred Rivera since he represented parts of the Miami metro area in Congress a decade ago.
The eight-count indictment against Rivera and lobbyist Esther Nuhfer chronicles the nefarious duo’s alleged dealings with Venezuela to help revive its state-run oil company.
The investigation stretches back to the start of the Trump administration when Rivera reportedly arranged meetings with an unnamed senator and a congressman as part of a conspiracy to ease tensions between the United States and South America’s socialist holdout. The unsavory politician ultimately hoped to lift sanctions on a regime universally reviled in South Florida.
Rivera began his efforts after signing a $50 million contract. Per Bloomberg, the indictment lays out the reputed method by which he unlawfully enriched himself:
The Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Delcy Rodriguez, directed executives at CITGO, a Texas-based unit of PDVSA, to draw up a consulting contract with Rivera’s company, according to the indictment.
The contract was between Interamerican and PDV USA, which prosecutors allege was used by CITGO to facilitate “special projects” ordered by executives of the state-owned parent company.
Additional charges against Rivera and Nuhfer include conspiracy to commit offense against the US, conspiracy to commit money laundering and engaging in transactions in criminally deprived property. Nuhfer couldn’t immediately be located for comment.
At one point, note prosecutors, Rivera received a $5 million payment from PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company and personal piggy bank for its corrupt socialist leaders, in an account at Gazprom Bank in Russia.
Thankfully Rivera’s illegal pro-Venezuela outreach effort ultimately failed, as Trump in 2019 recognized opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s legitimate leader and imposed stiff oil sanctions on the OPEC nation in a bid to unseat Maduro.
The U.S. Marshals Service said Rivera bailed out of jail Monday afternoon after making an initial appearance in Atlanta federal court.
Even more concerning, though, the Associated Press’ initial report detailed how Rivera attempted to arrange a meeting between a prominent female Trump campaign adviser-turned-White House “counselor” and a pro-Maduro businessman on his jet in Miami on June 27, 2017.
Kellyanne Conaway was in Miami that day to headline a Republican Party fundraiser. At the time, she served the Trump White House as the Senior Counselor to the President.
This wouldn’t surprise me either, as Conway was very close to Rivera, and may have been behind efforts to keep me from entering the Trump administration during his term, at the behest of Rivera.
Trump’s hiring of Conway, who I admired and knew casually from years in conservative circles, was one of the reasons I believed Trump could win and helped convince me to back him.
Sadly, it seems Conway’s ties to slimy Rivera may have slimed her too.
All this should remind us all to be very careful when blindly backing politicians, no matter who they are.
Opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
The former IRS contractor who got a sweetheart plea agreement from the Biden administration after stealing and leaking the private tax information of President Donald Trump, will soon have to answer to Congress.
The House Judiciary Committee reports Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter “requesting that Charles E. Littlejohn, a former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) contractor who leaked tax information belonging to hundreds of thousands of Americans, including President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, appear before the Committee.”
“In February, the IRS informed the Committee that Littlejohn had leaked the private data of more than 400,000 taxpayers—nearly six times higher than the 70,000 figure initially reported by the Biden-Harris IRS,” the Committee reports, noting it “raised concerns related to the Department of Justice’s sweetheart plea deal Littlejohn received, which resulted in a light sentence despite the severity of the data breach.”
Despite pulling off what may be the greatest data theft in IRS history, which the presiding judge called “a threat to our democracy,” and exhibiting little remorse, Biden administration prosecutors allowed Littlejohn to plead guilty to only one minor charge, giving him the lightest possible sentence.
Jordan’s letter reads, in part:
“Since the 118th Congress, the Committee has been conducting oversight into the unprecedented leak of protected taxpayer information by your client, Charles E. Littlejohn. On January 29, 2024, the Department of Justice (DOJ) allowed Mr. Littlejohn, a former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) contractor, to plead guilty to only one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax information for leaking ‘thousands of individuals’ and entities’ tax returns,’ including President Trump’s tax information. Since then, the Committee has obtained information showing that the scope of the leak is much broader than the Biden-Harris Administration led the public to believe—affecting over 400,000 taxpayers. In light of this new information, Mr. Littlejohn’s testimony is critical to the Committee’s oversight efforts and advancement of potential legislative reforms. We therefore respectfully request his testimony.
“In 2017, Mr. Littlejohn applied to work as an IRS contractor with the expressed intention of accessing and disclosing President Trump’s tax returns. Not only did Mr. Littlejohn succeed in obtaining and leaking President Trump’s returns, he also disclosed ‘thousands of Americans’ federal tax returns and other private financial information’ to the New York Times and ProPublica, which together published more than 50 articles relying on the stolen information. Despite the Biden-Garland Justice Department referring to his unauthorized disclosures as ‘unparalleled in the IRS’s history,’ it only charged Mr. Littlejohn with one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax information, which resulted in a five-year prison sentence, three years’ supervised release, and a $5,000 fine. The judge who oversaw Mr. Littlejohn’s sentencing, admitted that she was ‘perplexed’ and ‘troubled’ by the plea agreement.
“After Mr. Littlejohn’s sentencing, the IRS began notifying and assisting affected taxpayers. In May 2024, an IRS spokesman stated, ‘[m]ore than 70,000 people received the initial notice that their information was involved in the breach.’ However, in December 2024, the IRS issued a second wave of notifications to additional taxpayer victims. On February 14, 2025, the IRS disclosed to the Committee that it had ‘mailed notifications to 405,427 taxpayers whose taxpayer information was inappropriately disclosed by Mr. Littlejohn’ and that ’89 [percent] of the[se] taxpayers are business entities.’
“In light of this new disclosure that Mr. Littlejohn leaked hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ information—not just ‘thousands’ as previously suggested—the Biden-Harris Administration’s decision to charge him with just one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax information is even more concerning. The Committee has jurisdiction over criminal law and federal law enforcement pursuant to House Rule X. As such, to develop effective legislation, such as reforms to DOJ procedures governing plea agreements and new statutory limits of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, Mr. Littlejohn’s testimony is necessary.
“Accordingly, we write to request Mr. Littlejohn’s testimony before the Committee on the Judiciary as soon as practicable. Please confirm his appearance before the Committee as soon as possible, but no later than 5:00 p.m. on March 31, 2025. We will also work with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to facilitate his testimony in a timely manner.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – After reportedly imploding earlier Wednesday, Hunter Biden’s sweetheart criminal plea deal then appeared to be ‘back on’ after being revised.
But then the revised deal imploded again when it was blocked by the federal judge overseeing the case.
It now may be on life support.
Prosecutors said in court that Hunter Biden failed to pay between $1.1 million and $1.5 million in taxes when they were due.
Questioning from Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump appointee, during Biden’s hearing, uncovered that the Department of Justice (DoJ) and Biden’s legal team were not on the same page regarding the scope of the deal.
Biden’s team believed it was more sweeping than it was intended.
Hunter Biden had been expected to plead guilty to 2017 and 2018 misdemeanor tax charges Wednesday in a Delaware court, in part it seemed, to avoid jail time on a separate felony gun charge.
Under an earlier agreement with federal prosecutors in Delaware, the First Son has entered a pretrial diversion program for the gun charge, which allows defendants to avoid a conviction or prison time.
Noreika said she had “concerns” about the parties seemingly linking the tax plea agreement to resolving a felony gun charge.
However, the deal was then revised.
The new deal was going to cover Biden’s drug use and tax-related conduct from 2014 to 2019 (not just 2017-2018) but would not cover Biden for any other matters or crimes.
This is critical since the GOP-led House Oversight Committee is currently investigating Biden’s shady foreign business dealings and how Joe Biden is connected to the money that came to Hunter from overseas sources including Ukraine and China.
News of the sweetheart deal in June sparked accusations of favorable treatment for the president’s son from Republicans who have accused the younger Biden of a myriad of crimes and improprieties, including influence-peddling abroad.
Under the revised deal the DoJ could now charge Biden in the future for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) since he lobbied on behalf of foreign governments without registering as a Foreign Agent under FARA.
America First Legal (AFL) is suing the DoJ for allegedly failing to require the president’s son to register for FARA during the Obama administration.
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley told CNN that court proceedings today on Biden’s plea deal shows that the deal was always flawed and that additional charges could be coming.
“It’s very telling that the judge intervened here and said basically, ‘No, I’m not going to approve some sweeping blanket deal,’” the Republican from Missouri said. “I mean, that tells you the court has serious concerns about other potential charges here, and also the scope of the deal, which has seemed outrageous from the beginning.”
He added, “This, I think, signals that they’re still very much as potential for prosecution forward.”
Hawley said that Biden should not receive special treatment, as whistleblowers have alleged. “He should be treated like any other person under the law. That’s my view on him.”
But the judge wasn’t satisfied with the revised deal either. “What if it is unconstitutional?” Judge Noreika asked. “I’m trying to exercise due diligence and consideration to make sure we don’t make a misstep.”
The tax charges could carry a sentence of up to 18 months, but Hunter Biden is unlikely to face prison time because he lacks a criminal history and has accepted responsibility for his actions.
As part of the deal, prosecutorsare recommending probation, but ultimately the judge has the sole authority to decide his punishment.
The hearing ended with Biden pleading not guilty ‘for now’ with the judge asking both sides to file additional briefs explaining the plea deal’s legal structure.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.