Blinken lied to US Senate about Hunter Biden – lawmaker

Senator Ron Johnson has claimed that the secretary of state falsely testified about his dealings with the president’s son

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken “lied bold-faced” in congressional testimony about his contacts with President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has claimed.

Then a campaign aide to President-elect Biden, Blinken agreed to testify voluntarily to a Senate committee investigating the Biden family’s business dealings in December 2020, Johnson said on Sunday in a Fox News interview. At the time, Joe Biden had picked Blinken to become America’s top diplomat, an appointment that would require Senate confirmation.

“He wanted to be secretary of state,” said Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican. “And now, because of more information that’s come out, we know that he lied bold-faced to Congress about never emailing Hunter Biden. My guess is he told a bunch of other lies that hopefully we’ll be able to bring him and his wife back in.”

Johnson suggested that Blinken and his wife should preserve their records for legal reasons. “You cannot trust Joe Biden. You cannot trust Hunter Biden. You can’t trust the Biden family. You can’t trust so many of the people that they have surrounded themselves with.”

Read more

Former CIA head reveals efforts to help Biden win 2020 election

At the time of Blinken’s voluntary testimony, Joe Biden had just won the 2020 presidential election despite controversy surrounding his family’s business dealings in Ukraine and China. The scandal surfaced just three weeks before the election, when the New York Post reported on the contents of a laptop that Hunter Biden had allegedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop.

Former CIA director Mike Morell testified to Congress earlier this month that shortly after the laptop bombshell came out, Blinken nudged him to organize an open letter claiming that the story was the product of a Russian “disinformation campaign.” Morell, who was among more than 50 former US intelligence officials who signed the letter, admitted to Congress that he was motivated by a desire to help Biden win the election.

Asked by Fox host Maria Bartiromo to clarify whether Blinken lied under oath, perjuring himself, Johnson said, “Yes, he did. He said he did not email Hunter Biden, and now we have those emails. We also know that his wife, using her private email address when she was an employee of the State Department, was basically a conduit between her husband and Hunter Biden as well.”

Johnson called for further investigation of the matter, including issuing a subpoena to force Blinken to testify again. However, Biden’s Democratic Party controls the Senate and its subpoena power.


READ MORE: Ex-stripper wants love-child she had with US president’s son to be a Biden – media

“There’s a lot of truth that has to be uncovered here yet that’s being covered up by the Deep State,” Johnson said. “Let’s face it: The Deep State knows what it did. These co-conspirators inside the agency know exactly what they did. They don’t give up their secrets very easily. They know how to hide things, they know how to slow-roll everybody.”

 

Hungary issues NATO rebuke to Zelensky

Ukrainian president had publicly accused Budapest of behaving “inappropriately” for a NATO member

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has rebuked statements by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who has publicly accused Budapest of behaving “inappropriately” for a NATO member state.

It was “fortunately” not for Zelensky to decide on Hungary’s behavior, Szijjarto said in a Facebook post on Sunday, suggesting also that Budapest already provides enough support for Kiev.

“Hungarian people have already paid an extremely high price for this war,” Szijjarto wrote, adding that multiple representatives of Ukraine’s Hungarian ethnic minority had persisted in the ongoing hostilities between Kiev and Moscow.

If this statement means ‘I respectfully thank the Hungarians for letting in and taking care of more than a million refugees from Ukraine, and I respectfully thank you for continuously sending aid’ then [the response is] ‘You are welcome and can count on us in the future as well.’

The sarcastic remarks by Hungary’s top diplomat apparently came in response to statements made by Zelensky in an interview with Nordic media outlets on Friday. The Ukrainian president accused Budapest of siding with Russia in the ongoing conflict and of treating NATO as an “adversary” altogether.

“It seems to me that confusion reigns among the Hungarian political elite. This is a very strange situation. Can a NATO country simultaneously be with Russia and against NATO?” Zelensky stated, adding that Budapest has been displaying “inappropriate behavior” for a member of the US-led NATO alliance.

Read more

NATO member questions Stoltenberg’s pledge to Ukraine

Hungary has taken a reserved stance on the ongoing hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, which have been raging since February 2022. The country has opposed EU sanctions against Russia, particularly those harming its own interests, such as restrictions in the nuclear and conventional energy fields. Apart from that, Budapest has repeatedly said it will not support Ukraine’s applications to either NATO or the EU. Hungary has also refrained from providing military aid to Kiev and has refused to allow such shipments from elsewhere to flow through its territory.

Hungary and Ukraine have long been at odds over the fate of the ethnic Hungarian minority in Ukraine. Some 150,000 ethnic Hungarians, living primarily in the Transcarpathian region of the country, have been affected by the Ukrainianization efforts undertaken by the authorities of post-Maidan Ukraine. While the crackdown has primarily focused on Russian speakers, it affected other minorities as well.

Kiev, for its part, has long accused Budapest of meddling in the country’s domestic affairs, with its practice of issuing Hungarian passports to Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarians resulting in multiple diplomatic incidents.

Even one American in Iraq is ‘too many’ – Iran

Around 2,500 US troops are currently stationed in the country

Iraq should not permit the presence of US troops on its territory, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told his Iraqi counterpart Latif Rashid at a meeting in Tehran on Saturday.

“Americans are not friends of Iraq,” Khamenei said to Rashid during Saturday’s meeting, according to local state media. “Americans are not friends with anyone and are not even loyal to their European friends.”

Rashid and his delegation arrived in Tehran on Saturday at the invitation of Khamenei for talks intended to boost ties between the two neighboring states. Issues such as sharing water resources, trade, and methods of combating climate change were expected to be tabled, the Rudaw Media Network reported.

According to Reuters, the topic of the United States’ influence in the region was also discussed. Iran strongly opposes a US military presence on its Iraqi border. The US has approximately 2,500 troops in Iraq, many of whom are tasked with advising and assisting regional armed forces in assessing and dealing with the threat of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), which seized sections of Iraq in 2014.

Read more

Xi ‘personally intervened’ in Saudi-Iran talks – diplomat

However, Khamenei has opposed Washington’s military intervention and said he believes it to be a root cause of regional instability. “Even the presence of one American in Iraq is too much,” Reuters quoted him as saying to Rashid on Saturday.

“Iraq’s main effort is to deepen relations with Iran and resolve certain remaining issues between the two countries,” Rashid said afterwards, without commenting on Washington’s interests in Baghdad.

Tensions between Washington and Tehran have increased in recent years, with particular emphasis on Iran’s nuclear program. In 2015, the US joined other world leaders in signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was intended to limit Iran’s nuclear capability in return for the lifting of sanctions.

In 2018, then-President Donald Trump’s administration withdrew from the agreement and reintroduced sanctions on Tehran. More recently, Joe Biden has signaled that he would be keen to re-enter talks with Iran, but no such plan has yet been proposed.

Epstein papers expose his prominent contacts – media

Documents have reportedly shown that the sex offender set meetings with a future CIA chief, an Obama aide and a Rothschild banker

Future CIA director William Burns, banker Ariane de Rothschild and an ex-aide to US President Barack Obama are among the noteworthy people who had meetings with financier Jeffrey Epstein after he was publicly registered as a child-sex offender, according to a newly unearthed trove of documents from the late financier.

The previously unpublicized documents, including thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017, reveal that Epstein booked multiple meetings with such prominent figures as US spy chief William Burns and with Kathryn Ruemmler, a former White House counsel who later became a top lawyer at Goldman Sachs Group, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. All of the encounters were arranged after Epstein served jail time in 2008 for procuring a teenage girl for prostitution in Florida.

Burns, then deputy secretary of state in Obama’s administration, first met with Epstein in 2014 in Washington and later visited his townhouse in Manhattan twice, according to the documents. CIA spokeswoman Tammy Kupperman Thorp told the WSJ that Burns didn’t know anything about the notorious financier “other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector and offered general advice on transition to the private sector.”

Read more

JP Morgan execs joked about Epstein’s pedophilia – lawsuit

Ruemmler had a professional relationship with Epstein, who introduced her to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and other potential legal clients, a Goldman Sachs spokesman told the newspaper. “I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein,” Ruemmler said.

The WSJ said the documents suggested that Epstein knew his guests well. For instance, he asked an assistant to ensure that avocado sushi rolls were served when he met with Ruemmler. He and his staff also discussed whether Ruemmler would be uncomfortable with the presence of young women at his townhouse. One visitor, anthropologist Helen Fisher, said that after a 2016 lunch with Epstein at the townhouse, he invited her to speak with his staff, and six attractive young women filed into the room.  

Ruemmler, who had dozens of meetings with Epstein over the years, was introduced by the convicted pedophile to de Rothschild, the documents show. After the introduction, the de Rothschild family’s Swiss private bank hired Ruemmler’s law firm to assist with US regulatory issues.

In 2013, Epstein asked de Rotshchild to help find him a new assistant, “female . . . multilingual, organized.” She agreed to “ask around.” He had more than a dozen meetings with de Rothschild and sought her help with luxury furnishings and business deals.

Read more

Bill Gates: ‘I caused pain’

After Epstein was arrested in 2019 for alleged sex trafficking of underage girls, the bank, Edmond de Rothschild Group, claimed that de Rothschild never met the financier and had no business ties to him. The bank told the WSJ that its earlier statement was incorrect and that de Rothschild met with Epstein as part of her normal duties, but she had no knowledge of legal proceedings against him or concerns about his conduct.

The earlier case against Epstein in Florida attracted major media coverage and led some politicians to return donations to the financier. Some business associates, such as retail billionaire Leslie Wexner, cut ties with him. “Despite the negative press, Epstein’s days were filled from morning to night with meetings with prominent people,” the WSJ said.

Previously reported Epstein documents showed that he had links with such celebrities as Gates, former President Bill Clinton and the UK’s Prince Andrew. He died in a New York City jail in 2019, allegedly by suicide. His death gave rise to the meme “Epstein didn’t kill himself,” which suggested that he was killed to cover up evidence about the powerful people with whom he associated.


READ MORE: Musk questions establishment silence over Epstein client list

The documents uncovered by the WSJ showed that Epstein also had meetings arranged with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Bard College President Leon Botstein, author Noam Chomsky, movie director Woody Allen and Joshua Cooper Ramo, then co-CEO of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm.