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RNC Chair Falsely Claims ‘Biden White House’ Killed Hunter Laptop Story in 2020

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The head of the Republican National Committee is claiming the “Biden White House” killed the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, before Joe Biden was elected President. The embattled RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel, is again taking criticism, but her false allegations resurface events some may have forgotten.

“This is a Biden White House that was meeting with social media companies, dictating what they put on their platform before the 2020 election,” McDaniel told Fox News on Monday.

“That to me is suppression,” she continued. “This is a White House that killed the Hunter Biden story that we now know is true, that prevented voters from knowing that before the 2020 election.”

That is false.

But it’s also important to take a look back at reporting from 2020 which debunks McDaniel’s false statements.

READ MORE: ‘Denied’: Trump Loses Latest Gag Order Effort

Just days before the 2020 election, NBC News reported that “Trump and his allies say there is evidence of corruption in emails and documents allegedly found on a laptop belonging to Democrat Joe Biden’s son. They say those and other documents show that Hunter Biden used his father’s influence to enrich himself through business deals in Ukraine and China, and that his father not only facilitated that, but may have benefited financially.”

“But the Wall Street Journal and Fox News — among the only news organizations that have been given access to key documents — found that the emails and other records don’t make that case. Leaving aside the many questions about their provenance, the materials offered no evidence that Joe Biden played any role in his son’s dealings in China, let alone profited from them, both news organizations concluded,” the NBC News report states.

Now, despite nearly a year of intense Republican investigations by three House committees and a GOP-majority House leadership that appears determined to make the case to impeach President Joe Biden, those findings in the NBC News report are just as true today as they were when they were published more than three years ago.

In that same report, NBC News also stated, “many questions remain about how the materials got into the hands of Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has met with Russian agents in his effort to dig dirt on the Bidens.”

READ MORE: Comer Says Biden’s Bank Records ‘Don’t Lie’ but His Claims Are Quickly Debunked

“U.S. intelligence agencies have informed the White House that Giuliani has been in contact with alleged Russian intelligence agents. The FBI has been looking into whether the Russians played any role, and no official has ruled that out.”

At the time, that was the Trump White House, not the Biden White House. Bill Barr was the Attorney General.

One year earlier, in October of 2019, Politico reported, “2 Giuliani Ukraine associates indicted on campaign finance charges.” And just weeks ago, The Guardian reported, “Ukrainian authorities have arrested a controversial MP who was at the heart of efforts by Rudy Giuliani to dig up compromising material about Joe Biden, and placed him in pre-trial detention.”

McDaniel claimed Joe Biden dictated to social media companies “what they put on their platform before the 2020 election.”

Again, that is false. Nor does a presidential candidate have the power to do so.

What actually happened?

“The background here is that the FBI came to us,” Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan last year, as the BBC reported, “and was like ‘hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that’.”

READ MORE: ‘Authoritarianism’: Florida Says Its Public Schools Exist to ‘Convey Government’s Message’

The BBC added, Zuckerberg “said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular – only that Facebook thought it ‘fit that pattern’.”

The BBC also pointed to the New York Post report that it says “claimed that a laptop, abandoned in a repair shop by Hunter Biden, contained emails which included details of Hunter introducing a Ukrainian energy tycoon to his father and arranging a meeting.”

“There is no record on Mr Biden’s schedule that such a meeting ever took place,” BBC adds.

“More than a year after the story appeared, the Washington Post conducted its own analysis and concluded the laptop and some emails were likely to be authentic – but the majority of data could not be verified due to ‘sloppy handling of the data’.”

That New York Post “article remains controversial. The hard drive at its centre was provided to the Post by Donald Trump’s own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.”

Watch McDaniel below or at this link.

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Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation

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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.

Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”

“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”

In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”

He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”

“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”

“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”

“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.

“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”

Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”

Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.

Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.

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Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs

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President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.

“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”

The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”

Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”

TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”

Critics blasted Trump.

“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.

One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”

Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”

The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”

 

Image via Reuters 

 

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One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won

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President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.

According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.

Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”

“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”

Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”

Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.

Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.

The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.

“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.

The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.

“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”

 

Image via Reuters

 

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