Government & Politics

• FBI informant pleads guilty to lying about Biden: Former FBI source Alexander Smirnov has pleaded guilty “to causing the creation of a false and fictitious record in a federal investigation” in addition to a charge of tax evasion in an “alleged” bribery scandal involving the Biden Crime Family. The timing of this plea is curious, as Joe Biden is on his way out the door and desperately needs any news that might offset the growing perception that he’s the worst president in American history. As The Washington Post reports: “Smirnov was arrested in February on allegations that he falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter Biden and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to ‘protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,’ according to court documents.” Interestingly, the pro-Biden WaPo doesn’t mention the Big Guy’s Ukrainian quid pro quo or his son’s “money for nothing” gig on Burisma’s board, for which he was paid lavishly despite not knowing anything about energy.

• Drug lords, Ponzi schemers, and corrupt officials: Meet Joe Biden’s clemency recipients (Washington Free Beacon) | Satire: Biden issues pardon to the Dark Lord Sauron (Babylon Bee)

• Did Liz Cheney know about the FBI’s J6 informants? A report from the Biden DOJ’s inspector general has finally confirmed what we knew long ago: The Capitol grounds were teeming with FBI informants on January 6, 2021. But where does Republican Senator Mike Lee go to get his reputation back? Lee was one of a handful of GOP senators who wondered about the FBI’s involvement in the events of J6, and for it, he was smeared by Trump-hating former Congresswoman Liz Cheney as a “nutball conspiracy theorist.” As it turns out, Cheney is either a nutball conspiracy theorist herself for suggesting that the FBI was nowhere to be found on the Capitol grounds that day, or she’s simply a lying liar. “It’s very strange that [Cheney] would call people who were raising these questions nut jobs, nut cases … when she herself, a member of this January 6 investigative committee, had access to a lot of information,” Lee noted. “Did she know, in fact, that what Mr. Horowitz put out recently in the inspector general report? Did she know this already? If so, why was she up there, calling into question the sanity of anyone … raising the question?”

• Humor: Ray Epps announces resignation from FBI (Babylon Bee)

• Trump’s positive approval has even Romney feeling charitable: For the first time ever, Donald Trump has a net positive rating. The RealClearPolling average now shows Trump with a plus-two point rating, a significant improvement over his net negative 12.8 back in June. Trump is now enjoying a honeymoon period he never experienced during his first term. Even some of his critics are changing their tune, as Senator Mitt Romney rejected continued efforts to oppose Trump. “Donald Trump won. He won overwhelmingly. He said what he was going to do, and that’s what he’s doing,” the departing Utah senator said. “I mean, people are saying, ‘Oh, I don’t like this appointment or this policy that he’s talking about. But those are the things he said he was going to do when he ran. So you can’t complain about someone who does what he said he was going to do. And I agree with him on a lot of policy fronts. I disagree with him on some things. But it’s like, OK, give him a chance to do what he said he’s going to do and see how it works out.” It appears that Trump is still winning.

• Biden’s message to Kamala: In a speech at the DNC’s holiday get-together in Washington, DC, over the weekend, Joe Biden addressed Kamala Harris. After bizarrely asserting that he knew what he was doing when he picked her as his vice president, Biden turned to Harris directly and said, “You’re not going anywhere, kid, because we’re not going to let you go.” Harris’s loss to Donald Trump sent Democrats into a world of finger-pointing, denial, and some introspection, so the notion that Harris will remain a significant player in their future election strategy is anything but certain. Harris’s political prospects seem most likely to include a run for governor of California, which would effectively take a 2028 presidential run off the table. Biden’s message, likely intended as a show of support, may prove to be accidentally prescient in that her political future may be done; she’s really not going anywhere because she’s come to the end of her political road.

• DA Bragg wants judge not to dismiss conviction but treat Trump as dead: Clearly unbowed and unbroken despite last week’s resounding acquittal of New York City subway hero Daniel Penny, woke Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is pressing ahead in his targeting of Donald Trump — so much so that he’s asking a deeply conflicted Trump-hating judge to entertain a wildly exotic legal maneuver to keep alive a dubious hush-money felony conviction of the president-elect. As The Washington Times reports, “In an 82-page filing last week, Mr. Bragg urged New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan to postpone proceedings until Mr. Trump leaves office in 2029 or use the process of abatement, treating the defendant as though he had died, to ensure the hush money conviction sticks.” As Cal-Berkeley law professor John Yoo argues, Bragg’s suggestion of abatement to keep the conviction hanging over Trump’s head is “another sad example of how this prosecution not only has made-it-up as it went along, but also runs contrary to fundamental principles of law and justice.”

Security

• Under Biden, docket for deportation explodes to 6.3 million (Center Square)

• Trump considering preemptive strikes on Iranian nuke facilities (Hot Air)

• Reports of mass graves tied to Assad found after regime toppled (Newsweek)

Culture

• Biden’s Forest Service wasted hundreds of thousands on DEI workshops: How much taxpayer money has the federal government wasted on diversity, equity, and inclusion? Well, under Joe Biden, the U.S. Forest Service expended over $250,000 on contractors to subject agency employees to DEI workshops. One particular contractor, J. Mattox and Associates, advertises its DEI diversity circles as “safe, supportive space to promote open and respectful exchange of personal stories, and feelings about racial inequalities and social injustice to achieve shared understanding, bridge differences, and strengthen [a] sense of community.” White employees are asked to “explore a range of actions and techniques” to help them act “as allies with people of color to be supportive and take action to combat social injustice and racial inequities in the workplace and the community.” Meanwhile, a 2023 report from the Agriculture Department Office of Inspector General found that the Forest Service had a $5 billion maintenance backlog.

• A child “trans” victim of double mastectomy sues: Gender-“affirming” surgery is deeply disquieting, especially for children. As the Supreme Court weighs whether Tennessee can legally ban such mutilations, consider the case of a “fast-tracked” victim of the trans cultists. Clementine Breen, who’s now a 20-year-old college student, was given puberty blockers at age 12, male hormones at 13, and — good heavens — a double mastectomy at 14. According to the lawsuit, “Around the age of 11 or 12, likely due at least in part to the sexual abuse she experienced as a young child, Clementine began struggling with the thought of developing into a woman and began to believe that life would be easier if she were a boy.” That’s when her parents entrusted her to “the experts” at the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. But their “treatments” didn’t help. “Breen spiraled into depression, psychosis, and attempted suicide,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board writes. “Eventually, with new mental-health care and a 'natural desistance of gender dysphoria as one progresses into adulthood,’ she realized she wasn’t transgender.” Yet the damage to her body had been done. Let’s hope this lawsuit is but the first in a tidal wave of similar legal actions.

• Sick: Luigi Mangione GiveSendGo defense fund crosses $100,000 (Breitbart)

• Texas sues New York doctor for telemedicine prescription of abortion pills (NBC News)

• NYT puts menstrual products in men’s bathrooms (Washington Free Beacon)

• 1 in 20 Canadian deaths were from medically-assisted suicide in 2023 (PM)

• Vatican removes Palestinian keffiyeh Nativity scene amid backlash (Christian Post)

• Elton John calls marijuana legalization “one of the greatest mistakes of all time” (Washington Examiner)

Climate

• We’re not going to be burned alive by the sun monster: All those climate models predicting a catastrophic rise in global temperatures that will melt the polar ice caps and boil the oceans all because we use fossil fuels have repeatedly failed. As skeptics have repeatedly noted, these climate models fail because they don’t account for the myriad of factors that contribute to and impact the global climate. Recently, scientists uncovered a previously unaccounted-for compound known as methanethiol, a naturally produced emission from marine life. Methanethoil acts to reflect the sun’s rays, sending radiation back into space, thereby cooling the planet. This naturally produced marine life emission has a bigger impact on global temperatures than was realized. Go figure — when it comes to our limited scientific knowledge and understanding of the world we inhabit, humility rather than hubris is a wiser way of going about things.

Misc.

• Trump vows to “eliminate Daylight Saving Time” (Daily Wire)

• Trump eyes privatizing U.S. Postal Service, citing financial losses (Washington Post)

• Nancy Pelosi “on the mend” after hip replacement surgery in Germany (The Hill)

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