House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is not ruling out impeaching Joe Biden over his failure in Afghanistan. In an interview Sunday, the representative said Congress has a constitutional responsibility to hold Biden and his officials accountable for the ongoing crisis.
While President Biden retreats from Afghanistan in order to meet the Taliban’s arbitrary deadline of August 31, he is abandoning American civilians still stranded there.
The Commander-in-Chief should not take orders from terrorists.
McCarthy added, the Biden administration did not share with Congress its plans and data on the withdrawal. He stressed Biden’s officials apparently evaded congressional oversight. McCarthy went on to say GOP lawmakers are collecting the data and they may draft articles of impeachment against Biden if it’s supported by facts.
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Biden’s mishandling of the Afghan crisis is “much worse than Saigon.” During an interview Sunday, the Kentucky lawmaker said Vietnamese militants did not seek to attack the U.S. after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
However, the senator pointed out Islamic terrorists are now plotting against the U.S. because they are emboldened and excited by Biden’s weakness. He stressed the Taliban may try and take U.S. hostages while ISIS could stage terror attacks on U.S. soil.
McConnell added, Biden’s failure in Afghanistan is now sparking fears for the future of America.
The revelations come at a sensitive time for the FBI and Director Christopher Wray, who has insisted widespread problems revealed about the bureau’s conduct in the now-discredited Russia collusion case have been fixed even as new revelations of misconduct come to light.
The FBI, already under fire for its handling of FISA warrants and confidential informants, is enduring more scrutiny as the Justice Department admits agents failed to disclose to a court that they had paid — to the tune of six figures — a white supremacist publisher for years to be an investigative source.
The admission came in a series of court filings this month in the case of Kaleb Cole, a Washington state man accused of being a member of the white supremacist group Atomwaffen and participating in an intimidation campaign against Jewish Americans and minority journalists. Cole has pleaded innocent and awaits trial.
Cole’s lawyers filed a motion to suppress evidence gathered against their client on the grounds that the FBI had failed to disclose in a search warrant application that a publisher of extremist literature had been paid about $144,000 over 16 years to be an informant, including $82,000 for work in the case against Cole. The confidential informant (CI) also had an earlier felony conviction that wasn’t disclosed, court records show.
The filings don’t identify the informant by name but describe him as a publisher who “owns and operates a publishing company that distributes white supremacist writings.”
“The CI began his long career as a professional informant in exchange for consideration regarding his sentence on a federal conviction for possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number and an unregistered silencer,” Cole’s lawyers argued in an Aug. 13 motion.
“The failure to include the information about the CI’s incentives is made more egregious by the fact that the warrant application incriminated Mr. Cole based almost solely on the alleged observations of the CI,” the lawyers added.
A week later, the Justice Department admitted agents had mistakenly omitted the information, but argued the search warrant would have been approved anyway before the informant’s information had been corroborated.
“Although the defense is correct that certain potential impeachment information about the informant was not included in the affidavit, that omission is hardly fatal,” the DOJ said. “The omitted information was limited to the fact that the informant was well compensated by the FBI over a 16-year period, and was convicted of a firearms crime over 15 years ago.”
U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour has yet to rule on the motion.
But the revelations come at a sensitive time for the FBI and Director Christopher Wray, who has insisted widespread problems revealed about the bureau’s conduct in the now-debunked Russia collusion case have been fixed even as new revelations of oversights and misconduct come to light.
In addition, special prosecutor John Durham continues an investigation into whether FBI supervisors, agents or lawyers committed crimes during the Russia probe. One ex-FBI lawyer has already pleaded guilty to falsifying evidence.
And new questions have emerged about the FBI’s conduct during an investigation into an alleged white supremacist plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, after Buzzfeed News disclosed the FBI had more informants involved in the plot, 12 in total, than defendants.
“Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects,” Buzzfeed reported. “Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. “The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”
The US should demand that the Taliban (banned in Russia) return all the American equipment that was seized during its takeover of the country from Afghan security forces or employ military force against the group, Former US President Donald Trump said on Monday.
“All equipment should be demanded to be immediately returned to the United States, and that includes every penny of the $85 billion dollars in cost”, Trump said in a statement. “If it is not handed back, we should either go in with unequivocal Military force and get it, or at least bomb the hell out of it.”
Trump criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal in the statement, saying that never in history has a withdrawal been handled so poorly.
Although the US has yet to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, the Pentagon has repeatedly said that leadership has been in communication with the group on the ground in Kabul to coordinate free passage and security during the withdrawal.
Diners will be asked to present proof of vaccination via the OpenTable app
In an under the radar announcement last week, popular restaurant reservation service OpenTable revealed that it will integrate vaccination status into it’s app and website forms, to enable establishments to enforce vaccine pass mandates.
OpenTable announced that it will partner with digital identification company CLEAR, allowing establishments to indicate whether they require diners to present proof of vaccination.
Customers will then be asked to create a CLEAR account via the OpenTable app and connect their COVID vaccine certificate if they wish to eat in a restaurant that mandates it.
To help diners easily provide proof of vaccination at restaurants requiring it to dine indoors, OpenTable and secure identity company CLEAR are partnering to offer diners a simple way to show proof of vaccination through CLEAR’s digital vaccine card. https://t.co/q7H4xrYyns
This is yet another indication that the two tier societies we see forming in large metropolitan areas such as New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles are coming to the rest of America and the world.
There are still some hold outs, including Texas, where businesses have been put on notice that asking for proof of a Covid vaccination is illegal in the state.
As we recently noted, a Fox News poll found that a half of Americans believe vaccine mandates and COVID passports for “safety” are more important than “protecting freedom”.
An unclassified U.S. intelligence report summarized for the public on Aug. 27 makes clear that the first cases of COVID-19 were at least as early as Nov. 19, 2019, and that the first cluster of cases occurred at least by December 2019 in Wuhan.
The report makes clear that China is hiding information about the origins of COVID-19. But other scientific research from Harvard University indicates a possible origin as early as Aug. 1, 2019. President Joe Biden’s new intelligence summary does not address this important data.
In conjunction with Friday’s release of intelligence analysis, Biden denounced China for hiding the origins of the virus. But his administration does not go nearly far enough in pinpointing a potential August 2019 origin, assigning blame, and demanding reparations for at least $19 trillion owed globally, due to 6.9 million lost lives. This sum does not include additional amounts owed for economic damages, non-lethal suffering, medical costs, criminal penalties, and future damages.
Biden, who spoke to the public about the report, denounced China’s lack of cooperation in the investigation. He said in a statement, “Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People’s Republic of China, yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it. To this day, the PRC continues to reject calls for transparency and withhold information, even as the toll of this pandemic continue[s] to rise. We needed this information rapidly, from the PRC, while the pandemic was still new.”
Biden implied that China was being irresponsible in its lack of transparency. “Responsible nations do not shirk these kinds of responsibilities to the rest of the world,” he said. “Pandemics do not respect international borders, and we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics.”
The President said that he would continue to pressure China to release more information. “The United States will continue working with like-minded partners around the world to press the PRC to fully share information and to cooperate with the World Health Organization’s Phase II evidence-based, expert-led determination into the origins of COVID-19—including by providing access to all relevant data and evidence. We will also continue to press the PRC to adhere to scientific norms and standards, including sharing information and data from the earliest days of the pandemic, protocols related to biosafety, and information from animal populations.”
Biden’s statement does not sufficiently emphasize potential COVID-19 signals in Wuhan as early as Aug. 1, 2019. According to the Harvard study, which was conducted at the medical school, 2019 internet search statistics and satellite imagery of auto traffic around five major hospitals in Wuhan are signals of a much earlier COVID-19 spread.
Dr. John Brownstein at Harvard told ABC News last June that the traffic increase, measured over two years with 108 usable satellite images from approximately March 2018 to May 2020, and increasing in fall 2019, coincided with an increase of Chinese internet search queries for “symptoms that would later be determined as closely associated with the novel coronavirus.”
A medical worker takes a swab sample from a resident to be tested for COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, on May 14, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
The data shows a rise in vehicles parked around the five hospitals starting about Aug. 1, 2019, peaking on Dec. 1, 2019, which was the date of the first confirmed case of COVID-19, and falling rapidly into March 2020, presumably because of countermeasures, including the Wuhan lockdown starting on Jan. 23, 2020. Could Chinese countermeasures have started as early as Dec. 1, 2019, while waiting to tell the world until the data started to leak out on Dec. 30, 2019?
Some of the fall 2019 increases in hospital traffic that Harvard measured are as much as 90 percent compared with the same time in the prior year.
Brownstein did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
U.S. intelligence learned of the virus in late November and alerted the Pentagon, according to four ABC News sources.
Individual Chinese doctors attempted to alert the public of the unknown virus on Dec. 30, 2019. The next day, Chinese social media started censoring information about the virus. Chinese officials waited until that day—Dec. 31, 2019—to formally notify the WHO of the virus that emerged in Wuhan.
Biden ordered the August 2021 intelligence report in May, to reassess the virus’ origin, and determine whether China’s scientists should be blamed. He should also have ordered more analysis on the sequence of events to control the virus once the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) realized that it transmitted from human to human. The CCP apparently realized such transmissibility but started to censor warnings coming from doctors in China as early as Dec. 31, 2019, thereby putting the world at risk.
Biden received the new intelligence report this past week of Aug. 27, according to the Financial Times. The government published a summary that day, which stated, “China’s co-operation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of Covid-19.” It continued, “Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist[s] sharing information and blame[s] other countries, including the United States.”
Former President Donald Trump, as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, claimed that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a hypothesis that scientists are increasingly considering given the failure to find a species through which the virus might have naturally jumped to humans.
Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that in November 2019 (three months after the increase in Wuhan hospital traffic), three of the Wuhan lab researchers were hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms. These reports apparently prompted Biden to order the latest investigation.
One of the four intelligence agencies that participated in the report had “moderate confidence” that the Wuhan lab was the origin of the virus, due to its risky work on viruses. The Wuhan lab hosted years of research into bat coronaviruses, including gain-of-function manipulation of virus genetic codes to see how they could become transmissible to humans.
This gain-of-function research on viruses is clearly unethical, knowing what we do now: that it could lead to lab leaks that cause pandemics.
However, the report threw cold water on theories that CCP scientists developed SARS-CoV2 as a biological weapon. None of the four agencies believed this theory. The report ruled out that Chinese officials knew about the virus prior to its emergence among humans in 2019. This lack of knowledge is what convinced, albeit at a low level of confidence, the agencies to conclude that the disease spread naturally from animals to humans.
Regardless, the CCP is culpable for its mishandling of the initial outbreak, its censorship of warnings that started on Dec. 30, 2019, from individual doctors in China, and its failure to control the virus once it emerged into an epidemic. The Biden administration is wrongly and relatively silent on all of this, and most importantly, has failed to demand reparations of trillions of dollars that the CCP owes the world for what should be considered criminal negligence.
VAERS data released Friday by the CDC showed a total of 623,343 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 13,627 deaths and 84,466 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and Aug. 20, 2021.
Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that between Dec. 14, 2020 and Aug. 20, 2021, a total of 623,343 total adverse events were reported to VAERS, including 13,627 deaths — an increase of 559 over the data released last week.
There were 84,466 reports of serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 3,416 compared with the previous week.
Of the 6,128 U.S. deaths reported as of Aug. 20, 13% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 18% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 32% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.
In the U.S., 360.3 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of Aug. 20. This includes: 203 million doses of Pfizer, 143 million doses of Moderna and 14 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J).
The data come directly from reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.
Every Friday, VAERS makes public all vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date, usually about a week prior to the release date. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.
This week’s U.S. data for 12- to 17-year-olds show:
The most recent reported deaths include a 15-year-old boy (VAERS I.D. 1498080) who previously had COVID, was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy in May 2021 and died four days after receiving his second dose of Pfizer’s vaccine on June 18, when he collapsed on the soccer field and went into ventricular tachycardia; and a 13-year-old girl (VAERS I.D. 1505250) who died after suffering a heart condition after receiving her first dose of Pfizer.
Lisa Shaw, 44, received her first dose of AstraZeneca on April 29. On May 13, she was taken by ambulance to University Hospital of North Durham after having a headache for several days. She was transferred to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, where she received a number of treatments, which included cutting away part of her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. She died May 21.
According to the BBC, Tuomo Polvikoski, a pathologist, told the coroner Shaw was fit and healthy before receiving the vaccine. When asked about the underlying cause of the fatal clotting on her brain, Polvikoski said the clinical evidence “strongly supports the idea that it was, indeed, vaccine-induced.”
FDA grants full approval of Pfizer vaccine, critics blast agency for lack of data, scientific debate
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Aug. 23 granted full approval to Pfizer’s “Comirnaty” COVID vaccine for people 16 years and older — without allowing public discussion or holding a formal advisory committee meeting to discuss data.
This is the first COVID vaccine approved by the FDA, and is expected to open the door to more vaccine mandates by employers and universities.
According to The Washington Post, Pfizer’s vaccine approval was the fastest in the agency’s history, coming less than four months after Pfizer/BioNTech filed for licensing on May 7.
According to an article published Aug. 20 in the BMJ, transparency advocates criticized the FDA decision not to hold a formal advisory committee meeting to discuss Pfizer’s application for full approval — an important mechanism used to scrutinize data.
Last year the FDA said it was “committed to use an advisory committee composed of independent experts to ensure deliberations about authorization or licensure are transparent for the public.”
But in a statement to The BMJ, the FDA said it did not believe a meeting was necessary ahead of the expected full FDA approval.
Kim Witczak, a drug safety advocate who serves as a consumer representative on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, said it’s concerning that full approval is based on only six months’ worth of data — despite clinical trials designed for two years — and there’s no control group after Pfizer offered the product to placebo participants before the trials were completed.
FDA approval letter causes confusion, raises questions
Buried in the fine print of Monday’s approval of the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine are two critical facts that affect whether the vaccine can be mandated, and whether Pfizer can be held liable for injuries, according to Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Meryl Nass.
Here's my latest with @NassMeryl… Buried in fine print of Monday's approval by FDA of Pfizer Comirnaty COVID vaccine are 2 critical facts that affect whether vaccine can be mandated + whether Pfizer can be held liable for injuries.https://t.co/QtpHufCKDI
Kennedy and Nass, who accused the FDA of pulling a “bait and switch” on the public, said the FDA acknowledged that while Pfizer has “insufficient stocks” of the newly licensed Comirnaty vaccine available, there is “a significant amount” of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine — produced under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) — still available for use.
The FDA decreed that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine under the EUA should remain unlicensed — but that it can be used “interchangeably” (page 2, footnote 8) with the newly licensed Comirnaty product.
Second, the FDA said the licensed Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine and the existing EUA Pfizer vaccine are “legally distinct,” but said their differences do not “impact safety or effectiveness.”
Kennedy and Nass said EUA products are experimental under U.S. law. Both the Nuremberg Code and federal regulations provide that no one can force a human being to participate in this experiment.
Under 21 U.S. Code Sec.360bbb-3(e)(1)(A)(ii)(III), “authorization for medical products for use in emergencies,” it is unlawful to deny someone a job or an education because they refuse to be an experimental subject, they wrote.
At least for the moment, the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine has no liability shield. Vials of the branded product, which say “Comirnaty” on the label, are subject to the same product liability laws as other U.S. products, Kennedy and Nass said, adding that “Pfizer is therefore unlikely to allow any American to take a Comirnaty vaccine until it can somehow arrange immunity for this product.”
On Thursday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) wrote the FDA raising similar concerns and questions about the agency’s approval of the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine.
In his letter, Johnson asked FDA Acting Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodruff why the FDA didn’t grant full licensure for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that is already in use and available in the U.S., and how the agency will ensure that those being vaccinated under mandates will receive the FDA-approved version.
As COVID surges among fully vaccinated, CDC fails to properly track breakthrough cases
As The Defender reported Aug. 24, the most recent data from the CDC shows 9,716 breakthrough cases resulting in hospitalization or death as of Aug. 16. However, the agency states those numbers are underreported.
On May 1, the CDC made a decision to stop tracking all breakthrough cases and instead only track cases in the fully vaccinated that resulted in hospitalization or death. That leaves public health officials without the full data that can answer questions as the new Delta variant spreads.
In an interview with PBS News Hour, Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist and research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital and former science communications lead at the COVID Tracking Project, said not tracking breakthrough data with as much granularity as we would hope is “basically creating blind spots in our understanding of the true impact of the virus, especially the variants that are circulating so widely in the United States.”
The New York Times recently published data from seven states — California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Virginia — that keeps particularly detailed records on breakthrough cases.
Analysis showed that in six of the states, breakthrough infections made up 18% to 28% of all newly diagnosed cases of COVID in the past several weeks, and 12% to 24% of all COVID-related hospitalizations, with reported deaths higher than the CDC’s original estimate of .5%.
Pfizer scheme to churn out ‘variant-specific’ vaccines will lead to more variants, experts warn
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla on Tuesday told Fox News the company has a system in place to turn around a variant-specific jab within 95 days in the likelihood a vaccine-resistant COVID strain emerges, but experts warn that strategy will backfire.
Bourla said Pfizer hasn’t identified any variants that could escape the vaccine yet. However, that statement contradicts the findings of numerous studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which show waning immunity against the Delta variant.
Dr. Peter McCullough, board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular diseases and clinical lipidology, said in a recent podcast: “There are clearly sources of information to suggest that once we start vaccination and we get more than 25% of the population vaccinated, we will allow one of the variants that’s in the background to emerge because it’s resistant to the vaccine.”
“That [theory] makes sense,” McCullough said. “Just like an antibiotic, once we get to a certain percentage of coverage with an antibiotic, we’ll allow a resistant bacteria to move forward.”
According to Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA and DNA vaccines, worldwide expert in RNA technologies and Harvard-trained physician, continued mass vaccination campaigns will enable new, more infectious viral variants.
Even if we had complete uptake in vaccines and complete masking, Malone said, CDC data makes it clear that at best we can slow the spread of Delta but we can’t stop it.
New CDC studies show waning vaccine immunity to Delta variant
Two studies released Aug. 24 by the CDC showed fully vaccinated Americans’ immunity to COVID is waning as the Delta variant now makes up 98.8% of U.S. COVID cases.
One study found vaccine effectiveness among frontline healthcare workers declined by nearly 30 percentage points since the Delta variant became the dominant strain in the U.S.
The analysis also concluded COVID vaccines were only 80% effective in preventing infection among the frontline healthcare workers.
The second study examined 43,000 Los Angeles residents 16 and older. Between May 1 and July 25, 25.3% of COVID infections occurred in fully vaccinated persons and 3.3% were in partially vaccinated persons.
The CDC cautioned in its report that vaccine effectiveness “might also be declining as time since vaccination increases and because of poor precision in estimates due to limited number of weeks of observation.”
The publication of the new studies followed a week after the CDC released its first three reports on vaccine efficacy — which also showed waning vaccine protection against the Delta variant.
172 days and counting, CDC ignores The Defender’s inquiries
According to the CDC website, “the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”
On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with a written list of questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. We have made repeated attempts, by phone and email, to obtain a response to our questions.
Despite multiple phone and email communications with many people at the CDC, and despite being told that our request was in the system and that someone would respond, we have not yet received answers to any of the questions we submitted. It has been 172 days since we sent our first email to the CDC requesting information.
Over 1,000 church leaders, as well as over 7,000 church members and participants, voiced their objection to the implementation of a “vaccine passport” scheme in Australia in an open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
The letter, called The Ezekiel Declaration, was written by three pastors from Queensland who pledged to fiercely oppose any “vaxx certificate system” that was imposed on the church, reports the Caldron Pool.
The letter was written by Timothy Grant of Mount Isa Baptist Church, Matthew Littlefield of New Beith Baptist Church, and Warren McKenzie of Biota Baptist Church when it became apparent that there were few citizens opposing the growing “medical two-tiered society.”
“For many Christian leaders and Christians, this is an untenable proposal that would inflict terrible consequences on our nation,” reads the letter in part.
Listing five reasons for their objection, the letter notes that the current generation is not the first to be confronted with the issue of “vaccine passports.”
It quoted Christian theologian Abraham Kuyper– who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905– who wrote in 1880 the necessity to forgo vaccination certificates.
“Vaccination certificates will therefore have to go… The form of tyranny hidden in these vaccination certificates is just as real a threat to the nation’s spiritual resources as a smallpox epidemic itself,” wrote Kuyper.
Thus, the letter argued that “free citizens” should have the opportunity to give their permission, particularly when the vaccination deployment is being referred to as a “clinical trial.”
A “vaccine passport,” the group said, would only symbolize a hazardous abyss of tyranny that would not foster freedom and wellbeing, but would rather dehumanize and subjugate its people under the guise of “personal health and safety.”
The second argument given was that a sizable part of the population is already overburdened and on the brink of hopelessness. It says that, unsurprisingly, government leaders were obliged to declare a state of emergency in March 2020. The danger was unknown at the time, and the world’s capacity to deal with it had not been tried.
Aside from psychological consequences, the letter highlighted missed diagnoses of other diseases by physicians or patients remaining at home, the impact on delayed and incoherent education of children, young people graduating into a closed economy, finding it impossible to find employment, and poverty.
Their third point of contention was that one’s conscience should never be forced.
“A government should never coerce conscience, but rather respect the important function that it carries in aiding a person to worship God freely and live obediently before the state,” said the letter. “As we have noted, Jesus commands Christians to count the cost, and many believers do not feel that we have all the information necessary to make a decision on this vaccine at this point in time.”
Consequently, they call on the Australian government to refrain from using a “vaccine passport” which would force many people in the country to violate their conscience.
Fourth, making vaccination a requirement so people can get back to their normal lives would be counterproductive to safeguarding others.
As an example, the letter cited a CDC research that found that “74% of people infected in Massachusetts Covid outbreak were fully vaccinated,” emphasizing in particular that the four who were vaccinated were hospitalized.
“As it is evident that vaccines do not prevent infection, to restrict a person’s access to society based on a medical choice is questionable,” states the letter.
The fifth objection came from Christian leaders, who said that they “find it untenable that we would be expected to refuse entry into our churches to a subgroup of society based on their medical choice.”
They claim that only Jesus Christ has the right to set the rules of corporate worship, which instruct them not to discriminate based on race or medical preference.
“I knew many Christians were confused by this,” Pastor Littlefield told Caldron Pool in a statement.
“They want to know what pastors are thinking. So many people have heard Christians argue in apologetics that the Church has done much good for society, and now when so much is happening, the Church appears silent,” he added.
Those who want to read and even sign the letter can do so here.
“My son was one of the Marines who died yesterday… I woke up at 4:00 this morning to Marines at my door telling me my son is dead.”
Those were the words of Kathy McCollum, mother of 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, who went on to direct most of her grief and anger towards President Biden and what she says was a complete and total mismanagement of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“She (Jen Psaki) said my son didn’t die in vein. But guess what, my son did die in vein. This was an unnecessary debacle that could have been handled properly,” the Gold Star mom explained. “They had months and months to remove everyone from Afghanistan, and they chose not to. And so they sent in . . . 6,000 troops, and my son, through the laws of statistics, my son was one of the ones who just got blown up in a freaking terrorist bomb yesterday.”
Listen to the call here:
Two weeks ago, 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum was transferred to Afghanistan.
He was 20 years old and was going to be a father next month. He died in the suicide bombing.
Listen to his mom's call with Andrew Wilkow yesterday. It is truly heartbreaking. pic.twitter.com/WRo3kxhelL
“I couldn’t just sit by idly because I think I need to process through anger instead of tears.”
McCollum explained her son had just gotten married in February and he and his wife were expecting a child in September. She also fondly remembered her son as extremely intelligent, who could’ve pursued any option in life he wanted.
He decided, selflessly, to serve his country in the military.
His mother had harsh words for President Biden, repeatedly calling him “feckless” and “dementia ridden” as she admittedly was “processing her grief” through anger. “Instead of grieving or crying, I’m getting mad.”
She also blamed her son’s death on not only President Biden, but anyone who voted for Biden in the first place.
The call went viral over the weekend. McCollum isn’t the only family member of the victims of the Kabul attack. The father of Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui also vented his frustration with how the withdrawal was poorly executed and attributed that to his son’s death.
The Kabul Airport “looked like a turkey shoot” Steve Nikoui said, referring to the crowds being funneled through a couple of narrow entry points. “It was just basically so chaotic and not really planned out.”
He also said he believed this all could’ve been avoided if they chose to conduct the evacuations through Bagram Airbase rather than abandoning it in July.
Continue lifting up the grieving families who lost loved ones in the Kabul Airport attack in your prayers.
Company claims Flynn represents ‘possible reputational risk to our company.’
Chase Bank has canceled General Mike Flynn’s personal credit card, citing “possible reputational risk to our company.”
🚨🚨BREAKING: Chase Bank cancels its credit card accounts with General Flynn citing possible “reputational risk” to their company. In case there was any doubt what is happening in this country. @TracyBeanzOfficial pic.twitter.com/GIyQHXgW9l
National Security Adviser, was notably set up by the FBI in an unauthorized ‘perjury trap’ over his conversations with the former Russian ambassador over sanctions related to alleged interference in the 2016 US election.
Flynn pleaded in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about contacts with the former Russian ambassador during the 2016 presidential transition – only to have the Justice Department drop the case after Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, fought for the release of information suggesting that the FBI laid the ‘perjury trap‘ to try and get him to lie. In January 2020, however, Flynn withdrew his guilty plea in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. – stating that he was “innocent of this crime” and was coerced by the FBI and prosecutors under threats that would charge his son with a crime.
According to documents uncovered by Flynn attorney Sidney Powell, the FBI had already come to the conclusion that Flynn was guilty prior to their unauthorized interview with him in January, 2017 – and that agents were working together to see how best to corner the 33-year military veteran and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The bureau deliberately chose not to show him the evidence of his phone conversation to help him in his recollection of events, which is standard procedure. Even stranger, the agents that interviewed Flynn later admitted that they didn’t believe he lied during the interview with them.
What’s more, the entire FBI investigation of Flynn appeared to have been instigated by Russiagate operative Stephan Halper, who lied about Flynn’s relationship with a Russian academic.
After the FBI’s malfeasance was uncovered, the Trump Justice Department dropped all charges against Flynn – conceding that the FBI had no basis to interview him on January 24, 2017.
The judge, Emmet Sullivan, refused to drop the case,and has instead asked a federal appeals court – twice – whether he can ignore the DOJ, after asking a government-paid private lawyer to argue against Flynn – only to eventually relent after Trump pardoned his former NatSec adviser.
There is a time and a place for animal rescue. That time and place isn’t Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021.
In the capital of a failed state, citizens of Western countries — as well as the Afghans who worked with them and likely face severe retribution at the hands of the Taliban — are trying to flee the country the only way they can: through Hamid Karzai International Airport.
The airport has seen one terror attack that killed 13 U.S. service members and at least 169 Afghans, according to The Associated Press. A drone strike that U.S. authorities say prevented another suicide bombing at the airport on Sunday has claimed the lives of numerous innocent civilians in Kabul, CNN reported, including at least six children.
Amid all this, a former British Royal Marine who ran an animal shelter in Afghanistan organized an effort to have his animals airlifted out of the country with the assistance of the U.K. military, which got the rescued pets through the airport in Kabul on Friday, according to the BBC.
Paul “Pen” Farthing, the Royal Marine behind the effort, arrived back at London’s Heathrow Airport on Sunday with 90 to 100 dogs and 60 to 70 cats. The effort was dubbed “Operation Ark” and was initially intended to airlift the shelter’s staff and their families — along with 140 dogs and 60 cats — out of Kabul.
Farthing called Operation Ark a “partial success” in a tweet.
Arrived Heathrow with partial success of #OpArk Mixed emotions & true deep feeling of sadness for Afghan today. Heathrow Ops centre, Border Force, HARC & Air Pets were all bloody amazing. Witnessed 1st hand the compassion Heathrow is showing Afghan refugees. 🙏🏼❤️#AboveAndBeyond
That “partial success” didn’t include airlifting the staff out of Kabul; Farthing’s charity confirmed it had to leave Afghanistan without them. Dr. Iain McGill, a veterinarian who traveled back on the plane chartered by Farthing, said the former Royal Marine was “very concerned for his staff and for all the other people suffering in Afghanistan.”
Farthing’s charity said it was a “devastating blow” their “wonderful team” was forced to remain in Afghanistan.
Yes, one might say so.
Farthing’s defenders, including comedian Ricky Gervais, argued the animals traveled in the plane’s cargo hold and therefore didn’t take up any space that would have been used to transport those fleeing the Taliban, according to Bloomberg Quint.
However, the controversy isn’t so much where Farthing’s rescue animals were carried so much as it is one of British resource usage.
According to The Guardian, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace told members of Parliament during a Wednesday conference call that Operation Ark had “diverted” the military’s focus somewhat from saving human lives, adding that the affair was “not something I would be proud of.”
While supporters of Farthing’s charity privately chartered an Airbus A330 to make the flight, Wallace said this wasn’t a “magic wand,” given the logistical difficulties involved with getting people into and through Hamid Karzai International Airport. This call, mind you, took place two days before the suicide bomb attack on the airport complicated things significantly.
Instead, Wallace said the A330 would “block the airfield” and “sit there empty” as the evacuation of people was prioritized.
“What I was not prepared to do is prioritize pets over people. I’m afraid you may dislike me for that but that’s my view. There are some very, very desperate people under threat,” he said.
The BBC also reported Wallace had complained Farthing’s supporters had “taken up too much time of my senior commanders dealing with this issue when they should be focused on dealing with the humanitarian crisis.”
Early on Wednesday, Wallace tweeted that “if [Farthing] arrives with his animals we will seek a slot for his plane … I have been consistent all along, ensuring those most at risk are processed first and that the limiting factor has been flow THROUGH to airside NOT airplane capacity. No one has the right in this humanitarian crisis to jump the queue.”
If he does not have his animals with him he and his staff can board an RAF flight. I have been consistent all along, ensuring those most at risk are processed first and that the limiting factor has been flow THROUGH to airside NOT airplane capacity. @DefenceHQ
British Army head Maj. Gen. Nick Carter also didn’t express unalloyed support for the mission to airlift animals out of Afghanistan when grilled about it on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday morning.
“Our priority has been to evacuate human beings,” Carter said, according to Bloomberg Quint. “We obviously worry about everything that needs to be evacuated, but of course these are very difficult times, and there are very difficult judgments to be made.”
However, in an interview with LBC Radio on Saturday, Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the U.K. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, was a bit more blunt.
“The difficulty is getting people into and out of the airport, and we’ve just used a lot of troops to bring in 200 dogs, meanwhile my interpreter’s family are likely to be killed,” said Tugendhat, according to the BBC.
“As one interpreter asked me a few days ago, ‘Why is my 5-year-old worth less than your dog?’”
However, is Farthing the one to blame? Sam Ashworth-Hayes, writing in the conservative British publication The Spectator, doesn’t think so. Instead, in a piece published Sunday, he said the issue was a government too willing to give into Farthing’s cause instead of focusing on evacuating Britons.
“We can try to spin this as a heart-warming effort as much as we like. I’m sure some politicians will. But the job of government is to make difficult decisions, and ours caved in under pressure from an animal-loving mob,” he wrote.
“If you asked the public tomorrow if the government should set up a National Veterinary Service with a budget equal to the NHS, you would be laughed out of town. Basing policy on what people say in the heat of the moment rather than trying to understand their long-term preferences is a terrible idea. But weak leadership means that we spend far too much time worrying about cute animals on the front pages.
“We’ve left behind 150 Britons and a thousand Afghan support staff. Now consider that for some paratroopers ‘the last thing they do before leaving themselves is putting Pen Farthing’s cats and dogs on a plane,’ and tell me this was still a heroic and noble act.”
But at least there’s a happy ending for the dogs and cats, right? “As you can imagine they’re not short of homes for these animals,” McGill told the BBC.
New Intel Report on COVID-19: China Is Hiding Something
An unclassified U.S. intelligence report summarized for the public on Aug. 27 makes clear that the first cases of COVID-19 were at least as early as Nov. 19, 2019, and that the first cluster of cases occurred at least by December 2019 in Wuhan.
The report makes clear that China is hiding information about the origins of COVID-19. But other scientific research from Harvard University indicates a possible origin as early as Aug. 1, 2019. President Joe Biden’s new intelligence summary does not address this important data.
In conjunction with Friday’s release of intelligence analysis, Biden denounced China for hiding the origins of the virus. But his administration does not go nearly far enough in pinpointing a potential August 2019 origin, assigning blame, and demanding reparations for at least $19 trillion owed globally, due to 6.9 million lost lives. This sum does not include additional amounts owed for economic damages, non-lethal suffering, medical costs, criminal penalties, and future damages.
Biden, who spoke to the public about the report, denounced China’s lack of cooperation in the investigation. He said in a statement, “Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People’s Republic of China, yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it. To this day, the PRC continues to reject calls for transparency and withhold information, even as the toll of this pandemic continue[s] to rise. We needed this information rapidly, from the PRC, while the pandemic was still new.”
Biden implied that China was being irresponsible in its lack of transparency. “Responsible nations do not shirk these kinds of responsibilities to the rest of the world,” he said. “Pandemics do not respect international borders, and we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics.”
The President said that he would continue to pressure China to release more information. “The United States will continue working with like-minded partners around the world to press the PRC to fully share information and to cooperate with the World Health Organization’s Phase II evidence-based, expert-led determination into the origins of COVID-19—including by providing access to all relevant data and evidence. We will also continue to press the PRC to adhere to scientific norms and standards, including sharing information and data from the earliest days of the pandemic, protocols related to biosafety, and information from animal populations.”
Biden’s statement does not sufficiently emphasize potential COVID-19 signals in Wuhan as early as Aug. 1, 2019. According to the Harvard study, which was conducted at the medical school, 2019 internet search statistics and satellite imagery of auto traffic around five major hospitals in Wuhan are signals of a much earlier COVID-19 spread.
Dr. John Brownstein at Harvard told ABC News last June that the traffic increase, measured over two years with 108 usable satellite images from approximately March 2018 to May 2020, and increasing in fall 2019, coincided with an increase of Chinese internet search queries for “symptoms that would later be determined as closely associated with the novel coronavirus.”
The data shows a rise in vehicles parked around the five hospitals starting about Aug. 1, 2019, peaking on Dec. 1, 2019, which was the date of the first confirmed case of COVID-19, and falling rapidly into March 2020, presumably because of countermeasures, including the Wuhan lockdown starting on Jan. 23, 2020. Could Chinese countermeasures have started as early as Dec. 1, 2019, while waiting to tell the world until the data started to leak out on Dec. 30, 2019?
Some of the fall 2019 increases in hospital traffic that Harvard measured are as much as 90 percent compared with the same time in the prior year.
Brownstein did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
U.S. intelligence learned of the virus in late November and alerted the Pentagon, according to four ABC News sources.
Individual Chinese doctors attempted to alert the public of the unknown virus on Dec. 30, 2019. The next day, Chinese social media started censoring information about the virus. Chinese officials waited until that day—Dec. 31, 2019—to formally notify the WHO of the virus that emerged in Wuhan.
Biden ordered the August 2021 intelligence report in May, to reassess the virus’ origin, and determine whether China’s scientists should be blamed. He should also have ordered more analysis on the sequence of events to control the virus once the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) realized that it transmitted from human to human. The CCP apparently realized such transmissibility but started to censor warnings coming from doctors in China as early as Dec. 31, 2019, thereby putting the world at risk.
Biden received the new intelligence report this past week of Aug. 27, according to the Financial Times. The government published a summary that day, which stated, “China’s co-operation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of Covid-19.” It continued, “Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist[s] sharing information and blame[s] other countries, including the United States.”
Former President Donald Trump, as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, claimed that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a hypothesis that scientists are increasingly considering given the failure to find a species through which the virus might have naturally jumped to humans.
Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that in November 2019 (three months after the increase in Wuhan hospital traffic), three of the Wuhan lab researchers were hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms. These reports apparently prompted Biden to order the latest investigation.
One of the four intelligence agencies that participated in the report had “moderate confidence” that the Wuhan lab was the origin of the virus, due to its risky work on viruses. The Wuhan lab hosted years of research into bat coronaviruses, including gain-of-function manipulation of virus genetic codes to see how they could become transmissible to humans.
This gain-of-function research on viruses is clearly unethical, knowing what we do now: that it could lead to lab leaks that cause pandemics.
However, the report threw cold water on theories that CCP scientists developed SARS-CoV2 as a biological weapon. None of the four agencies believed this theory. The report ruled out that Chinese officials knew about the virus prior to its emergence among humans in 2019. This lack of knowledge is what convinced, albeit at a low level of confidence, the agencies to conclude that the disease spread naturally from animals to humans.
Regardless, the CCP is culpable for its mishandling of the initial outbreak, its censorship of warnings that started on Dec. 30, 2019, from individual doctors in China, and its failure to control the virus once it emerged into an epidemic. The Biden administration is wrongly and relatively silent on all of this, and most importantly, has failed to demand reparations of trillions of dollars that the CCP owes the world for what should be considered criminal negligence.