Why didn't they do this six months ago?
Oh right, because they're the Junior Partner in the Uniparty.
Now they say they'll finally get around to this now that Merrick Garland has declared himself to be above any contempt-of-Congress charge.
The recent U.S. House vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt and the subsequent "No, thank you" by the Department of Justice he heads in response has invited renewed scrutiny over the plight of similarly situated individuals -- in particular, former Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon.
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Following the DOJ's declination of prosecution as to Garland, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that they'd see the DOJ in court, noting:
"It is sadly predictable that the Biden Administration's Justice Department will not prosecute Garland for defying congressional subpoenas even though the department aggressively prosecuted Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for the same thing. This is yet another example of the two-tiered system of justice brought to us by the Biden Administration."
Navarro is currently sitting in prison, and Bannon is set to begin serving a four-month sentence on July 1, both for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas and subsequently being held in contempt for it.
Now, GOP House members have taken further action in relation to the seeming double standard. As laid out by Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO) in this tweet thread, the House has introduced a measure aimed at rescinding the subpoenas directed to Navarro and Bannon, as well as Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino, and withdrawing the recommendations to hold them in contempt of Congress.
Don't get excited -- the "moderates" in the party, the not-so-secret allies of the Democrats, will never vote for this.
Speaking on state corruption on a Soviet scale, the FBI knew about Hunter Biden's $120 million deal with a Ukranian oligarch when Joe was VP and I guess they, get this, covered it up.
Quick Hit:
According to Just The News, The FBI has known since 2016 about Hunter Biden's involvement in a $120 million deal with a Ukrainian oligarch during Joe Biden's vice presidency, according to recently disclosed documents.
Key Details:
Hunter Biden's team planned a venture funded by Burisma's owner, Nykola Zlochevsky.
The FBI obtained documents detailing this plan during a 2016 securities fraud investigation.
The information was revealed by former business partner Devon Archer to the House Oversight Committee.
Diving Deeper:
The FBI learned as early as 2016 that Hunter Biden and his partners were working on a venture involving a $120 million investment from Nykola Zlochevsky, the controversial owner of Burisma Holdings. Documents obtained by Just the News reveal that this information, kept from the public for eight years, was uncovered during an investigation of securities fraud nearly a decade ago.
The FBI covered this up so that Joe Biden could claim at his 2020 debate that Hunter Biden never took a single dime from overseas oligarchs.
Then, of course, they lied all through 2019 and 2020 when they staged wargames with the media in which they gamed out a scenario in which falsified documents about Hunter Biden were pushed by Russia in a "hack-and-release" operation.
They did that. They prepared the media to reject any documents that got released about Hunter Biden through a "tabletop simulation" at the Aspen Institute. Bill Kristol was a participant.
They told the media in advance that false, fraudulent documents would be "hacked" and released by Russia, even though they had the laptop they knew these documents would be leaked from, and knew they were 100% real, and would not be released by Russia but by Rudy Guiliani and former FBI agents.
That's so incredible I can't believe it-- but that's what they did.
And not only has no one been prosecuted for this, but no one even missed a scheduled pay-rise.
These documents, totaling 3.39 million, were recently handed over to the House Oversight Committee by Hunter Biden's former business partner, Devon Archer, as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden's conduct. The new evidence indicates that the deal was being orchestrated while Hunter Biden was on Burisma's board and Joe Biden was vice president, overseeing U.S.-Ukraine policy.
The memos show that Hunter Biden was to serve on the board of a new company called Burnham Energy Security LLC, incorporated in Liechtenstein, and funded by Zlochevsky. The venture was planned to be capitalized in 2015 and aimed to transform Burisma into a global energy leader. Hunter Biden's involvement was seen as essential for "credibility" purposes, according to Vadym Pozharskyi, Zlochevsky's lieutenant.
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Hunter Biden's attorney, Abbe Lowell, did not respond to requests for comment from Just the News.
If Trump doesn't prosecute these people -- using the same fanciful "conspiracy to defraud the US of a free and fair election" charge the FBI and DOJ have used against January 6ers -- then he's a failure, a sell-out, and a handmaiden to the death of the Republic.
Speaking of corruption on a Soviet scale -- Niall Fergusen writes that, due to the corruption and incompetence of the Regime, "We're all Soviets now."
He means we're in the same position the Soviet Union was in -- right before it collapsed.
Niall Ferguson: We're All Soviets Now
A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?
By Niall Ferguson
The witty phrase "late Soviet America" was coined by the Princeton historian Harold James back in 2020. It has only become more apposite since then as the cold war we're in--the second one [with China]--heats up.
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But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we--and not the Chinese--might be the Soviets. It's a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: "Are we the baddies?"
I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day--perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?
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Economists keep promising us a productivity miracle from information technology, most recently AI. But the annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973--1980.
The U.S. economy might be the envy of the rest of the world today, but recall how American experts overrated the Soviet economy in the 1970s and 1980s.
And yet, you insist, the Soviet Union was a sick man more than it was a superpower, whereas the United States has no equal in the realm of military technology and firepower.
Actually, no.
We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker's newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker's report--and I recommend you do the same--I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.
On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)
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Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.
But by current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men.
Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, but he had suffered his first major stroke seven years before. Andropov was only 68 when he succeeded Brezhnev, but he suffered total kidney failure just a few months after taking over. Chernenko was 72 when he came to power. He was already a hopeless invalid, suffering from emphysema, heart failure, bronchitis, pleurisy, and pneumonia.
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Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. Leon Aron's brilliant book Roads to the Temple shows just how wretched life in the 1980s had become.
In the great "return to truth" unleashed by Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, Soviet citizens were able to pour forth their discontents in letters to a suddenly free press. Some of what they wrote about was specific to the Soviet context--in particular, the revelations about the realities of Soviet history, especially the crimes of the Stalin era. But to reread Russians' complaints about their lives in the 1980s is to come across more than a few eerie foreshadowings of the American present.
It's a long article, worth the read.