Despite suspending negotiations with Sweden, Turkey now says it is ready to approve Finland’s bid to join NATO, an approval likely to be formally announced Friday when Finnish President Sauli Niinisto travels to Istanbul to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

On Wednesday Erdogan had responded positively to reporters’ questions over whether Turkish parliament stands ready to ratify Finland’s membership after the Niinisto meeting. Erdogan responded: “God willing, if it is for the best.” He also mentioned keeping “our promise”.

BREAKING — Erdogan says Turkey will honour its pledge on Finland’s NATO bid after meeting the Finnish president on Friday pic.twitter.com/uZ1oC1pM8Q

— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) March 15, 2023

“Whatever the process is, the process will function. We will do our part. We will keep our promise. We will meet with the president on Friday and fulfill the promise we made,” Erdogan said.

Perhaps more interesting was the Kremlin’s somewhat softer than expected reaction (given the clear behind-the-scenes positive relations and cooperation between Moscow and Ankara despite the Ukraine war), which said Thursday that Russia is not a threat to Finland.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov sought to stress, “We have many times expressed regret over Finland and Sweden’s move toward membership and said many times that Russia does not pose a threat to these countries.”

“We do not have any dispute with these countries… They have never posed any threat to us and, logically, we did not threaten them,” Peskov added.

Finland meanwhile is building a 200km fence along its border with Russia to boost security, also after reporting that Russian men fled into Sweden by the droves in order to escape conscription. The fence will reportedly be 10 feet high and topped with barbed wire.

Sweden’s membership bid is expected to continue to stall, after deteriorating relations with Turkey in the wake of the Quran-burning incident by a far-right activist. Turkey has also demanded Swedish authorities crackdown on Kurdish political groups and operatives while alleging that Stockholm has hosted “terrorists” on its soil.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

A defiant Giorgia Meloni offered a staunch defense of her government’s handling of the migrant crisis in the Chamber of Deputies this week…

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told political opponents she will not bow to the political pressure exerted by powerful elites in favor of open borders.

Speaking during Question Time in the Chamber of Deputies, Meloni responded to questions related to her government’s handling of the ever-increasing migratory pressure in the Mediterranean following government data published this week that revealed more than 20,000 people have now reached the country so far this year.

“As long as there are departures on boats in bad condition, navigating in bad weather conditions, there will be loss of life,” she told parliamentary colleagues.

“We need to invest in legal routes, and that is exactly the job the government is doing. Our conscience is clear. I hope that whoever attacks the government but does not say a word about smugglers can say the same,” she added.

She offered a staunch defense of the country’s coastguard, which came under considerable scrutiny from Italy’s left-wing press in the aftermath of the migrant boat tragedy in the Ionian Sea, which cost several dozen lives.

The Italian premier expressed her amazement that “for political ends, we end up questioning the honor and the work of people who risk their lives every day to save human lives and the honor of Italy.”

On the wider migratory issue gripping the nation, Meloni highlighted that “for several months we have been witnessing a migratory pressure that has few precedents toward Europe and Italy,” and despite calls from humanitarian lobbyists and political opponents, she “has no intention of bowing to the many powerful pressures of those who would like a vision without national borders.”

She reiterated her desire to “firmly combat illegal traffickers and manage immigration in a regular way” through government decree and subsequent legislation. However, she warned that Italy cannot be expected to handle the crisis alone and called for “a framework of responsibility that must also involve the other European states.”

The conservative administration in Rome has been busy tackling the issue facing Italy and wider Europe since its electoral success in September, with Meloni recently introducing legislation to pass tougher sentences on convicted people smugglers. Those found guilty of the offense could soon face up to 30 years in prison should their negligent actions or failure to act result in the death of vulnerable migrants.

Meloni also issued several government decrees that she aims to pass to stifle the operations of humanitarian search-and-rescue vessels operating in the Mediterranean. The decrees, which have caused outrage among the Italian left and European NGOs, call on vessels operating in the area to return to land immediately after a rescue, rather than remaining at sea and effectively becoming a magnet for other prospective migrants encouraged to attempt the perilous journey.

This perspective was supported by a recent report by Italy’s intelligence services, which claimed the presence of NGO vessels in the Mediterranean is fueling the migrant crisis.

The report accused NGOs of providing “a logistical advantage for the criminal organizations that manage migrant trafficking, allowing them to adapt their modus operandi according to the possibility of reducing the quality of the vessels used, correspondingly increasing illicit profits, and exposing the people on board to a more concrete risk of shipwreck.”

Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClear Wire,

At the same time that Department of Justice officials were using spying and corruption statutes to aggressively pursue Donald Trump’s allies based on what turned out to be rumor and innuendo, they declined to use those same laws to investigate evidence of wrongdoing involving Biden family members and one of their corrupt Chinese business partners, DOJ documents and federal court records reveal.  

In 2016-2017, the evidence shows, the FBI raided the offices and intercepted the communications of Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, a Chinese national agents suspected of espionage even as he was negotiating business deals with former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and brother James. 

DOJ later used information obtained from the searches and wiretaps – which included conversations with the current President’s son and brother – to convict Ho of bribery and money laundering, as part of a separate corruption case involving United Nations officials. But it declined to tap into its trove of evidence – including “over 100,000 emails” – to explore the connections between Ho and the Bidens, who received millions of dollars from Ho and a Chinese intelligence front and discussed sharing office space. 

At Ho’s 2018 trial, prosecutors hid Hunter’s connection to Ho, redacting his name from court exhibits (see sidebar) while describing Ho as “the person who flies around the world paying bribes to advance the interest of the oil company [CEFC China Energy],” according to hearing transcripts.

A federal database shows the Bidens failed to register as foreign agents while engaged in activities on behalf of CEFC, a state-owned entity suspected of being a front for Chinese intelligence. Federal anti-spying laws require anyone acting as a lobbyist for a foreign power to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). 

The DOJ did not prosecute either Biden family member for potential violations of FARA for representing the interests of the Chinese. 

This stands in stark contrast to the DOJ’s aggressive pursuit of alleged FARA violations involving no fewer than six Trump campaign officials. In August of 2016, shortly after receiving a tip that a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had allegedly been told that the Russians might have dirt on Hillary Clinton, the bureau opened FARA investigations into Papadopoulos and three other Trump associates with no clear ties to Papadopoulos: national security adviser Michael Flynn; campaign manager Paul Manafort; and campaign adviser Carter Page. The FBI subsequently investigated Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates; and Trump’s Mideast adviser Walid Phares under the same statute. 

As RCI has previously reported, the FBI used FARA as the basis for a wide-ranging probe that included tailing them, staking out their homes, digging through their trash, and using confidential sources to secretly record them. Only one of the six was convicted for FARA-related violations, and none was charged with any espionage or conspiracy crimes involving Russia.

“It’s 100% a double standard, and it’s absolutely corrupt to the core,” former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker told RCI. “And meanwhile, [current FBI Director] Chris Wray fiddles.”

Other veterans of the bureau say the Obama and Biden administrations have politicized and weaponized FARA.

“Starting in 2016, the Obama-Biden administration used FARA and the criminal justice system as tools to attack and eliminate the opposition,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello, adding that many of the same officials are “back in charge and making sure those tools won’t be turned on themselves.”

An FBI spokeswoman said the agency had no comment on why it did not apply the foreign lobbying law equally. The Justice Department did not return requests for comment.

Ho and Hunter: A Lucrative Relationship  

Court records and other documents show that Hunter Biden met with Ho’s boss Ye Jianming in February 2017 in Miami, where the CEFC chief offered him up to $30 million for “introductions alone,” according to emails. Ye – who had connections to both China’s Communist Party in China and its armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army – sealed the deal with a lucrative gift to Hunter: a 3.16-carat diamond worth an estimated $80,000. (Hunter never returned the large gem.)

Not long after their private dinner, CEFC began wiring millions of dollars from China to pass-through companies set up by Hunter Biden. Over the next 14 months, Hunter and Jimmy Biden (as the latter is known to family and friends) ultimately received almost $6 million from CEFC entities, according to congressional investigators, including $1 million from Ho. At the time, the FBI was tracking Ho’s and CEFC’s “bank and wire transfer records,” according to DOJ records, which indicates agents were aware of the China-based payments to the Bidens.

As Hunter was meeting Ye that February, DOJ records show, the FBI renewed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting Ho. Former FBI officials say agents had a clear window into how the Chinese were attempting to cultivate the Bidens.

When Hunter formally structured the CEFC deal in May 2017, text messages found on his abandoned laptop reveal, he was worried about running afoul of two federal laws: the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – which Ho was convicted of violating – and FARA. 

“We don’t want to have to register as foreign agents,” Hunter texted another partner in the deal, and suggested they set up a U.S. shell company towork around it. 

In the end, Hunter never registered with the Justice Department, according to a search of the FARA database. Nor did uncle Jimmy. They also did not report their activities for CEFC or any of the almost $6 million in wire payments they received, as required by law.

The texts indicate Hunter was familiar with the requirements of the law. Violations carry a maximum punishment of five years in prison. 

Hunter and his attorney did not respond to messages seeking comment. Attempts to reach James Biden were unsuccessful.

Also that May, the uncle sent his nephew a list of “key domestic contacts” they could exploit to advance the interests of their Chinese partners. Then-California Sen. Kamala Harris and then-California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom were among the powerful Democrats listed.

China has sought to influence powerful officials, particularly to gain access to U.S. energy markets, which are heavily regulated. CEFC is the capitalist arm of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” to spread China’s influence around the world while gobbling up oil and gas rights.

In an August 2017 email to another Ye lieutenant, Hunter guaranteed his family would follow through on the introductions as long as the money kept flowing: “The Bidens are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman [Ye] wants from this partnership.”

And the China-based funds flowed and flowed into Biden bank accounts. The CEFC contract guaranteed Hunter $150,000 a month, with another $65,000 a month for Jimmy Biden. The vast majority of Americans do not make $150,000 in a year. 

The payments, earmarked as “consulting fees,” raised so many red flags at Wells Fargo and other banks that processed the funds that they notified the Treasury Department they had concerns about possible money laundering and other financial crimes. Treasury, in turn, generated some 150 Suspicious Activity Reports related to the financial transactions.

The Biden administration has refused to turn over the Treasury reports to Congress, despite repeated requests for them. Congressional investigatorsare trying to determine if any of the “large wire transfers” enriched the president, either directly or through gifts-in-kind.

Early on, Joe Biden appeared from emails to be cut in on a future CEFC deal, which is at odds with his repeated denials about being involved in – or even knowing anything about – his son’s business dealings.

In a May 2017 meeting at a Beverly Hills hotel, Biden discussed the CEFC venture with Hunter’s business associate Tony Bobulinski, according to Bobulinski, who said they spoke for more than an hour. An email that same month described the “big guy” getting a 10% cut. Bobulinski has confirmed Joe Biden was the “big guy.” An October 2017 email, moreover, identifies the former vice president as a participant in a call about CEFC’s plans to purchase U.S. natural gas. 

‘Take Whatever Money You Can Take’

It’s not clear what the Chinese got for all their money, which didn’t appear to correspond with any actual billing for consulting work.

At one point a CEFC aide simply told Hunter in a laptop email: “[T]ake whatever money you can take. Take as much as possible … to spend for your own benefit.” The Bidens did virtually no “legitimate” work for CEFC, according to congressional  investigators, who question whether CEFC sought out Hunter as part of anintelligence-gathering operation aimed at his father. 

Hunter appeared to know he was accepting tainted money that might compromise national security. In an audio recording found on his laptop, he described his Chinese partner Ho as “the fucking spy chief of China.”

In November 2017, two FBI agents arrested Ho at JFK International Airport in New York.

After seizing his Huawei cell phone and iPad from his luggage, law enforcement records show, they charged him with attempting to bribe former U.N. officials and African government officials with wire payments and even boxes of cash to secure lucrative oil rights in African countries. 

Ho’s first call from jail was to James Biden, law enforcement records show. The call was made less than 10 minutes after agents read Ho his Miranda rights.

The Bidens’ Chinese benefactor-turned-inmate had hoped James and his nephew would use their political clout to spring him. Hunter quickly put in some calls to the FBI on his behalf, according to an email exchange he had that day with New York defense attorney Edward Kim, who represented Ho throughout his trial.

A retainer agreement found on Hunter’s laptop shows that Ho had paid Hunter $1 million for “Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation,” even though Hunter is not licensed to practice law in New York. Kim was Ho’s real attorney, not Biden. The Bidens had some powerful FBI friends, including former FBI Director Louis Freeh (who, records show, got a seat on the Beau Biden Foundation board after giving Joe Biden’s grandchildren $100,000). But they weren’t able to help Ho, who stayed locked behind bars at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan.

Agents subsequently raided the D.C.-area office of Ho, located about 10 minutes from Hunter Biden’s own office, which also has not been previously reported.

However, agents never searched Biden’s office, to which his Chinese partners had key access, and prosecutors never indicted Biden – despite evidently knowing the president’s son failed to register as a foreign agent representing the interests of the Chinese government agents in Washington in exchange for several million dollars.

The DOJ records reveal the FBI seized a massive trove of CEFC evidence, including “more than 100,000” emails, from searches of Ho’s phone, computers and offices in Manhattan and Arlington, Va., including emails citing Hunter Biden. No fewer than five of Ho’s email accounts –  both business and personal – were targeted for FISA collection, according to the DOJ records reviewed by RCI.

FISA surveillance is sweeping, and former FBI officials say it would have included phone conversations between Ho and CEFC and Hunter Biden – as well as his uncle, who was also a partner in the joint venture with the Chinese and also communicated with Ho.

“FISAs include everything,” Swecker said, “so it definitely included his emails and texts [with the Bidens].”

He said the bureau could have used the evidence to investigate the Bidens at the time, but backed off. He added that even though the FBI maintains the FISA-collected material in a classified database, he doubts investigators will use it now to go after the Bidens.

“FISA material cannot be used in a criminal proceeding unless you get a special court order,” Swecker said. “I suspect the FBI would not even try to do that now given their hands-off conduct on this case in the past.”

Even if Wray were to launch a probe now, it might be too late. Most federal felonies have a five-year statute of limitation.

Swecker, who served as a prosecutor before joining the FBI, said FARA violation cases against the Bidens would have been a slam dunk. He noted that CEFC was a foreign principal as defined by the FARA statute. And he said the Bidens’ consulting work for CEFC benefitted the Chinese government, making them potential agents of that government. He added that Ho and his CEFC bosses were no doubt targeting future presidential candidate Joe Biden, while Hunter and Jimmy Biden were peddling influence with the Chinese to generate millions for the Biden family.

“It’s strange how there was no curiosity [at Justice] whatsoever about foreign influence on a potential president of the United States, especially from this country’s greatest threat – China,” Swecker said.

Stranger still is that DOJ prosecutors knew the Bidens’ partner was a dangerous Chinese agent with “powerful” military and political ties, including to the leadership of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

In court filings, federal prosecutors noted Ho previously served as a Chinese government minister where he helped Hong Kong transition from British to Chinese state rule. They introduced recordings from prison, translated from Chinese, where Ho can be overheard directing Chinese allies to ask “the upper level” of the CCCP to “get involved” in his case.

“He has powerful connections in mainland China,” then-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a nine-page memo arguing for his continued detention. “It is difficult to overstate how well-connected Ho is.”

While the defense portrayed the portly, bespectacled Ho as a harmless academic running a “think tank” promoting international economic development, the China Energy Fund Committee, prosecutors accused Ho of not only doling out bribes but trafficking arms, including grenade launchers and anti-tank missiles.

After serving out his term, Ho was immediately deported back to China. 

Charlie McGonigal

One explanation for the FBI’s and DOJ’s lack of interest in prosecuting the Bidens in the Ho case may be the role played by former FBI official Charles “Charlie” McGonigal.

FBI sources say McGonigal oversaw the initial espionage probe of Ho, including the FISA coverage of his communications, as head of the FBI’s counterintelligence wing of the New York field office, where the investigation was opened.

McGonigal was recently arrested for allegedly taking bribes from an Albanian-American connected to CEFC, according to court records. He allegedly received $225,000 in cash from former Albanian intelligence official-turned-New Jersey businessman Agron Neza. Neza introduced McGonigal to Dorian Ducka, who worked as an adviser to CEFC and was trying to secure oil-drilling licenses in Albania for the Chinese. Ducka was close to CEFC chairman Ye, who dropped off the expensive diamond “gift” for Hunter Biden at his Miami hotel room. Ducka appears in emails found on Hunter’s laptop discussing CEFC business prospects.

Prosecutors say McGonigal first met with Neza in August 2017 – the same month the Bidens were ramping up their deal with CEFC. The nextmonth he met with Ducka. During this time,  McGonigal was overseeing the CEFC-Ho counterespionage case.

In an interview, former FBI counterintelligence attorney Mark Wauck said McGonigal may have pulled punches in the counterespionage probe of the Bidens and their Chinese bagmen because he himself was potentially compromised by the Chinese.

“Keeping the PRC angle in mind is important, once you realize this guy was for sale,” Wauck told RCI, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

It’s not immediately known if McGonigal was one of the FBI agents Hunter reached out to in 2017 after Ho called from jail pleading for help from his Biden payees. But the two men may have had a personal connection through their daughters.

According to emails stored on Hunter’s laptop, McGonigal’s wife Pamela and Hunter both received dozens of messages related to private lacrosse clinics in 2014 and 2015, when McGonigal was working out of the FBI’s Baltimore field office. Their daughters played at lacrosse training facilities in the Maryland-D.C. area.

McGonigal was a protege of former FBI director James Comey, who signed off on FISA spy warrants targeting Trump’s presidential campaign and was directly involved in the Russiagate investigation of the former president. In a May 2017 national security forum, McGonigal sang the praises of his erstwhile boss, who had just been summarily dismissed by Trump.

“Director Comey was probably one of the most loved leaders that we’ve had,” McGonigal said. “I think many of us who were nominated for leadership positions by him will forever hold him in esteem.”

McGonigal worked on national security cases with top DOJ official David Laufman, an Obama appointee based in Washington who made the decisions in 2017 to pursue Trump and his associates over possible FARA violations, while leaving the Bidens untouched. An Obama donor, Laufman stepped down as the chief of Justice’s National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section in February 2018.

The feds also had evidence of possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act from the many suspicious financial transactions between the Chinese and the Bidens. But investigators focused instead on Chinese attempts to corrupt former African officials and their families – even thoughbribing the family of an American vice president constituted a potentially far bigger scandal.

Swecker noted that counterespionage officials at the FBI and DOJ gathered far more evidence concerning the Bidens’ troubling connections to China than they ever did concerning Trump and his advisers’ alleged ties to Russia. In fact, much of the foundation for alleged Trump-Russia“collusion” turned out to be fabricated by two FBI informants who also happened to work for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

In the same 2016-2017 period the FBI had Ho under FISA surveillance, it was secretly monitoring former Trump campaign adviser Page as an alleged Russian agent through a series of FISA warrants – half of which were later invalidated by the spy court. The FISAs were based on false rumors from political opposition research contained in a dossier commissioned by the Clinton campaign.

Unlike Ho, Page was never accused of criminal wrongdoing or convicted of a crime.

Subpoenaing Hunter and Jimmy Biden 

Another Trump-tied counterespionage target in the FBI’s Russiagate crusade was retired Lt. Gen. Flynn, who served in the White House asTrump’s national security adviser before resigning less than a month after taking office as a result of what he called a politically motivated vendetta by the FBI and DOJ. In 2016, the FBI opened an investigation of Flynn based on possible FARA violations. Though the case was later dropped, prosecutors charged him with making false statements. DOJ eventually had to dismiss those charges, as well.

This month Flynn filed a $50 million lawsuit claiming “malicious prosecution” by Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, and his counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, along with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his lead prosecutor Brandon Van Grack, an Obama donor.

The 51-page complaint filed in federal court in Tampa claims their goal was to sabotage Trump and prevent Flynn from blowing the whistle on the FBI’s illegitimately predicated Russiagate probe as Trump’s national security adviser, where he would have had access to intelligence across theagencies. Then-Vice President Biden is named in the scheme.

In a phone interview, Flynn told RealClearInvestigations the specter of his exposing the FBI’s and DOJ’s cover-up of the Bidens’ Chinese connection was “another reason for getting me out of the way.”

As former Defense Intelligence Agency director, he said he posed a direct threat to corrupt actors in the intelligence community: “There was never a national security adviser with my type of background in that key role.”

In their probe of Biden foreign influence-peddling, congressional investigators are zeroing in on the CEFC connection.

Last month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer sent letters to Hunter Biden and his uncle Jimmy seeking all of their communications with Ho and other CEFC principals.

After Hunter and his legal team missed the Feb. 22 deadline to turn over the documents, Comer threatened to issue subpoenas to compel them to comply with the order. Now he says he will give Hunter’s camp more time to respond, so if his committee has to subpoena the documents, it will have a better chance of winning in court by showing a “good-faith effort” to obtain them through cooperation.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, a senior Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has launched a parallel investigation of the Bidens’ dealings with CEFC. In letters to DOJ, he’s complained about the uneven enforcement of the FARA statute when it comes to the Biden family. He said both Hunter and his uncle should have registered as foreign agents of the China-backed energy conglomerate.

“Hunter and James Biden, based on family name and political influence, were agents of CEFC,” he said in a statement, “as both had planned roles with CEFC which would ultimately benefit the communist Chinese government.”

Grassley argued that CEFC intended to alter U.S. policy and public opinion through the Bidens, and the Chinese government would have been the principal beneficiary of those actions.

“The [FARA] law must be followed and enforced without regard to party, power or position,” Grassley spokesman Taylor Foy asserted in an interview.

*  *  *

Paul Sperry is an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. He is also a longtime media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Sperry was previously the Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, and his work has appeared in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Houston Chronicle, among other major publications.

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who is among the country’s most well-known and influential political thinkers, has shocked the establishment by coming out with a blistering attack on Australia’s AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal with the United States and the United Kingdom. He blasted it as the “worst international decision” by a Labor government since the conscription order of World War I. 

He said in written statement on the occasion of addressing the National Press Club on Wednesday that the submarine deal is fundamentally about “US strategic hegemony in Asia” and that Australia has now unwisely hitched its wagon to Washington. Keating wrote in the rare critique that “China has committed, in the eyes of the United States, the great sin of internationalism. And what is that sin? To develop an economy as big as the United States.”

“The Americans will never condone or accept a state as large as them. That’s what China presents. They would have preferred that [China] – 20 per cent of humanity – remained in poverty forever. But the fact that China is now an industrial economy larger than the United States … it is not in the playbook.”

That’s when he concluded that ultimately, “This is what [Aukus] is about, the maintenance of the US strategic hegemony in Asia.”

In reference to the deal announced and confirmed by President Joe Biden on Monday in San Diego while standing beside his Australian and British counterparts, Keating wrote, “For $360 billion, we’re going to get eight submarines. It must be the worst deal in all history.”

He took direct aim at the current Australian PM and other top officials, writing the following: 

“This week, Anthony Albanese screwed into place the last shackle in the long chain the United States has laid out to contain China.”

“No mealy-mouthed talk of ‘stabilisation’ in our China relationship or resort to softer or polite language will disguise from the Chinese the extent and intent of our commitment to United States’s strategic hegemony in East Asia with all its deadly portents.”

“History will be the judge of this project in the end. But I want my name clearly recorded among those who say it is a mistake. Who believes that, despite its enormous cost, it does not offer a solution to the challenge of great power competition in the region or to the security of the Australian people and its continent.”

Australians who don’t want a war with China are still unclear about how to respond to this deluge of mass media war propaganda our country is being smashed with, and Keating showed exactly how to respond. He provided a solid model for us all.https://t.co/noXxKehvpB

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 16, 2023

Keating emphasized that Australian sovereignty must comes first, but Washington is aiming to become the “primary strategic power in Asia” despite having “no land in the metropolitan zone of Asia” given that it’s some 10,000km away.

English-language media in some instances was quick to suggest he’s playing into Chinese and Russian propaganda while not dealing with his actual arguments. Anthony Albanese also said the former PM has “diminished” himself. “It is unfortunate that Mr Keating chose such a very strong personal statement against people. I don’t think that that does anything other than diminish him, frankly,” the prime minister said. “We’ll continue to do what we need to do to defend our nation,” he added, but without addressing how the government hopes to pay for the massive decades-long nuclear submarine program.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that Joe Biden made the decision to blow up Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines because he saw being a war president as giving him a better chance at re-election.

Last month, Hersh published a report asserting that the pipelines were destroyed by the US as part of a covert operation.

According to Hersh’s sources, the explosives were planted in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise and were detonated three months later with a remote signal sent by a sonar buoy.

One source told Hersh that the plotters knew the covert operation was an “act of war,” with some in the CIA and State Department warning, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”

Last week, the New York Times reported that a “pro-Ukrainian group” had sabotaged the pipelines, using a team with as few as six people involved in the mission, contradicting previous assumptions that only a state would have had the resources to carry out the operation.

According to Hersh, referring to Biden, “He did it. He did it, I’m telling you, he did it,” adding, “The Biden game is to wait it out and never say yes.”

The journalist claimed that Biden wanted to escalate the conflict in order to position himself as a war president.

“I think Biden also saw beating up Russia as a ticket. Jack Kennedy is a classic example – presidents always did well politically in wars,” he said.

Hersh claimed that Biden made the decision in January 2022 to “see if we can find a way to blow… those pipelines, and put [the Russians] back in the dark ages.”

The Pulitzer-Prize winner went on to savage the legacy media for completely failing to follow up on his report that the U.S. was responsible for the attack, which took out three of the four pipelines.

Meanwhile, China has reacted with skepticism towards the explanation that a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible for the blasts.

During a press briefing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called for “an objective, impartial and professional investigation” into the bombing.

“We have noted that some Western media have been mysteriously quiet after Hersh reported that the US was behind the Nord Stream blast. But now these media are unusually simultaneous in making their voice heard. How would the US account for such abnormality? Is there anything hidden behind the scene?” Wang asked.

New reports also reveal that a German spy ship was in the area where the attack occurred at the time of the blasts on September 26.

According to a report by German magazine Der Spiegel, the CIA warned Berlin about a potential attack on gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea weeks before it happened.

As we highlighted yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin branded claims that the Nord Stream pipeline attack was the work of pro-Ukrainian activists “nonsense,” arguing the blasts must have been carried out by a state power.

*  *  *

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NASA and the Houston-based aerospace company Axiom Space revealed next-generation spacesuits that astronauts would wear on the Artemis III moon mission. 

Compared to the inflexible Apollo suits that astronauts were equipped with over 50 years, the new suits are designed to be more flexible, said Russell Ralston, deputy program manager at Axiom Space.

“Axiom Space’s Artemis III spacesuit will be ready to meet the complex challenges of the lunar south pole and help grow our understanding of the Moon in order to enable a long-term presence there,” Michael T. Suffredini, Axiom Space president and CEO, wrote in a press release. 

The new Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit was on full display at Space Center Houston’s Moon 2 Mars Festival on Wednesday. A “full fleet” of training spacesuits will be delivered to NASA by late this summer. 

Axiom Space just unveiled a prototype of the spacesuit NASA astronauts will wear when walking on the #moon. pic.twitter.com/Dg6pzOnTEi

— Andrea Leinfelder (@a_leinfelder) March 15, 2023

Here’s a better view of the spacesuit. 

The moon mission is slated for launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop the Space Launch System in 2025 with four astronauts. And, of course, NASA went ‘woke’ by recently saying the “crew will be selected from among the most diverse astronaut in history.” 

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official assesses that China’s growing pessimism over its relationship with the US is making Beijing prepare for a future war it would rather not fight, Voice of America reported Wednesday.

“China doesn’t want to start a fight with us over Taiwan,” Doug Wade, the head of the DIA’s China Mission Group, said at a virtual event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

“They will if they have to … they haven’t ruled it out,” Wade added. China’s official position is that it seeks “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan but doesn’t rule out using force.

While China is reluctant to start a war, Washington’s increasing support for Taipei has led to Beijing putting more military pressure on Taiwan. The US’s overall military buildup in the Asia Pacific is also naturally making China think they have to prepare for a future conflict.

The US has shown no interest in backing off, and US military officials are openly discussing their plans for a future war with China. Wade warned that the two powers are entering an “increasingly confrontational period,” which he expects to play out across all domains.

“It’ll manifest itself pretty much across the spectrum – every warfighting domain in every sphere of diplomatic, informational, economic, commercial,” Wade said.

Chinese officials have been calling for better relations with the US but have also stepped up their warnings about where the two powers are heading.

Chinese President Xi Jinping appointed his “war cabinet” in October; he is implementing the largest military buildup since the Second World War; he has been trying to sanctions-proof his regime; and he is mobilizing the civilian population for war. https://t.co/aImFV9jUwL

— Gatestone Institute (@GatestoneInst) March 12, 2023

“If the United States does not hit the brake, but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there surely will be conflict and confrontation,” Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang told reporters earlier this month.

Authored by Gary Bai via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) latest objection to allegations that it suppressed evidence in its prosecution of Jan. 6 defendant Jacob Chansley flies in the face of the Sixth Amendment, current and former attorneys of Chansley told The Epoch Times in separate interviews this week.

“They are hiding. They affirmatively are electing not to disclose [exculpatory evidence],” Albert Watkins, Jacob Chansley’s former attorney that negotiated the navy veteran’s 41-month sentencing agreement in 2021, told The Epoch Times on Tuesday, referring to the DOJ.

“They’re doing so in a fashion which, in my opinion, gives rise to an inescapable conclusion that the Department of Justice has done more damage to our democracy by how it has treated Jan. 6 defendants than anything that had occurred on January 6.”

Watkins was reacting to the DOJ’s Sunday court filing on another Jan. 6 defendant’s case, in which the government confronted, for the first time in court, the newly surfaced surveillance tapes of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach aired by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight show.

Among these tapes was a clip showing Chansley, unarmed, walking along with several Capitol Police officers who did not attempt to remove him from the Capitol building, which Carlson said showed that Chansley was less violent on Jan. 6 than described by the government.

Despite the video records of the navy veteran’s behaviour, Chansley’s current and former lawyers argued that the government violated Chansley’s rights by suppressing this evidence during his trial, in response to the DOJ’s claims to the contrary on Sunday.

The answer to this debate is important because it shines a light on the government’s prosecutorial conduct in handling Jan. 6 cases, many of which have ended with swift sentencing.

Chansley is currently serving a 41-month sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty to an obstruction charge in September 2021.

Government Shared All Evidence: DOJ

In a filing on Sunday, the DOJ said it provided the tapes to Chansley’s attorney during the discovery phase of Chansley’s trial in 2021, therefore satisfying the requirement of producing exculpatory evidence, or evidence favoring the defendant, to the defense counsel.

The filing was in response to a motion to dismiss filed by the attorneys of Dominic Pezzola, a Jan. 6 defendant currently on trial, which alleged that the tapes shown on Tucker Carlson show the government “withheld” evidence in prosecuting participants of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.

“The CCTV footage is core evidence in nearly every January 6 case, and it was produced en masse, labeled by camera number and by time, to all defense counsel in all cases,” the DOJ wrote in its filing.

The department cited Brady v. Maryland, a 1963 case in which the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must make available to the defense counsel exculpatory evidence. As a part of that requirement, the DOJ cited Brady’s text establishing that a Brady violation requires the material in question to be “something that is being ‘suppress[ed] by the prosecution.’”

“Pezzola’s Brady claim therefore fails at the threshold, because nothing has been suppressed,” the DOJ wrote, basing it on the claim that it had provided Watkins with the “necessary tools” to identify relevant CCTV evidence notwithstanding the voluminous discovery.

“Accordingly, the volume of discovery does not excuse defense counsel from making reasonable efforts to ascertain whether an item has been produced, let alone before filing inaccurate and inflammatory allegations of discovery failures,” the DOJ wrote.

DOJ Suppressed Evidence: Chansley’s Lawyers

Chansley’s lawyers disagreed with the DOJ’s claims, saying that the bar for suppression is lower than what the government claims it to be.

“Suppression … is not the nefarious burying of evidence,” Bill Shipley, Jacob Chansley’s current counsel, said in an interview with The Epoch Times on Monday. “It just means it wasn’t brought to light by the government. The government knew what was there and did not illuminate the fact that it was there.”

Shipley says that the government may have violated Brady because they did not identify the tapes and their nature as potentially exculpatory evidence during Chansley’s trial. Making them available without making sure the defendant knows of the existence of the tapes may constitute suppression, according to Shipley.

“Suppression simply means it went undiscovered by the defendant beyond a point at which it could be made use of,” Shipley, who was a federal prosecutor for 21 years, said. “If the government produced thousands of hours of video and said, ‘There’s a minute of evidence that’s favorable to Jacob Chansley—good luck,’ that production is not an effective Brady disclosure.”

The tapes are relevant for reasons beyond proving Chansley’s innocence or guilt, Shipley told The Epoch Times, noting that they are important to answering the question of whether Chansley’s sentence was fair under due process considerations.

“The question is: were Jacob Chansley’s rights to due process and effective assistance of counsel violated? Were the procedural requirements complied with such that the process and outcome of his case was a fair proceeding?” Shipley challenged.

“They’re clearly the kinds of videos that, had Judge [Royce Lamberth] seen them at sentencing, he might have concluded that Mr. Chansey is not the personification of evil in the way the government has made him out to be,” the attorney added. Judge Royce Lamberth presided over Chansley’s trial.

“That might have caused Judge Lambert to think that maybe 41 months was too much time to give him, taking into consideration all of his conduct, as opposed to just the precise conduct the government gave,” Shipley said.

Read more here…

Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Wire,

On its face, there wasn’t anything unusual about the email that landed last week in the press office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“Background interview request from the Washington Post,” read the subject line that summarized the industry-standard process whereby information is shared with reporters under pre-negotiated terms, usually anonymity. When sanctioned by a politician or their team, it is called “going on background” to shape and broaden a story with additional facts and contexts but without direct attribution. When not sanctioned, well, then that is just called leaking.

Either way, Jeremy Redfern wasn’t interested. The DeSantis spokesman wrote back one word: “No.”

A screenshot of the exchange went viral with the consensus in more conservative corners of Twitter being that a liberal rag, albeit the beltway paper of record, had just been owned. The score in their minds? DeSantis: 1, WaPo: 0.

The little episode does underscore a larger, still emerging theme of the expected DeSantis presidential campaign. It isn’t just that the team that didn’t leak in Florida wouldn’t leak in the White House. The implication is that DeSantis would not obsess over what is written about him in news outlets most of his constituents don’t read, because such an obsession is counterproductive to conservative goals. In this way, DeSantis may prove to be the anti-chaos candidate.

DeSantis has hinted at all of this during a recent book tour, a closely watched exercise that seems to be a dress rehearsal for a White House run. “There’s no drama in our administration,” he said on stage in Iowa next to Gov. Kim Reynolds. “There’s no palace intrigue.” The juxtaposition with the frontrunner in the GOP primary, former President Donald Trump, was implicit and obvious.

“We made very clear to the people working in the administration, you’re not going to be leaking,” DeSantis said, recalling how he told his staff early on that if they had “any other agenda” than “doing business of the people of Florida” then they might as well “pack your bags right now.”

With a unified team onboard with that mission, DeSantis continued, “We roll out, and we execute, and we do things, and we get things done. And in the process, we beat the left day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.”

Republicans have made the media their foil for decades now. Newt Gingrich won over South Carolina voters during the 2012 Republican primary when the former House speaker slammed a CNN debate moderator over what he considered “despicable” questioning, arguing that the “destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country.” Gingrich would lose the nomination but leave behind a blueprint that Trump would embody. Conservatives loved how he hated the “fake news.” But few were aware of the strange symbiosis that enveloped his administration.

Trump gave as good as he got during press conferences, but his team was set against itself at times, and often consumed by the media at the expense of the administration’s mission. His son-in-law, a senior advisor in the last White House, said as much. The war between Jared Kushner and Steven Bannon was infamous in the West Wing and well-documented in the papers. Albeit almost always “on background.”

When Bannon was eventually fired, Kushner later wrote in his autobiography, another senior aide came to him joking that he had “a plan to split up Steve Bannon’s extensive workload. Hope [Hicks], you leak to Jonathan Swan at Axios. Jared, you call Mike Bender from the Wall Street Journal. I’ll call Jeremy Peters from the New York Times, and … we’re done.”

Careers were catapulted and journalism prizes won on the ability to get the president’s inner circle to text back by deadline. Even when the headlines would be negative, Trump often called reporters directly. He still does. “I love being with her,” Trump said of Maggie Haberman during one of his multiple interviews with the star New York Times reporter. As president, he blasted her publicly as “a third-rate reporter.” After leaving the White House, he called her “my psychiatrist.”

The Trump cabinet didn’t just jockey for position in the press. Internal divisions were so extreme that officials would gauge their standing with the president by recent headlines or Fox News hits. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even made a joke of the dysfunction, promising that he would stay on in the administration “until he tweets me out of office.”

Trump was a bellicose president, and his base adored him for it. Some of his closest advisors still worried that an obsession with settling scores left him off balance. For instance, during the job interview for attorney general, Bill Barr reported that he told Trump that “the problem with immediately counterpunching … is that you are letting your opponents pick the time and place of the fight.” Trump, Barr later wrote in his memoir, didn’t seem to take the advice. But DeSantis has.

The governor can be as pugnacious as the former president, and YouTube is full of clips from DeSantis fans and from the press chronicling his blow-for-blow battles with reporters. He has catapulted himself into the national conversation, in large part, through those fights with the media that he has labeled “the liberal elite’s Praetorian Guard.”

But the same reporters who enjoyed unprecedented access to Trump, possibly the most accessible president in modern history, have had a hard time getting ahold of DeSantis outside of his regular news conferences, leaving the New York Times to ask “Can Ron DeSantis Avoid Meeting the Press?”

“The old way of looking at it is: ‘I have to do every media hit that I possibly can, from as broad a political spectrum as I can, to reach as many people as possible,’” Nick Iarossi, a longtime DeSantis supporter and a lobbyist in Tallahassee, told the Times. “The new way of looking at it is: ‘I really don’t need to do that anymore. I can control how I want to message to voters through the mediums I choose.’”

DeSantis has followed an aggressive but more calculated blueprint, becoming a conservative media darling through frequent appearances on Fox News with Tucker Carlson and the Daily Wire with Ben Shapiro. It has been enough to bring him alongside Trump in the RealClearPolitics Average even though he has not yet declared. Trump remains the clear front runner with a 14.4-point advantage.

Mick Mulvaney doesn’t see much unique in the current DeSantis approach. He knows both men well. Mulvaney was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus with DeSantis before leaving Congress to join the Trump administration, first as director of the Office of Management and Budget and later as his second-to-last chief of staff. If the boast about avoiding “palace intrigue” and the admonishment not to leak become campaign promises, Mulvaney doesn’t see a clear competitive advantage. “I expect all of the challengers,” he told RCP, “to use a variation on the ‘Trump policies without the Trump baggage’ message.”

Disdain for the press has indeed become a feature of the right. According to Gallup, just 14% of Republicans say they have “a great deal or fair amount of confidence” in the media. Gripes among conservatives have turned from occasional complaints to the outright belief that a biased press is an enemy to their way of life.

Candidates see that, and they will say they don’t trust elite media, Tucker Carlson told the 2022 Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, last year. But figuring out who is play fighting with the press versus those who will shun them altogether, the Fox News host added, was critical to earning their vote. “You need to be really wary of candidates who care what the New York Times thinks. You really, really do,” he said. “And if you say that to Republican voters, they are like, ‘The New York Times is Communist! I don’t even read it!’ Really? Because your leaders do. And they really care. They really, really care.”

DeSantis was happy to blast the press in Iowa last week. Like many Republicans, he has shown a willingness to punch back. Unlike some others though, he has a demonstrated ability to ignore their calls. “Don’t think that they’re coming to you in good faith,” he said in one broadside against the press. “They’re coming to you to be able to advance their agenda, and if you’re somebody that’s standing for our values, like Kim and me stand for, you are an impediment to their agenda.”

“So don’t play into it. Just speak the truth. Do your thing,” he continued before counseling that conservatives should “not give them the satisfaction that they are some type of neutral gatekeepers because they are not.”

The Biden administration has responded to Poland’s Thursday announcement that it will be transferring about a dozen or more MiG-29 jets to Ukraine. As we reported earlier, President Andrzej Duda’s move was no doubt calculated in hopes of tilting the momentum of the political debate in Washington in favor of supplying planes.

National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby said Thursday afternoon in response to Warsaw’s decision, “It doesn’t change our calculus, with respect to F-16s.”

He added in the press briefing: “It’s not on the table right now. And an announcement by another nation to provide fighter aircraft does not affect, and does not change, our own sovereign decision-making.”

President Biden had just a month ago said that F-16s were off the table “for now” as pressure began growing within Congress to approve the jets.

However, new fighters could take years to send, while older jets would likely take around a year or more – given also military officials have indicated at least that amount of time to train Ukrainian pilots on the American-made systems.

Thursday’s announcement makes Poland the first NATO country to fulfil Zelensky’s repeat requests for fighter jets since the war began. Given Ukraine already operates the Soviet-made planes, it’s expected they’ll be in use right away against Russia.

President Duda specified that an initial four MiG-29s will be delivered “within the next few days” and that the rest would come after they go through servicing and maintenance. 

The Associated Press notes that the total to be transferred could be more than a dozen: “The Polish word he used to describe their number can mean between 11 and 19,” according to the report.