The Bidens’ former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, offered a scathing testimony at the U.S. House Oversight Committee, directly accusing Joe and his sone of committing crimes and calling out Democrats who continue to protect “the big guy.”
Bobulinski even accused high-ranking Democrat Ro Khanna (D-CA) of knowing as early as 2020 that Joe had committed crimes, stating, “I have extensive emails with congressman Ro Khanna in 2021 and 2022 where I begged him and his staff to sit down with me and look at my Blackberry phones that the Democrats are so focused on, to hire forensics experts and go through all of the factual information that I had.”
Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski revealed Wednesday that he reached out to a Democratic lawmaker in October 2020 about his allegations that then-presidential candidate Joe Biden was involved in his son and brother’s business ventures abroad.
Bobulinski told the House Oversight Committee he “was begging” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) “to go on CNN and tell the world in October 2020” about the allegations — and apparently had a receptive audience, initially.
“You have always demonstrated to me that you are nothing but an honest, with the highest integrity, individual,” Khanna texted Bobulinski, the latter man told the House Republican-led impeachment inquiry in its second public hearing.
Tony Bobulinski in a Wednesday hearing on Capitol Hill said that he reached out to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in October 2020 about allegations of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s involvement in his son and brother’s business ventures abroad. REUTERS
Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski went scorched earth on Joe Biden, his son Hunter, his brother Jim, the regime media and House Democrats during the Republican-led House Oversight Committee’s impeachment hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday.
In his brutally frank opening statement, Bobulinski also accused Hunter and Jim Biden of telling “flat-out lies” when they were interviewed by the Committee last month, and urged Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) to hold them accountable for their perjury.
“If there is no evidence of corruption—if Joe’s conduct and the conduct of his family were fully legal and proper—then why are they so dishonest about it?” Bobulinski asked. “Not just slight misrepresentations of fact but deep untruths about the entire corrupt enterprise.”
U.S. District Judge and Obama appointee Sharon Johnson Coleman just ruled that illegal aliens can constitutionally own guns, meaning people who enter our country illegally have a constitutional right to arm themselves, meaning America’s enemies can now import standing armies into our country thanks to this ruling and Biden’s open border Executive orders.
The ruling is sure to be appealed but the judge herself is now under scrutiny for violating basic U.S. law and constitutional principles.
Republicans in Arizona are hoping to pass legislation that will give the voters a chance to decide if they’d like to protect firearms companies from being de-banked, from having their bank accounts cancelled by banks that disapprove of Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms.
Banks have threatened the public with higher bond rates if the measure passes because banks will simply leave the state rather than allow gun companies to do legal, constitutionally-protected business providing a constitutionally-protected service for American citizens.
Despite the overt appearance of a conflict of interest, Judge Scott McAfee, a Democrat running for re-election who also donated to Fani Willis’ election campaign, ruled that Fulton County DA Fani Willis can continue to stay on her case prosecuting Donald Trump for questioning the 2024 election. He had earlier struck down 6 of the charges against Trump. He also ordered Willis to let her lover and hired co-attorney Nathan Wade go.
This was the justification for his questionable ruling, “As the case moves forward, reasonable members of the public could easily be left to wonder whether the financial exchanges have continued resulting in some form of benefit to the District Attorney, or even whether the romantic relationship has resumed. Put differently, an outsider could reasonably think that the District Attorney is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences. As long as Wade remains on the case, this unnecessary perception will persist.”
Fani Willis has a choice to make if she wants the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump to move forward. On March 15, a judge ruled that the Fulton County district attorney must dismiss herself or special prosecutor Nathan Wade from the case.
As previously reported, Fani ended up in front of a judge after her romantic relationship with Wade became public.
To be clear, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee did not find that Willis’ relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade resulted in a conflict of interest.
However, the judge said Willis can stay on the case only if Wade withdraws due to “an appearance of impropriety” that infected the prosecution team.
Additionally, Judge McAfee criticized DA Fani Willis for a “tremendous” lapse of judgment. He also questioned the truthfulness of Willis and Wade’s testimony about the timing of their relationship.
(CNN) — The presiding judge in the Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump and his allies has thrown out some of the charges against the former president and several of his co-defendants.
The partial dismissal by Georgia Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee leaves most of the sprawling racketeering indictment intact.
McAfee ruled that six charges in the 41-count indictment related to Trump and some co-defendants allegedly soliciting the violation of oath by a public officer lacked the required detail about what underlying crime the defendants were soliciting.
Trump was named in three of the counts specifically, meaning the former president is now facing 88 charges over the four criminal indictments in Georgia, New York, Washington, DC, and Florida.
The controversy over the militarization of law enforcement has been a continuing question in the United States since the inception of the SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) concept of the late-1960’s. While some parties cover their own political biases on the subject by ranting about the US Federal Government providing “military equipment” to local law enforcement departments, primarily through Washington’s “LESO” program, such pandering to “fear-porn” is simply the willful refusal to acknowledge the reality that any “militaristic” expression of law enforcement is precisely what those hysterical parties demanded for years…and then were faced with results that they refused to believe were possible.
While rather clichéd, the popular idea of the “good police” was formed in the 1950’s by television shows such as Dragnet and the later Adam-12. As the years rolled by, however, it became increasingly apparent that the “good cop” – even if a real thing – was not capable of dealing with the new realities of criminal violence at the end of the 1960’s.
Increasingly, local police and county-level sheriff’s departments were faced with criminal gangs operating drug labs in remote rural areas, that offered criminals the ability to utilize military-style tactics to defeat police efforts at arrest. Similarly, worsening political violence in urban areas displayed a significantly different character than the violence of previous decades. In this context, armed groups – primarily Communist groups inspired by the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse Deng, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara – attempted to initiate urban revolutionary warfare against the United States establishment and its citizens.
The passage of time, as well as the shifting motivations of the popular media, has downplayed the levels violence involved, to the point where the resurfacing of old training videos sponsored by state-level police departments are seen as almost fiction, when in fact, the reality was that violent attacks and kidnappings were frequent occurrences. What would now be openly called organized terrorist campaigns were waged by groups as diverse as the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and the Symbionese Liberation Army.
For these reasons, long-time observers were in no way surprised at the recent uptick in “ambush attacks” against police officers around the nation; indeed, the wonder was that the surge in such attacks had not happened earlier.
In response to the increasingly complex violence of the 1960’s, first the Philadelphia Police Department – quickly followed by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) – established large teams of officer designated and trained to respond to various situation that were outside the realm of normal police duties. To a great degree, the SWAT concept was limited to dealing with bank robberies and hostage situations. This situation changed decisively after LAPD SWAT fought its landmark gun battle with the Symbionese Liberation Army on May 17, 1974. Police departments around the nation took note of a law enforcement unit being suddenly thrust into an openly military type of operation, and began to act accordingly.
LAPD SWAT officers, 2015. Photo Credit: Marc Cooper. Public Domain.
Beginning with larger departments, SWAT-type units were formed within departments, and began training and equipping those teams accordingly, frequently seeking training advice from prior-military service veterans of the recently concluded Vietnam War, as those soldiers usually possessed skills not previously taught to police officers. The Federal Government took notice, with the FBI laying out the basis for its Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) in the late-1970’s, leading to its actual founding in 1983.
Civil police departments, however, quickly realized that they needed more extensive assistance to maximize a unit like a SWAT team. With the US military establishment being both legally restricted from directly aiding civilian law enforcement by the Posse Comitatus Act, and not wanting bad press in the aftermath of Vietnam, police departments struggled to properly equip their teams. However, as there was a concurrent decrease in strictly political violence as the 1970’s drew to a close, local departments used their SWAT units for both “high-risk warrant service” and hostage rescue situations. Both type of operations, of course, straddle the line between strictly police enforcement and military operations.
FBI HRT during the 2011 the Aztec Fury exercise. USMC Photo. Public Domain.
Beginning in 1990, with the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1990-1991, the Federal Government opened up the direct sale of military surplus equipment – including weapons and certain armored vehicles – to civilian law enforcement agencies, under what was then called the “1208 Program”, after where is appears in the enabling legislation. In 1996, various wording was changed and the law was expanded, going into effect in 1997, becoming the current “1033 Program”.
The vast bulk of the weapons and equipment available to civilian law enforcement agencies is gear that is either excess to the military’s needs, or is older equipment that the military has completely replaced in its Active, Reserve and National Guard units. Because of the heavily discounted amounts (down to “free for the taking”) offered to civilian law enforcement, this has been a great boon to expanding the capabilities of local police departments and their various special teams. Since 1997, though, while high-risk warrants and hostage rescues by police have certainly happened, but SWAT units in most departments are usually used to raid drug labs and dealers, which actions are specifically encouraged in the 1997 legislation.
Tactically speaking, these operations are far from military-level actions. The reasons are simple: such raids will have, at most, one to four hostiles that the police are planning on arresting, and even if the police teams meet resistance, it is certain to be short, disorganized and ineffectual. Most importantly, the criminals the SWAT teams are trying to arrest rarely have any desire to “fight it out to the bitter end”; actions like that certainly happen, but it is very rare. Criminals, by and large, are more likely to surrender than to fight to the death.
Two incidents, however, revealed the weakness of the widespread reliance on SWAT teams.
On February 28, 1997, serial bank robbers Larry Phillips Jr. and Emil Mătăsăreanu attempted to rob a Bank of America branch in the Los Angeles suburb of North Hollywood, sparking one of the largest gun battles in US police history. While the details – and video footage – of the shootout are widely available, the takeaway is that responding police officers were categorically incapable of dealing with a single pair of largely untrained criminals, operating under significant amounts of illegals drugs, who had no intention of surrendering. The pair of gunmen were finally taken down because their own incompetence, Phillips dying by his own hand, and an already-wounded Mătăsăreanu being mortally wounded by a hail of point-blank fire from three SWAT officers after a bungled attempt to flee.
Worse, however, were “after-action” interviews with the SWAT officers. While all of the responding police officers – and certainly the SWAT officers – displayed outstanding levels of bravery that should be justifiably recognized and hailed, their attempts at conveying accurate technical information was terrifyingly abysmal.
This is not a case of pedantic criticism. One of the chief tenants of military ability is being both “technically and tactically proficient”, in this case, being able to correctly identify both the types and capabilities of equipment, but also in making realistic assessments of hostile force’s capabilities. This was very definitely not in evidence in the aftermath of the shootout, even years later.
The other case was exposed serious issues in police response to determined, non-criminal violence was the 2008 terrorist attacks on the city of Mumbai, India. A 10-man team of terrorists from the Pakistan-based Lakshar-e-Taiba conducted a highly complex infiltration and attack operation against the city – a metropolis of over 12 million – lasting four days, with a frightening level of competence.
Local police were essentially helpless, as the attackers were not there to commit simple crimes like robbery or kidnapping. The terrorists were there to kill as many Indian civilians as they could; only one terrorist would ultimately survive to lay out the details of the operation for Indian police and military operators.
A 2013 Naval Postgraduate Study examined the question of potential United States civilian police response to a hypothetical Mumbai-style attack. The results are far from encouraging, especially given the events of the subsequent decade.
While very large police departments – such as the LAPD, among others – have written detailed plans for dealing with multiple “active shooter” incidents, and while acknowledging that improvised bombing attacks can generate larger number of casualties than infantry/commando style shooting attacks, both the study and those department’s own manuals also acknowledge that such dedicated types of attacks would generate widespread fear and terror (hence, the designation of “terrorist attack”) throughout not simply the urban area affected, but also throughout the wider region, as well as the nation as a whole.
Lurking under these stolid studies is a fundamental issue: Police officers – hysterical screaming to the contrary – are not mentally or psychologically prepared for a confrontation with a group such as Lakshar-e-Taiba. Taking down drug dealers, child traffickers and the occasional unstable individual are one thing; dueling with an organized, focused and dedicated team of shooters who are not operating for any of the conventional criminal reasons is an animal of an entirely different stripe.
As incidents from the North Hollywood shootout, to the Columbine and Uvalde school shootings demonstrate, many police departments around the country – regardless of the level of material support they may have received from the 1033 Program – are not psychologically prepared to deal with a single shooter who is willing to fight to the end, much less a pair of shooters, even when the shooters are completely untrained; the response of Nashville, Tennessee police officer to the recent school shooting there is the exception that demonstrates the rule.
In light of the foregoing, the continued hysterical demonization of American citizens to not simply defend themselves firearms in the absence of police, and equally strident calls to limit not only the ability of American citizens to own firearms, but to restrict their ability to obtain competent and useful training with weapons they already own, is highly worrying, given the demonstrated willingness of left-leaning city administrations to not only actively restrict their police departments from dealing with organized, large-scale violence, but also giving criminals literal “get out of jail free cards” for “petty crimes”.
This demonstrates, more than anything else, that the “average American citizen” is very much on their own when it comes to crime in their nearby areas.
If you are reading this inside the United States of 2024 – take note.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Ken Buck (R-CO), a known anti-Trumper and Democrat in Republican clothes, has resigned from congress, leaving the GOP with a slim 2-seat majority in the House.
Buck said of his decision, “I think this place is dysfunctional. For example, I am the number third-ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. I haven’t even asked my questions yet. 40-50 people have gone before me. A lot of this is personal and that’s the problem. Instead of having to quorum instead of operating in a professional manner. This place has just evolved into this bickering and and nonsense and not not really doing the job for the American people.“
Under oath before the House Judiciary Committee hearing, Special Council Robert Hur testified President Joe Biden took classified documents for the purpose of cash profit.
He told the committee, “Mr. Biden had strong motivations to ignore the proper procedures for safeguarding the classified information in his notebooks… During hours of recorded interviews in which he read aloud from his notebooks in his private home, Mr. Biden provided raw material to his ghostwriter detailing meetings and events that would be of interest to prospective readers and buyers of his book.”
… Next, Jordan asked Hur about the advance Biden received for that book, “Promise Me, Dad.” According to Hur’s report, Biden received $8 million — a highly lucrative deal.
“Joe Biden had 8 million reasons to break the rules. He took classified information and shared it with the guy who was writing the book,” Jordan said. “He knew the rules, but he broke them for $8 million in a book advance.”.
.. Hur told Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) that his investigation did not exonerate Biden.
On the contrary, Hur explained in his opening statement that his investigation “identified evidence that the president willfully retained classified materials after the end of his vice presidency, when he was a private citizen.”
Donald J Trump and Joe Biden are set to repeat the battle of 2020 as both men have now unofficially won enough delegates to clinch their respective parties.
Trump added three more primary wins in Washington, Mississippi, and Georgia, winning each election by more than 80 percent of the primary vote. The news comes on the heels of a recent purge of the RNC by Trump’s daughter-in-law, Laura Trump, the new co-chair of the RNC.
With no real concessions won, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-AR) oversaw the passage of a partial budget in the House that was signed by President Joe Biden. The total amount of the spending bill comes to $460 billion and will keep “essential” agencies funded through fiscal year 2024.
… The measure contains six annual spending bills and had already passed the House. In signing it into law, Biden thanked leaders and negotiators from both parties in both chambers for their work, which the White House said will mean that agencies “may continue their normal operations.”
Meanwhile, lawmakers are negotiating a second package of six bills, including defense, in an effort to have all federal agencies fully funded by a March 22 deadline.
“To folks who worry that divided government means nothing ever gets done, this bipartisan package says otherwise,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, said after lawmakers passed the measure Friday night just hours before a deadline.
We’ve previously discussed the “democratization of military training”, way back in 2022, looking at the idea of individuals, with no previous military training or experience, teaching at least one of those skills to themselves. Since that article, the ability to acquire those skills – what Great Britain used to call “small tactics” – has only expanded throughout the internet; indeed, all that is necessary is knowing what information to ask for.
Of course, certain things are required to teach oneself these kinds of skills, primarily access to at least basic small arms, such as rifles, handguns and/or shotguns. Of course, for the longest time, access to such weapons could be problematic; in many places in the world – and increasingly, within the United States, itself – that requirement can still present issues. Recently, however, that impediment has been reduced through the use of highly realistic “toys”, primarily “Airsoft” weapons, which mimic actual military-type weapons in current use. While Airsoft toys have significant issues in trying to impart realistic levels of firearms training, they can be effectively utilized to cover many of the basics, drastically reducing the need for “live fire” training and experience. Likewise, while keeping in mind that using Airsoft for military-like training has serious handicaps, it can help teach the basics of small-unit maneuver, at least up to the squad to platoon levels.
This ability to train realistically – even if not precisely up to the level of “actual” military levels – is already making its impacts felt in places such as Burma, where insurgents fighting a brutal military junta’s forces have been able to couple effective training with 3-D printed firearms to “bootstrap” themselves into effective guerilla infantry formations.
So terrified has the “power elite” within the United States Government become, they are resorting to desperate actions to ban even a hint of such training options for civilians – in effect, creating an underclass dividing civilians from prior-service military personnel…The fact that such actions are specifically counter to Congress’ own foundational requirements does not seem to even be a consideration to a group desperate to retain their own power and authority.
The Minute Man, sculpture by Artist Daniel Chester French (1850–1931), 1875, Concord, Massachusetts. National Park Service. Public Domain.
That said, there is another aspect to the training issue: that of “leadership”.
Military leadership – contrary to the views of many in the military, political and corporate sectors – is very different from “leadership” in either the corporate or political sectors. Leadership in a law enforcement agency does bear some resemblance to military leadership, but there are fundamental differences even there.
At its core, military leadership is much more difficult to define, let alone execute in the field. While there is a legal expectation of obedience inherent in military leadership, as there is in the political and law enforcement spheres, this almost never true in the corporate sector. Likewise, while law enforcement officers are expected to voluntarily face danger, there is seldom – if ever – a legal requirement to risk their own lives, as the verdict in the trial of the armed officer in the Parkland high school mass shooting demonstrated…This is very much not a verdict that would be laid in a military court martial for a similar offence.
In a very real sense, military leadership is centered on the fundamental principal that the commissioned or non-commissioned officer holds both the legal responsibility and moral authority to order their subordinates into situations that have a high chance – and potentially a guarantee – of resulting in said subordinates death or severe wounding. Such a responsibility is something that few politicians will ever face, in the course of their political careers; in the United States, the only political leaders who hold such authority are the President of the United States (in relation to the Federal Armed Forces), and the various governors of the Several States (in relation to their State National Guard commands).
The prescient question for this article, however, does not necessarily revolve around “legitimate authority”; in fact, the nature of his article more or less assumes that the notion of “legitimacy” does not come from a “vertical hierarchy”, but from a “lateral agreement”.
In the real “old days”, military leadership came from the strongest, meanest and most capable warrior, who used their fighting prowess to gain a band of followers who followed them because of their demonstrated skill and wisdom. In time, this evolved into various forms of social hierarchy, primarily in the form of “kingship” and an associated aristocracy, based on military ability and personal loyalty. Aside from the occasional aberration, such as the Roman Centurion system, this remained the case in Western Europe until the 17th Century.
The First Muster, 1637. Artist: Don Troiani. Public Domain.
Beginning around that time, the idea of the old “feudal levy” began to evolve into that of citizen militias. These types of formations were frequently self-organizing, in the literal sense of the term, where a group of local people – usually at the village or town level – would assemble on their own, pronounce the formation of some level of militia unit, the members of which would then volunteer to “place themselves under military discipline” (a very ‘loaded’ term, and one which the modern military struggles with to this day). And then, they would frequently do something so unheard of today, it is nearly impossible to find references to it: the self-mustered militia soldiers would elect officers from among their ranks as leaders.
In the British colonies of North America, the various colonial governors preferred to appoint officers to military ranks, such as George Washington’s direct appointment to the rank of Major by the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, but the reality was that colonial governors could not afford to be too picky with a group of militia self-organized in time of need.
While the election of officers from within the ranks could certainly be problematic and prone to corruption, incompetence, and discipline problems, it actually tended to work out more often than not. George Washington’s frequent criticism of the various Colonial militias was aimed primarily at their officers being more concerned about keeping their positions by not enforcing too strict a regimen of discipline on their men, and likewise not training their men too strenuously, since those men could easily vote them out of their positions at any time. This was not true, however, in all of the hodge-podge of militia units Washington had to work with, but it did have a negative impact. While this negative impact led to the creation of a “regular” army, that army remained tiny for the entirety of the War of Independence, relying on local militias to fill its gaps for the entire course of the war.
As time went on, of course, the idea of local militias began to fade out of the public mind, especially as states struggled to retain sole control over their state military forces. Now, the same parties within the US government trying to outlaw military training for civilians outside of the armed forces, with the aid of their allies in the “popular press” have demonized the term “militia” to the point where most American equate the word to “terrorist”…
…But that is a whole other discussion.
To return to the point: Can a civilian – with no formal training or military experience – “self-teach” themselves to become an effective military leader? A leader capable of not simply leading a military formation, but of creating a basic training regimen for whatever troops they can “attract to their banner” (to borrow a phrase)?
The answer, as can be surmised, is…it’s complicated.
Reading various works on military leadership, both from the “old days” and newer works, is always a good start; a basic reading list will be presented at the end of this article. However, there is always a break point, where theory and reading must be put into practice.
And that’s the difficult part: a military officer – whether appointed from a higher authority or self-taught – is very much a chief in need of ‘spear carriers’: without troops to lead and teach, the self-taught “officer” will never know whether they have effectively learned the lessons their readings have taught them.
The majority of readers of this article will almost certainly never have to actually face this issue in “real life”…and you shouldn’t want to, by any means. But – the situations and threats of the world of the early-21st Century may require those skills.
It’s your decision whether or not to pursue the idea of teaching yourself how to lead troops. While I certainly cannot make that decision for you, you should be very concerned about government flunkies who don’t want you to do so.
Back FREEDOM for only $4.95/month and help the Freedomist to fight the ongoing war on liberty and defeat the establishment's SHILL press!!
Are you enjoying our content? Help support our mission to reach every American with a message of freedom through virtue, liberty, and independence! Support our team of dedicated freedom builders for as little as $4.95/month! Back the Freedomist now! Click here
.jpg%2F440px-Joe_Biden_(49385177488).jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=8de1d34e8e3a558d11578aebb358a63c6a6b90887de510583be217d3d152517e&ipo=images "Biden Signs Partial Budget Bill")
