Five Quick Things: The Biden Bribes Scandal Gets Deeper and Wider - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Five Quick Things: The Biden Bribes Scandal Gets Deeper and Wider
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It’s been a long week — even with the holiday on Tuesday — so we’ll skip the ado and folderol and just jump right into this, starting with the ever-increasing Biden bribery scandal.

1. Gal Luft Might Well Be the ‘Deep Throat’ of the Nuclear-Watergate Biden Bribes Scandal

We’ve got a video to show you. It’s just under 14 minutes long, and it’s fairly painful to watch.

The guy in the video is Dr. Gal Luft, an Israeli professor and think-tank director who had a consulting gig with the Chinese energy company CEFC, the same outfit that paid substantial sums of money to Hunter Biden for … something. Luft is currently under indictment in the Southern District of New York and on the run; the video was shot in an undisclosed location. His indictment is sealed, which is fishy; according to Luft, it gets even worse because the prosecutor in his case, Daniel Richenthal, is the same man with whom he’d met in March of 2019 to discuss evidence he had of the Bidens’ corruption.

That meeting took place at the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. Luft says it was with six members of federal law enforcement; Richenthal and another Southern District of New York prosecutor, and four FBI agents, one of whom was Joshua Wilson of the FBI’s Baltimore office. Wilson was the FBI agent who later seized Hunter Biden’s laptop. As you know, nothing at all happened from then on as the cover-up began.

Luft is what he calls “patient zero” of the Biden bribes case — he’s the “missing” witness in Rep. James Comer’s House investigation into the Biden bribes, and Comer says he’s still a “potential” witness in those hearings. But Luft is not going to testify before Congress because he says he doesn’t believe he’ll get a fair trial on the series of charges New York has filed against him, including that he’s an arms dealer and that he committed Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) violations for having ghostwritten an article in the China Daily newspaper carrying former CIA Director James Woolsey’s byline. As Luft says, if Hunter Biden isn’t prosecuted under FARA, it’s hard to see how anybody else could be.

So far, only Miranda Devine at the New York Post has reported on this. The rest of the legacy corporate media is doing everything they can to choke the life out of the story. But it’s about as close to a smoking gun as you can get. The Watergate story gained major legitimacy because of an anonymous Deep State leaker who went by “Deep Throat” when he dished dirt to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; we didn’t find out until decades later that “Deep Throat” was an FBI suit named Mark Felt. But with this, we don’t have “Deep Throats.” We have people like Gal Luft and Gary Shapley and others who are willing to go public internationally with chapter and verse of what happened with those payments. We even have Ukrainians with recordings and WhatsApp messages with shakedowns of Chinese bigwigs.

Almost nothing about the Biden bribes scandal is hidden or difficult to decipher. It’s clear that the current president of the United States and his family were running a highly aggressive and haphazardly hidden influence-peddling grift, dealing almost solely, if not 100 percent solely, with foreign rather than domestic “clients,” under the clear prospect of his return to power and payoff of those bribes.

A sane country would be impeaching him on a bill charging treason by the weekend, and the uproar of the populace would be so great that members of his own party would be running screaming for the hills as Republicans did with Richard Nixon.

But nobody thinks even the allegations made by Luft will make a difference. And it’s hard to say they’re wrong.

We covered a good bit of the Biden bribes case and its potential import in this week’s Spectacle podcast, with a great guest: PJ Media’s Matt Margolis. Check that out here.

2. And Speaking of the Bidens…

So, we’ve got cocaine showing up at the White House, and of course Queen Karine the spokeslesbian has nothing to say about it, and we’re being fed the spin that this was likely some tourist’s baggie full of Bolivian marching powder that got misplaced.

But that has all the telltale signs of another lie, particularly when we have this just a couple of days later:

https://twitter.com/stockes76/status/1676888853385191425

Not to mention this:

How much more tolerance do you have for the gaslighting and insults to your intelligence?

Again — a sane country would be demanding that the president and the first lady and all of the key White House staff submit to drug testing, just as you’d see corporate HR demanding of workers at a sensitive facility where illegal drugs were found in a work area.

We won’t get that either.

Do you feel that the federal government under this president has any legitimacy at all? It’s a Babylonian captivity. Or a Bidenlonian captivity, in which Ukrainian oligarchs and Chinese plutocrats have a whole lot more influence than American citizens do.

As Charles Krauthammer said, what cannot continue will not continue. And this cannot continue, though right now it might not seem that there’s a viable avenue for stopping it.

3. It’s More Like the Big Crapple Now

What in the hell has happened to New York?

You’ve got a Marine on trial for putting an end to a deranged man’s attacks on subway passengers before they began, you’ve got efforts to stop local pizzerias from using wood-burning ovens to make pies, and you’ve got … whatever it is that Eric Adams is doing with the New York Times:

And if all of that wasn’t enough, there is this:

Fake last name, fake marriage and fake everything.

Bill de Blasio became the mayor of New York City largely because his interracial kids made videos on his behalf, catapulting him from a packed field of aspiring politicians during the Democrat primary.

But there was always an obvious question about his marriage.

Are you still a lesbian?

That was one question lobbed at Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, during a Facebook question-and-answer session hosted by the website Mic.

Ms. McCray, who was taped taking questions from the public in advance of a live session next Tuesday, did not say “no.”

Instead, the first lady visibly rolled her eyes and shook her head. She moved on to the next question.

Ms. McCray, a poet and activist, has been married to Mr. de Blasio for 21 years but once identified as a lesbian. In a 1979 magazine essay that was first unearthed by the Observer shortly before Mr. de Blasio ran for mayor, Ms. McCray described in detail her experiences as a lesbian.

The essay was frankly titled “I am a Lesbian.”

Now that Bill de Blasio’s career is over, so is his marriage.

Mr. de Blasio and Ms. McCray are separating. They are not planning to divorce, they said, but will date other people. They will continue to share the Park Slope townhouse where they raised their two children, now in their 20s — the vinyl-sided hub of a thoroughly modern political family whose mixed-race symbolism helped send a spindly progressive long shot to City Hall

So nothing is going to change except that they no longer have a need to pretend for the public?

Is it so hard now for New York to find even slightly below-average human leadership?

I suppose the answer is yes. Not to pick on New York, especially when these are the same problems evident in Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and every other large city run by Democrats.

It just seems more acute in New York. Not long ago, it was the best-run large city in America. Now it’s a circus.

Last night I ran across the original Death Wish, Charles Bronson’s 1970s vigilante classic set in a failed New York City. I’d never actually watched the whole thing.

I’d say it was more or less reflective of today given the awful condition of the city and its leadership depicted in the film, but that wouldn’t be true. Bronson’s character gets off with an admonition to skip town by the NYPD rather than a prosecution, despite the fact that they had him dead to rights for a half-dozen killings. When you see what Daniel Penny is having to go through for a clear case of justifiable homicide, what you realize is that New York is a lot more criminal friendly than the Bronson 1970s version.

4. What to Take From the Mass Shooting in Philadelphia

Pretty much the same thing to take from the one in Nashville, frankly.

We’re talking about this:

Which sure didn’t give much of a description of what really happened, which was more like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NyRoo2GHN0

Wonder how come we never get to find out this stuff from the legacy corporate media?

The Nashville shooter was outed as a woman who wanted to be a man — largely because conservative news outlets made such a stink about it before the Machine narrative could kick in. With this, it’s all about the gun-grabbing.

Seems like a very small group of people is increasingly punching above its weight in producing these atrocities, though. Wonder if this has anything to do with the Transgender Day of Vengeance and the other rather unfriendly rhetoric that we keep hearing from the active ingredients in that community.

None of which dispels the notion, held by many, that these are unstable and disproportionately dangerous people who need psychiatric intervention rather than coddling and civil-rights protections. Somebody who demands that you submit to their fantasies or else you’re committing an offense against him or her is much more likely to cause you harm than somebody who doesn’t. It’s amazing how we’re being bullied into ignoring that obvious fact.

5. Sound of Freedom Is Wiping the Floor With Disney

Here’s a cool little screen grab from Box Office Mojo:

Sound of Freedom, with an original production budget of just under $15 million and a total budget of about $20 million, is appearing in 2,634 theaters across the country. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, with an estimated budget of $295 million, is in 4,600 theaters.

The Indiana Jones release has grossed about $60 million so far in domestic box office, and a little under $160 million worldwide. It’s not going to make a profit.

I haven’t seen it. What I’ve heard about it isn’t good. Indiana Jones is an old, tired loser who has to be led around by the nose by a feminist chick who beats up all the guys, blah blah blah.

And it sounds like the Indiana Jones flop might be the death knell for the Woke Typhoid Mary of movie failures, that being Kathleen Kennedy, who as the head of Lucasfilm has destroyed both the Star Wars and now Indiana Jones franchises. There is supposedly a big emergency pow-wow now happening at Disney, the parent company of Lucasfilm, over the fact that between The Flash, this new Indiana Jones flick, and Elemental, they’re now 0-for-3 on woke summer blockbusters.

And they just had their lunch eaten by Angel Studios.

But it’s even worse than that.

Did you know that Sound of Freedom was actually shot five years ago? It’s a new movie in the sense it was just released, but it’s not new-new.

Originally, it was going to be a 20th Century Fox feature.

But 20th Century Fox was bought by … Disney.

And Disney sat on Sound of Freedom until Angel Studios acquired it, put an extra $5 million into the project that they crowdfunded, and released it under their banner. The film’s almost assuredly going to double or triple its production budget in box office gross. It crossed into the black on Wednesday, the second day it was in theaters.

So Disney, which is now branded as the film conglomerate that actively seeks to groom kids for exotic sexualities, sat on the little movie about child sex trafficking for five years and now has that little movie coming back to haunt them when it beats their giant, can’t-miss summer tentpole property on the biggest movie day of the year.

Don’t tell me all is lost. All is most certainly not lost when delicious irony like this is still possible.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Additionally, he's the author of the new book The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, available at Amazon.com. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his three Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition and Retribution at Amazon. Scott's other project is The Speakeasy, a free-speech social and news app with benefits - check it out here.
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