Cross-Examination

• Bobulinski: Hunter’s business was selling Joe Biden: Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski was on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to testify in a closed-door hearing before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. In his opening statement, Bobulinski dispelled Joe Biden’s repeated claim that he had no involvement with his son’s foreign business deals. In fact, peddling foreign access to Joe Biden was Hunter’s job. As Bobulinski put it, “It is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family.” Bobulinski’s testimony comports with that of another former Hunter business associate, Devon Archer, who was on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings at the same time as Hunter. Bobulinski testified that the Biden family’s influence-peddling business spanned the globe. “The only reason any of these international business transactions took place — with tens of millions of dollars flowing directly to the Biden family — was because Joe Biden was in high office,” he said. “The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period.”

• CIA started the Russia collusion hoax: We’ve spilled a lot of bytes on these pages about the Russia collusion hoax — about the deep state’s efforts to cast Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as illegitimate and then hamstring his administration with an unwarranted special counsel investigation. Still, even with last year’s release of the damning Durham Report, there were still some missing elements in this criminal scheme and an utter lack of accountability for the Obama administration officials who carried it out. We’re still not convinced that accountability — criminal or historical — will ever come to Barack Obama and his henchmen, but new information unearthed by a trio of intrepid journalists does shed some new and disturbing light on the hoax. According to new reporting based on “multiple credible sources,” independent journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag say the CIA targeted 26 Trump associates for foreign spy agencies to “reverse target” and “bump” — that is, to actively contact these individuals and then manipulate them. These Trump team members thus became targets of our own intelligence community for collection and misinformation. Shellenberger says there’s also a binder of highly classified information detailing the whole operation — and those materials have gone missing. Shellenberger suggests that the deep state’s desperate search for this binder may have been what triggered the FBI’s July 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Looking back, what we wrote shortly after that unprecedented raid now sounds spot-on: “What we’re hearing now is still speculation … but now we’re told that the feds were worried that Trump might ‘weaponize’ certain materials he’d been collecting in order to exonerate himself, perhaps during the upcoming 2024 presidential campaign.”

• GOP loses House seat vacated by George Santos: White male Democrat beats black female Republican. That was the result of yesterday’s special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, but it wasn’t unexpected given that district’s solidly Democrat composition. Still, it was telling that nearly the entire Leftmedia enterprise located this largely anticipated story above and ahead of yesterday’s far more historic story of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s impeachment. Regardless of media bias, the GOP loss makes its fingertip-hold on the House even more tenuous. Democrat Tom Suozzi, the district’s former congressman, beat Republican Mazi Pilip 54-46 in a race to fill the seat vacated by Republican George Santos, the fabulist who was expelled by his House colleagues in December. This is a Long Island district that Santos had won in a 2022 midterm surprise but that Joe Biden had carried by eight points in 2020. In addition, Suozzi, 61, had held the seat for three terms before Santos before leaving it for an unsuccessful bid for governor. Said National Republican Congressional Campaign Chairman Richard Hudson: “This was an uphill battle. Joe Biden won this district by 8 points, Democrats outspent Republicans two-to-one, and our Democrat opponent spent decades representing these New Yorkers — yet it was still a dogfight. Republicans still have multiple pathways to grow our majority in November.”

• WaPo fact-checker dodges on Biden’s “gun violence” claim: It’s dog-bites-man kind of news, but it’s news nonetheless. Once again, The Washington Post’s “fact-checker” has been caught in a calisthenic effort to hide the truth about gun-related deaths among children and thereby protect his leftist colleagues and their gun-grabbing agenda. As Glenn Kessler would have us believe, gun violence is the number one cause of death for children. But it just isn’t so — not unless you include gang-banging adult teens who simply aren’t “children” by any reasonable definition. As Hot Air’s John Sexton writes, you can arrive at “the talking point the White House seems to prefer by a) including adults as ‘children’ and failing to mention that, and b) leaving out people killed in car accidents beyond traffic crashes.” Those would seem to be essential details, wouldn’t they? No. At least not according to Kessler, whose bold conclusion is as follows: “We will leave this unrated.” Uh-huh. As Sexton sums it up: “Ultimately, Kessler doesn’t give this misleading claim a rating but he does say, ‘It would be better for White House officials to refer to children and teens when citing these reports.’ Yes it would. It would also be nice if fact-checkers and reporters would point out how carefully massaged the data behind these claims are when the claims are made instead of waiting most of a year to explain it.”

• Proof Hunter lied on background check: More damning evidence has emerged surrounding Hunter Biden’s illegal purchase of a firearm. Both images and text messages from his iPhone show that just days prior to his purchasing of the gun, on October 12, 2018, Hunter was purchasing illicit drugs. According to a DOJ filing: “The defendant took photos of crack cocaine and drug paraphernalia on his phone. Also prior to his gun purchase, the defendant routinely sent messages about purchasing drugs.” It further notes that Hunter “messaged his girlfriend about meeting a drug dealer and smoking crack" the day after the gun purchase. Furthermore, Hunter admitted to his then-girlfriend that he was "an addict.” This evidence proves that Hunter lied when filling out a background check to purchase the firearm. Usually, Joe Biden wants to, er, crack down on such crimes. Not this time.

• Cali Senate candidate calls for $50 federal minimum wage: “Just do the math,” she said. And so we did: That’s a minimum wage of $104,000 per year. Nice work if you can get it. Barbara Lee, the Oakland-based hard-leftist and Democrat congresswoman, is behind the proposal, and she’s behind it because she doesn’t understand supply-and-demand economics. She’s right about one thing, though: California has become increasingly unlivable. “In the Bay Area,” Lee says, “I believe it was the United Way that came out with a report that very recently $127,000 for a family of four is just barely enough to get by.” Lee added that we’ve “got to be focused on what California needs and what the affordability factor is when we calculate this wage.” In our federalist system, the 50 states are rightly understood to be the laboratories of republican democracy. And were it not for the guaranteed calamity that would result from a mandated $50-per-hour minimum wage, it might be fun to watch the Golden State give it a try.

• Felony charge for rainbow burnout: Dare to disrespect the LGBTQ rainbow and get hit with a felony charge. That is what a teenage Florida resident in the Clearwater area is facing after he did a burnout with his American flag-toting truck across a rainbow-painted crosswalk. According to Delray Beach law enforcement, the teenager engaged in “reckless action” and “caused significant damage to the streetscape painting, which serves as a symbol of unity and inclusivity for the LGBTQ community.” So laying down some black rubber across a rainbow-painted crosswalk may classify as reckless, but “significant damage”? Please. It may have hurt some folks’ feelings, but that’s about it. Of course, as noted above, this charge has everything to do with offending the Left’s special protected class. After turning himself in, he was released on a $5,250 bond and faces a felony mischief charge.

• Israel raids the UN: As Israel continues its war against Hamas in Gaza, it continues to uncover the sophisticated network of tunnels the terrorist organization has developed over the years. One such command tunnel the IDF followed led directly under the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) headquarters in Gaza. Go figure. This space under UNRWA that the tunnel led to contained a full-scale Hamas command center with data servers that were powered by the UNRWA headquarters directly above it. Furthermore, IDF noted: “Large quantities of weapons were found inside the rooms of the building, including rifles, ammunition, grenades and explosives. Intelligence and documents discovered in the offices of UNRWA officials confirmed that the offices had in fact also been used by Hamas terrorists.” Predictably, UNRWA officials played dumb, claiming that they had left the building five days after the war started and were “unable to confirm or otherwise comment” on what the IDF uncovered.

Headlines

• House impeaches Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for “willful, systemic refusal” to follow federal law, “secure” U.S.-Mexico border (New York Post)

• Dow tumbles 500 points, posts worst day since March 2023 after hot inflation report (CNBC)

• Lloyd Austin released from hospital after treatment for bladder issue (Daily Wire)

• Biden’s upcoming physical exam will not include a cognitive test, White House says (Fox News)

• Chuck Schumer says it’s “right-wing propaganda” to suggest that Biden’s mental acuity has declined (Not the Bee)

• New report says Obama CIA worked with international spy agencies to get Trump (PJ Media)

• Heartland Institute measures the effect of mail-in ballots in 2020 (Heartland.org)

• Embattled UN official doubles down at Harvard, says Israel has no right to self-defense (Daily Wire)

• Harvard students hunger strike for 12 hours in solidarity with Brown protesters (Harvard Crimson)

• Harvard students chant “Palestine is Arab” during on-campus protest (Daily Wire)

• Trans activists occupy Iowa state house to protest legal definitions of man and woman (PM)

• Colorado Dems move to require public schools to socially transition gender-confused students (Washington Free Beacon)

• Jeff Bezos will save over $600 million in taxes by moving to Miami (CNBC)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.