A Democratic congressman tasked with pushing back against Republican investigations into President Biden, his administration, and the president's son, Hunter Biden, has links to a major consultancy that manages a fund funneling millions to a group attempting to torpedo those very investigations, Fox News Digital has discovered.
Through his family foundation, Rep. Daniel Goldman, D.-N.Y, a member of the House Oversight Committee, has ties to Arabella Advisors, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm that overlooks the largest dark money network in the country. Arabella Advisors manages the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which has bankrolled the Congressional Integrity Project, a group of liberal operatives working behind the scenes with Democrats in attempts to smother the Biden investigations by Goldman's GOP colleagues on the Oversight Committee.
Goldman, a wealthy heir to the Levi Strauss jean company fortune, acted as the lead Democratic counsel for President Trump's first impeachment, making him a valuable asset for Democrats on the powerful Oversight Committee, where he'll serve as a main counterpunch to Republican investigators.
The Arkansas court case involving Hunter Biden and the woman he fathered a child with has been set for a two-day bench trial.
Circuit Court Judge Holly Meyer ordered on March 2 that the trial take place July 24-25.
The case, which is in the 16th Judicial District in Independence County, involves Biden's child support payments to Lunden Alexis Roberts -- the child's mother -- and Roberts' desire to change her daughter's last name to Biden.
A bench trail does not involve a jury and is conducted solely by a judge.
Hunter Biden is a pig. He would not admit the child was his and would not pay child support until after the court ordered a blood test and the results determined Hunter Biden was the father. Now he is trying to refuse his daughter the use of his last name? Disgusting pig. It is bad enough that he flits from one woman to another and that he refuses to see his daughter, but to deny her his name? Disgusting. I thought President Biden was Catholic. The way Hunter Biden acts, he has never been in a hall of worship. Or practiced any religion.
We all make mistakes, yes. That does not excuse Hunter Biden acting like an entitled ass his entire life. the article goes on to note:
In a Jan. 6 court filing, an attorney for Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, called the attempt to change the last name of the child "political warfare."
The four-page response demanded "strict proof thereof that such request is in the best interest of the child."
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Friday, March 10, 2023. While the Iraqi government bans booze, the US Congress holds one of the most embarrassing hearings of this century.
I am not a fan of The Twitter Files. I've referred to them repeatedly as The Twitter Dumps. I do not see it as reporting. A series of Tweets is not reporting in my opinion. The Twitter Files, for any unaware, are internal communications within Twitter and external requests -- from various government figures -- coming in to Twitter. They seek to explain how censorship took place.
There is no question that censorship took place prior to Elon Musk purchasing Twitter (and Elon has censored since purchasing Twitter). Elon appears to be censoring due to vanity and on his own whim whereas The Twitter Files are addressing issues of government figures and agencies attempting to censor free speech.
A number of journalists have dropped Tweets and it's been about as attractive and desirable as US House Rep Gerry Connolly dropping trou.
My objections have been that you need to write an article. I don't need your Tweets and I don't have time for them. I'm not the only one who feels that way. Yes, the devoted fan base of various writers can go through hundreds of Tweets. That's not the reality for most of us who have full lives and things to do. In addition, and I'm not sure this has gone up here in relation to this multitude of Tweets, I don't have the eyes for it. I'm not seeing multiple eye doctors, having injections and lasers, having surgeries because my eyes are doing great. Since the pandemic started, I've tried to have a ton of stuff up here and that's because it was a depressing, sad, scary time for all of us. (I'm not trying to imply that COVID 19 has ceased to exist. Just noting that most of us have calmed the f**k down.) There are times when there's a stoppage in that here. An hour or two, sometimes three. And that's because I've reached a point where the eyes have given out. That happens very frequently with my vision now. Especially on Sundays which is why I'm no longer in the mood to work forever on THIRD. I reach the point where my vision is going and I say, "That's it, I've got to go write the Sunday night entry at THE COMMON ILLS and that's all I've got left." So, no, I don't have time to read over a never-ending series of Tweets that are unfocused and unformed and are not anything like what people expect from reporting.
Yesterday morning, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled "The Weaponization Of The Federal Government On The Twitter Files." A badly worded title but a very clear one except to members on the Democratic Party side of the aisle who kept trying to interject that they (Republicans on the Committee and the two witnesses) were saying it was just censorship against conservatives. No, they weren't saying. They didn't even say that, as Committee Chair Jim Jordan pointed out near the middle of the hearing.
The Democrats on the Committee -- let me stop there. I was going to say they embarrassed themselves in the hearing. Actually, they embarrassed themselves prior to that.
Who are these Democrats at the hearing? It's March. They were sworn in back in January. It's March. Go to their website -- even just the Democrats website -- for the House Judiciary Committee and you'll see that several of the people making asses of themselves yesterday are not even on the Committee. I'm looking at, for example, the worthless post that Stacey Plaskett has. Worthless because it's a non-voting post. She's representing the Virgin Islands. She can't vote in any session because she doesn't have voting rights. But damn, can she hijack a hearing and be nasty and rude.
But look at her assignments. That's the official Congressional page for the Committees she's assigned to. I don't see the House Judiciary Committee on there. And Ranking Member -- as she was billed in the hearing. In what crazy world does the Democratic Party make a non-voting member the Ranking Member of a Judiciary Committee? Not a Subcommittee, a Committee. As fake as her hair, Stacey is nothing but an opportunist. That's why the Brooklyn born and raised Stacey represents the Virgin Islands. She moved there to establish residency to get the Congressional seat. It's why she's a Democrat today. She switched political parties as she embarked on her plan to be elected to Congress -- switched after the Iraq War had been going on for five years, switched after the age of forty. A fake ass. And a loud mouth. She was raised by parents but you'd never know it from yesterday's performance. And maybe someone actually from the Virgin Islands should represent that territory in Congress and not the Brooklyn born and raised Stacey who went to college in France?
We're focusing on Matt's testimony and this is a collection from the first hour and a half of the hearing.
I would say I spent ten years covering the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. That was obviously a very serious issue, but -- uhm -- this Twitter files story and what we're looking at now and what we're investigating now? I don't think there is any comparison. This is by far the most serious thing that I've ever looked at and it's -- it's certainly the most grave story that I've ever worked on personally.
[. . .]
Mr. Congressman, my disagreement with the issue [the unproven allegation that Russia interfered with the 2016 US election] [US House Rep Stephen Lynch cuts him off] -- Okay, then well I'm going to answer not in the sense that you're putting it. I think all countries engage in offensive information operations. It's a question of scale. And The Twitter Files [cut off again by Lynch]. I don't know and I'd say it's irrelevant [cut off again by Lynch].
[. . .]
So a great example of this [scale mattering] is a report that the Global Engagement Center sent to Twitter and to members of the media and other platforms about what they called "The Pillars of Russian Disinformation." Now part of this report is what you would call -- I think you would call traditional, hardcore intelligence gathering where they made a reasoned, evidence-based case that certain sites were linked to Russian influence or linked to the Russian government. In addition to that, however, they also said that sites that "generate their own momentum and have opinions that are in line with those accounts are part of a propaganda eco system . Now this is just another word for guilt by association. And this is the problem with the whole idea of trying to identify which-which accounts are actually INTERNET RESEARCH AGENCY [Russian trolls] and which ones are just people who followed those accounts or reTweeted them. Twitter initially did not find more than a handful of IRA accounts. It wasn't until they got into an argument with the Senate Select Intelligence Committee that they came back with a different answer.
[. . .]
I've done probably a dozen stories involving whistle-blowers. Every reported story that I've ever done across three decades involved sources who have motives. Every time you do a story you're making a balancing test between the public interest -- [cut off by US House Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz].
[. . . After Wasserman Schultz refused to allow him to answer and after she told him what he thought and how he acted and what his income was -- none of which was probably right -- US House Representative Dan Bishop gave Matt a brief moment to respond.]
Sure, just quickly, that moment on THE JOE ROGAN SHOW, I was actually recounting a section from Seymour Hersh's book REPORTER where he described a scene where the CIA gave him a story and he was very uncomfortable. He said that "I who had always gotten the secrets was being handed the secrets." Look, again, I've done lots of whistle-blower stories. There's always a balancing test that you make when you're given material. And you're always balancing newsworthiness versus the motives of your sources. In this case, the newsworthiness clearly outweighed any other considerations and I think everybody else who worked on the project agreed. [. . .] I would like to clear up some things that have been misrepresented. Not one of us has actually been paid to do this work [The Twitter Files]. We've all traveled on our [dime], we've hired our personnel on our own. And I've just hired a pretty large team to investigate this issue out of my own pocket.
[. . .]
I think it's none of the government's business which journalists a private company talks to and why. I think every journalist should be concerned about that and the absence of interest in that issue by my fellow colleagues in the mainstream media is an indication of how low the business has sunk. There was once a real Esprit de Corps and comradery within media. Whenever once of us was gone after, we all kind of rose to the challenge. [. . .] That is gone now. We don't protect one another.
There were a couple of very telling e-mails that we published. One was by a [Twitter] lawyer named Stacia Cardille where the company was being so overwhelmed by - by requests from the FBI. In fact, they gave each other a sort-of digital high-five after one batch, saying, "That was a monumental undertaking to clear all of these." But she noted that she believed that the FBI was essentially creating, doing word searches keyed to Twitter's terms of service -- looking for violations of terms of service specifically so that they could make recommendations along those lines which we found interesting. [. . .] I think you cannot have a state-sponsored anti-disinformation effort without directly striking at the whole concept of free speech. I think the two ideas are in direct conflict and this is a fundamental misunderstanding. I think a lot of the people who get into this world -- some of them, I believe, in a well-meaning way, I think they're actually trying to accomplish something positive. But they don't understand what free speech means and what happens when you do this. It undermines the whole concept -- that truth doesn't come from -- it isn't mandated, that we arrive at through debate and discussion.
I've presented the above that way to allow Matt to have his say. We've also focused on big issues. There are two exchanges I'm planning on carrying over to THIRD for the weekend.
But my chief criticism has been that we do not have anything concrete from Matt. So that is one effort to provide/address that. It's also why we're ignoring Michael Shellenberger. And it's why I posted Matt's opening statement last night and why we're including it below.
SelectSubcommitteeontheWeaponizationoftheFederalGovernment
CommitteeontheJudiciary
UnitedStatesHouseofRepresentatives
March9,2023
Chairman [Jim] Jordan,rankingmember [Stacey] Plaskett,membersoftheSelectCommittee,
MynameisMattTaibbi.I'vebeenareporterforover30years,andastaunch
advocatefortheFirstAmendment.Muchofmythreedecadeshavebeenspent
atRollingStonemagazine.
Today,I'mherebecauseofaseriesofeventsthatbeganlatelastyear,whenI
receivedanotefromasourceonline.
Itread:
manipulation...wasgoingonatTwitter?"
out.Tosaytheseattractedintensepublicinterestwouldbeanunderstatement.
Mycomputerlookedlikeaslotmachineasjustthefirsttweetabouttheblockage
oftheHunterBidenlaptopstoryregistered143millionimpressionsand30million
engagements.
Butitwasn’tuntilaweekafterthefirstreport,afterMichaelShellenberger,Bari
Weiss,andotherresearchersjoinedthesearchofthe "Files," thatwestartedto
graspthesignificanceofthisstory.
ofinformationglobally.Afreeinternetwouldoverwhelmallattemptstocontrol
informationflow,itsveryexistenceathreattoanti-democraticformsof
governmenteverywhere.
machinelearningandothertoolstoturntheinternetintoaninstrumentof
censorshipandsocialcontrol.Unfortunately,ourowngovernmentappearstobe
playingaleadrole.
tweetsbeforethe2020election,wherewereadthingslike:
wouldbeattachedtoexcelspreadsheetwithalonglistofnames,whoseaccounts
wereoftensuspendedshortlyafter.
governmentacrosstensofthousandsofemailsledtoaseriesofrevelations.Mr.
Chairman,we'vesummarizedtheseandsubmittedthemtothecommitteeinthe
formofanewTwitterFilesthread,whichisalsobeingreleasedtothepublicnow,
onTwitterat@ShellenbergerMD,and@mtaibbi.
WelearnedTwitter,Facebook,Google,andothercompaniesdevelopedaformal
systemfortakinginmoderation "requests" fromeverycornerofgovernment:the
FBI,DHS,HHS,DOD,theGlobalEngagementCenteratState,eventheCIA.For
everygovernmentagencyscanningTwitter,therewereperhaps20quasi-private
entitiesdoingthesame,includingStanford'sElectionIntegrityProject,
Newsguard,theGlobalDisinformationIndex,andothers,manytaxpayer-funded.
Afocusofthisgrowingnetworkismakinglistsofpeoplewhoseopinions,beliefs,
associations,orsympathiesaredeemedtobemisinformation,disinformation,or
malinformation.Thelattertermisjustaeuphemismfor "truebutinconvenient."
Plainandsimple,themakingofsuchlistsisaformofdigitalMcCarthyism.
orde-platforming,buttofirmslikePayPal,digitaladvertiserslikeXandr,and
crowdfundingsiteslikeGoFundMe.Thesecompaniescananddorefuseserviceto
law-abidingpeopleandbusinesseswhoseonlycrimeisfallingafoulofafaceless,
unaccountable,algorithmicjudge.
punishmentwithoutdueprocessishorrifying.
lastlineofdefenseinsuchcases.
Twitterdeclinedtoremoveanaccountrightaway,governmentagenciesand
NGOswouldcallreportersfortheNewYorkTimes,WashingtonPost,andother
outlets,whointurnwouldcallTwitterdemandingtoknowwhyactionhadnot
beentaken.
policingsystem.
"disinformation" withoutstrikingattheessenceoftherighttofreespeech.The
twoideasareindirectconflict.
alsoinspiredtheinfamous "AlienandSeditionLawsof1798," whichoutlawed
"anyfalse,scandalous,andmaliciouswritingagainstCongressorthepresident."
Hereissomethingthatwillsoundfamiliar:supportersofthatlawwerequicktodenouncetheircriticsassympathizerswithahostileforeignpower,atthetime
France.AlexanderHamiltonsaidThomasJeffersonandhissupporterswere "more
FrenchmenthanAmericans."
countrywherepowerisgiventopeople "whosesuspicionsmaybetheevidence."
silenceourfearsforthesafetyofourrights:thatconfidenceiseverywherethe
parentofdespotism.
societywedon'tmandatetruth,wearriveatitthroughdiscussionanddebate.
Anygroupthatclaimsthe "confidence"todecidefactandfiction,eveninthe
nameofprotectingdemocracy,isalways,itself,therealthreattodemocracy.
Thisiswhy "anti-disinformation" justdoesn’twork.Anyexperiencedjournalist
knowsexpertsareofteninitiallywrong,andsometimestheyevenlie.Infact,
wheneliteopinionistoomuchinsync,thisitselfcanbearedflag.
nowinvestigatinginitiallylabeledtheideathatCovidcamefromalab
"disinformation" andconspiracytheory.NowapparentlyeventheFBItakesit
seriously.
possibletoinstantlydefineandenforceapoliticalconsensusonline,whichI
believeiswhatwe’relookingat.
peoplearoundtheworldisthewaywedon'tletanyonetelluswhattothink,
certainlynotthegovernment.
speak,isthebestdefenseleftagainsttheCensorship-IndustrialComplex.Ifitcan knockoverthefirstandmostimportantconstitutionalguarantee,itwillhaveno
seriousopponentleftanywhere.
mostpreciousright,withoutwhichallotherdemocraticrightsareimpossible.
His opening statement and the testimony we highlighted earlier address my big criticism of The Twitter Files. He's also apparently -- see his remarks above -- hiring staff to assist him with this so maybe we might get an actual report from him at some point.
Some comments? Gerry Connolly -- does he even sit on the Committee. I didn't think so and I don't see him listed as a member. But if he's going to ask questions of a witness, he needs to learn how to say "Taibbi." There were two witnesses for the hearing that lasted over two hours. He thought enough to bring along his ridiculous scarf. He thought enough to bring up Chrissy Teigen -- even if he didn't know how to pronounce her last name either. He's not a member of the Judiciary Committee. He needs to retire. He's been an embarrassment for years. He's wept in Congress and wah-wahed and wah-wahed afterwards about us noting what a big crybaby he is.
He's ridiculous. Gerry at his most bitchiest in the hearing: "Thank you for your understanding of our Committee, I have a different understanding."
Gerry, you big cry baby, it's not your Committee, you don't sit on it. It's more Matt's Committee than it will ever be yours. The only "our" is the US taxpayer. Please stop wasting our money so you can play the soap opera queen diva. And if you're going to be a diva, do something about that awful chin waddle -- or at least don't draw attention to it with a girlish scarf. 56 degrees yesterday but Gerry needed a scarf. All I'm doing is noting the ugly reality. In fact, I think we have video of Gerry leaving the hearing.
And, Stacey, you shouldn't be a Ranking Member if you're so ill prepared that when the witness you're questioning mentions Bari Weiss -- a former NYT columnist and someone who's been publishing The Twitter Files -- and you respond "Mr. Weiss," you really shouldn't be billed as Ranking Member and probably shouldn't be on the Committee.
"I didn't ask a question, I didn't ask you a question, sir." Rude ass Plaskett. I've been at how many hearings and I have never, ever seen anything like that. And I was at the hearing where then-US House Rep Steve Buyer stormed out of the chamber and slammed the door when a journalist was testifying.
Dropping back to September 15, 2010:
Turning to Iraq quickly and briefly, AP reports:
Only a few months into its term, Iraq’s government is suddenly enforcing a long-dormant law banning alcohol imports and arresting people over social media content deemed morally offensive.
The crackdown has raised alarm among religious minorities and rights activists.
Some see the measures as an attempt by Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani to head off potential political challenges from religious conservatives and to distract from economic woes, such as rising prices and wild currency fluctuations.
The ban on the import, sale and production of alcohol was adopted in 2016, but was only published in the official gazette last month, making it enforceable.
Iraq's customs department gave orders on Saturday to start enforcing a ban on alcohol imports that became law last month despite divisions over the legislation. But the specialist retail stores that dominate alcohol sales in the virtual absence of bars or licensed restaurants remained open for business, at least in Baghdad, an AFP correspondent reported. Public alcohol consumption is frowned upon in mainly Muslim Iraq but beverages can be readily purchased from liquor stores, many of them run by Christians or other non-Muslims.
The application of the law, however, drew fire from Christian lawmaker Farouk Hanna Ato, who said the legislation "contradicts the foundations of the Iraqi Constitution.”
