Tag: corruption

Conflict of Interest? WashPost Owner Jeff Bezos Gives Obama Foundation $100 Million

It looks like The Washington Post may run into a conflict of interest problem the next time it fawns over former President Barack Obama’s allegedly “chiseled pectorals.”

The Obama Foundation released a statement saying that leftist Post owner and mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos was donating a whopping $100 million “in honor of Congressman John Lewis” (D-GA), who recently passed away. The Foundation called the donation “the largest individual contribution received to date.” The purpose of the grant includes “help[ing] expand the scope of programming that reaches emerging leaders in the United States and around the world.”

But this could present an issue for the newspaper Bezos owns, which has a sordid record of cheerleading for Obama. The most glaring example of the outlet’s bias was in December of 2008, when The Post was giddy for how “[t]he sun glinted off [Obama’s] chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.”

Keep reading

The Corrupt Media Did Not Fall For The Russia Collusion Hoax. They Were Part Of It

Soon after Special Counsel John Durham indicted Igor Danchenko, the “Primary Sub-Source” of the Steele dossier, on five counts of lying to the FBI, the press paused to feign a moment of public introspection. The corrupt media’s attempt to frame their failings as mere confirmation bias, however, holds no truer than the Russia-collusion hoax they peddled for five years.

The proof of this reality is seen in the prostitute sex tapes: the non-existent “golden showers” one and the verifiable, but ignored, Hunter Biden videos.

The first step of what appeared, at least momentarily, to be the kick-off of a mea culpa parade came earlier this month when the Washington Post amended large segments of two articles covering the Russia-collusion storyline, one from March 2017 and the second from February 2019.

Both articles had named Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-American businessman, as the individual identified as “Source D” in the Steele dossier. While Millian had long denied speaking with Danchenko or having any role in the dossier, it was only after Durham charged the Russian-born Danchenko and former Brookings Institute employee with lying about receiving a telephone call from Millian that the Post and other media outlets removed the claims.

Then, last week, The New York Times ran a “guest essay” by professor of journalism and former Columbia Journalism School dean Bill Grueskin, headlined, “How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong?”

Keep reading

Black Man Who Shot at Cops Acquitted for Acting in Self Defense on Same Day as Rittenhouse, Media Silent

Last Friday, the internet and streets erupted in both anger and joy after a jury of his peers found Kyle Rittenhouse ‘not guilty’ on all charges. The jury determined that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense and therefore was justified in killing two people and injuring another.

To those who watched that trial, this was the logical conclusion yet people are still hell bent on calling him a hero or a villain, when in reality, he is neither. Acting in self-defense is a natural choice. It is acting in defense of others that is heroic.

While the corporate media vultures picked the Rittenhouse trial clean of every single divisive fleck they could to keep society at each other’s throats, they conveniently ignored another trial in which that man actually did act in a heroic manner. Andrew Coffee IV attempted to save he and his girlfriend’s lives by firing at multiple home invaders who crashed into his bedroom window in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately, Coffee was unsuccessful at saving his girlfriend, Alteria Woods, and the home invaders shot her ten times. The details of this case, on the surface, were cut and dry, and Coffee should have never gone to trial. However, because those armed invaders who killed his girlfriend wore badges, Coffee went to jail and was charged with Woods’ murder. He was also charged with the attempted murder of the three officers who smashed in his window that night and killed his girlfriend

This horrific incident unfolded in 2017, yet unlike Rittenhouse, it took Coffee four years to get his trial and on the same day Rittenhouse was found not guilty of murder, so was Coffee.

As the media obsessed over Rittenhouse, jurors found Coffee not guilty on charges of felony murder and attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, on Friday. They determined he acted in self-defense when firing at deputies during that SWAT raid in 2017.

There were no protests, no riots, and no fights outside the courthouse while the verdict was read inside. Instead, Coffee hugged his family and the media remained mum.

Keep reading

Hunter Biden’s private equity firm helped Chinese conglomerate buy American-owned cobalt mine in $3.8 billion deal: Purchase helped China company gain world’s largest deposit of precious metal used to make batteries for electric vehicles

An investment firm founded by Hunter Biden assisted a Chinese company in purchasing one of the world’s richest cobalt mines from an American company for $3.8 billion – helping the conglomerate gain a massive share of the key metal used to make electric car batteries.

The president’s son was one of three Americans who joined Chinese partners in establishing the Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Company, or BHR, in 2013.

The Americans controlled 30 percent of the company and made successful investments that culminated in aiding China Molybdenum purchase the Tenke Fungurume cobalt mine in the Congo from the American company Freeport-McMoRan in 2016, the New York Times reported. 

The news comes after President Joe Biden had warned that China could use its dominance of mined cobalt to disrupt America’s development of electric vehicles.

It also adds to the scrutiny Biden and his father have faced for his dealings with Chines and Ukrainian companies while Joe was vice president and later running for president. 

Keep reading

The Rittenhouse Verdict Is Only Shocking If You Followed The Last Year Of Terrible Reporting

Kyle Rittenhouse was found innocent on all six felony charges today, already causing a great exploding of heads in the pundit-o-sphere. Unrest wouldn’t be surprising. How could it be otherwise? Colleagues in national media spent over a year telling the country the 18-year-old was not just guilty, but a moral monster whose acquittal would be an in-your-face affirmation of systemic white supremacy.

It used to bother me that journalists were portrayed in pop culture as sniveling, amoral weenies. Take William Atherton’s iconic portrayal in Die Hard of “Thornburg,” the TV-news creep who gasps, “Tell me you got that!” with orgasmic awe when an explosion rocks the Nakatomi building. I got that — I’d seen that face on reporters.

But risking the life of hero John McClane’s wife Holly by putting her name on TV, and getting the info by threatening the family nanny Paulina with an immigration raid? We’re bad, I thought, but not that bad. I got that it was a movie, but my father was a local TV man, and that one stung a bit.

MSNBC Thursday pulled a Thornburg in real life. Police stopped a man named James Morrison who was apparently following a jury bus, and said he was acting at the direction of a New York-based MSNBC producer named Irene Byon. Even if all you’re after is a post-verdict interview, if a jury gets the slightest whiff that the press is searching out their names and addresses, that’s clear intimidation. People will worry about the safety of their spouses and children as they’re deliberating. Not that it matters to anyone but the defense, prosecution, judge, jury, and taxpayers, but you’re also putting the trial at risk. I’ve covered plenty of celebrity trials, from Michael Jackson to the Enron defendants, and know the identifying-jurors practice isn’t unheard of. However, in a powder-keg case like this, it’s bonkers to play it any way but straight.

We’ve seen Die Hard-level indifference to social consequence from the beginning of this case. The context of the Rittenhouse shootings involved a summer of protests that began after the police killing of George Floyd, and continued in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake. We saw demonstrations of all types last summer, ranging from solemn candlelight vigils and thousands of protesters laying peacefully on their backs across bridges, to the burning of storefronts and “hundreds” of car thieves stealing “nearly 80” cars from a dealership in San Leandro, California. When the population is on edge, and people are amped and ready to lash out, that puts an even greater onus on media figures to get things right.

In a tinderbox situation like this one, it was reckless beyond belief for analysts to tell audiences Rittenhouse was a murderer when many if not most of them had a good idea he would be acquitted. But that’s exactly what most outlets did.

This is separate and apart from the question of whether or not you like Kyle Rittenhouse, or agree with his politics, or if, as a parent, you would want your own teenager carrying an AR-15 into a chaotic protest zone. The huge media error here was of the “Walls are closing in” variety, except the context was far worse. The “Walls are closing in” stupidity raised vague expectations among #Resistance audiences that at some unfixed point in time, Donald Trump would be pushed from office by scandal. In this case, the same people who poured out onto the streets last summer were told over and over that Rittenhouse was guilty, setting the stage for shock and horror if and when the “wrong” verdict came back.

Media figures got every element of this story wrong. As documented by TK contributor Matt Orfalea, the Young Turks alone spat out all sorts of misconceptions with shocking inattention: that Rittenhouse was “shooting randomly at people” after falling down, that he’d fired first, that there was no evidence that anyone had raised a gun at him, among many, many other errors. Belatedly, the show conceded some of these problems. However, they had access to the correct information in most of these cases on the night of the shootings.

Keep reading