From Newsmax:
Ashli Babbitt, the only person to die inside the U.S. Capitol during the protests on Jan. 6, 2021, was the victim of an “unlawful shooting” and the government must own up to that, Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, said on Newsmaxon Saturday.
Judicial Watch has filed a $30 million lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of the estate of Ashli Babbitt and her husband, Aaron Babbitt.
Read more here…
This is an instant classic. Jim Gaffigan, a stand-up comedian typically known for making harmless fun about everyman topics like bad food choices and habitual laziness, stunned the Golden Globes audience on Sunday with a joke about pedoph*lia that made the entire room uncomfortable.
“I can’t even believe I’m in the entertainment industry. It’s so unlikely. I’m from a small town in Indiana,” he said, adding, “I’m not a pedoph*le.”
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The uncomfortable quip, made in the wake of revealing court depositions related to the convicted pedoph*le Jeffrey Epstein being released last week, was captured at TMZ:
Jim Gaffigan took the oxygen out of the room during while presenting an award at the Golden Globes — and it’s because he somewhat referenced Jeffrey Epstein-esque material.
The longtime standup was on hand Sunday to hand out the award for Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television — a whole new category that the GG are starting to include … and while acknowledging how wild that development was, JG made a jaw-dropping joke.
He was talking about how crazy it is he’s even in showbiz, saying … “I’m from a small town in Indiana, I’m not a pedophile.” A handful of people laughed, but it was mostly dead silent.
Jim went on to rhetorically ask if “pedophile” was a new category there, but noted he was happy to be presenting an award for comics with big specials … arguing it was overdue.
Gaffigan’s jab at debased Hollywood culture is a faint echo of Ricky Gervais’ savage monologue roasting elites in 2020. (Editor’s Note: It was actually at the Golden Globes, correcting a viral tweet that I had dispatched last week.)
Remember Hollywood elites' nervous laughter at the Oscars when Ricky Gervais joked about the Epstein list?
Now we all know why. This is glorious. pic.twitter.com/eJ4paSo2wV
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) January 4, 2024
Gervais openly mocked the Hollywood A-list with its infamous coziness to the deceased Epstein.
No one cares about movies anymore. No one goes to cinema, no one really watches network TV. Everyone is watching Netflix. This show should just be me coming out, going, “Well done Netflix. You win everything. Good night.” But no, we got to drag it out for three hours. You could binge-watch the entire first season of Afterlife instead of watching this show. That’s a show about a man who wants to kill himself ’cause his wife dies of cancer and it’s still more fun than this. Spoiler alert, season two is on the way so in the end he obviously didn’t kill himself. Just like Jeffrey Epstein. Shut up. I know he’s your friend but I don’t care.
Truly epic. The Golden Globes might be able to return to relevance if their hosts continue to expose Hollywood’s debauchery like Gervais and Gaffigan. More of this!
Shortly before the disastrous Covid-19 outbreak, the Chinese scientist who oversaw controversial virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology attended a secret meeting with the US government to seek support for a project that would go on to supercharge coronaviruses.
Zhengli, known as ‘Batwoman’ for her work on virus sampling and sequencing in the animals, has become the missing link in understanding how the United States and China co-managed the Covid fallout. Shi Zhengli’s June 2017 meeting at America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now fueling fears of Western collusion with a Chinese communist cover-up after the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is widely believed to have been caused by a careless laboratory experiment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A fresh batch of data acquired by Freedom of Information activists and examined by The Daily Mail on Sunday reveals the degree to which America backed, and frequently sponsored, the contentious work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
They indicate that in order to increase their chances of winning funds, US researchers seeking financing for studies to engineer ‘spike proteins,’ which make it easier for bat viruses to infect human cells, deceived the authorities about the hazards of the trials.
The documents obtained by US Right To Know, a non-profit public health research organization, include a directive issued by Chinese intelligence on January 3, 2020 – two days after the world first learned about Covid – requiring its scientists to either share their samples with the government or destroy them “on the spot.”
Western intelligence services are now seeing a lab breach in Wuhan as the most plausible explanation for Covid, rather than the initial notion that it originated in the city’s wildlife market. The explosive papers include emails written by officials at EcoHealth Alliance – a now-infamous health organization that has utilized US government funds to fund bat virus investigations – prior to Professor Zhengli’s arrival.
“Zhengli and I will do a double act, and we’ll cover the work we’re doing … as well as the broadscale surveillance of bats for novel viruses,” says Peter Daszak, the $460,000-a-year head of EcoHealth.
Professor Zhengli earned the nickname ‘Batwoman’ for her virus-hunting treks to southern China’s bat caves, hundreds of kilometers from Wuhan, where her team gathered over 10,000 animal samples.
Covid-19 sequencing closely matched that discovered in those caves. Peng Zhou, an associate professor at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was also invited to the conference.
Daszak thanked the hosts in an email after the meeting, saying that it was “nice to have a chance to introduce our collaborators to you personally.”
EcoHealth also lobbied the Pentagon for funding for Zhengli to engineer high-risk coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute in December 2018, a year before the Covid-19 virus emerged, by synthesising spike proteins with furin cleavage sites that were designed to bind to human receptors more easily.
Dr. Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the center of concerns about gain-of-function studies, acknowledged in an email that US researchers would ‘freak out’ if they discovered novel coronavirus engineering and testing was being done in low-security Chinese laboratories, but disguised it to make the US government more ‘comfortable’ with the plan, which the researchers claim was intended to aid in pandemic prevention.
That proposal was turned down by the US government, but critics say the plans laid out in the proposal serve as a ‘blueprint’ for how to create Covid. Professor Zhengli has denounced the idea of a lab leak as baseless, including claims by US intelligence that several of her colleagues at the institute were infected before the outbreak emerged.
When challenged with the accusations, she said: “How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence? I don’t know how the world has come to this, constantly pouring filth on an innocent scientist.”
The U.S. government rejected the proposal, but opponents claim the objectives included in it serve as a ‘blueprint’ for how to build Covid. Professor Zhengli has dismissed the notion of a lab breach, as well as reports by US intelligence that numerous of her coworkers at the institution were infected prior to the outbreak’s emergence.
When challenged on the revealing documents, she replied: “How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence? I don’t know how the world has come to this, constantly pouring filth on an innocent scientist.”
It should be noted that the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing in March 2023 that showed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had substandard security protocols.
“We have learned that the Wuhan Institute has poor biosafety and was conducting this research at only biosafety level two, described as ‘the Wild West’ by Dr. Jeremy Farrar, a virologist from the UK, now chief scientist for the WHO,” the Subcommittee Chair Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) noted.
Nonetheless, long before the COVID-19 pandemic, former NIAID Director Dr. Fauci and former NIH Chief Dr. Francis Collins were highly visible, public advocates for laboratory experiments that involved “generating a potentially dangerous virus in a laboratory,” legal documents showed.
Such research of “generating a potentially dangerous virus in a laboratory” is commonly called “gain-of-function” research, the exhibit notes. Dr. Fauci testified that “[g]ain of function is a very potentially misleading terminology, and that was one of the reasons why several years ago outside groups, not the NIH … did away with the terminology ‘gain of function’ because it can often be very confusing and misleading.” Yet Dr. Fauci confirms that “the NIH” did not “d[o] away” with that terminology, and Dr. Fauci’s own internal email used the phrase “SARS Gain of Function” to describe the research on bat coronaviruses that was conducted by Dr. Shi Zhengli and others at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, partly funded by Dr. Fauci’s NIAID through the subgrants from the EcoHealth Alliance, the attorneys continued.
The legal briefing then turns to Fauci funding such risky gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“On June 1, 2014, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID funded a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance for the five-year period June 1, 2014, to May 31, 2019. Fauci Ex. 2, at 2. The title of the project was ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.’ The project’s Abstract stated: “This project will examine the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using indepth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China, molecular characterization of novel CoVs and host receptor binding domain genes, mathematical models of transmission and evolution, and in vitro and in vivo laboratory studies of host range.”
The Abstract noted that one of the project’s “three specific aims” would be to “[t]est predictions of CoV inter-species transmission” by engaging in two forms of research to enhance the bat coronaviruses’ transmissibility to humans: “reverse genetics,” i.e., genetic manipulation of the viruses to render them more transmissible; and “virus infection experiments” using “humanized mice,” i.e., repeatedly infecting humanized mice with bat coronaviruses to provoke mutations that render them more infectious to human cells (a process known as “serial passage”). Specifically, the Abstract stated: “Predictive models of host range (i.e.[,] emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
Dr. Fauci endeavored to argue that “reverse genetics” is so vague it might not refer to gain-of-function research, the attorneys noted. (“I’m not really quite sure what they’re
referring to. Reverse genetics can mean many things.”). But Dr. Fauci admits that “reverse genetics” means “[m]anipulation of a virus, recombination, things like that.” In 2015, in an article reporting on research performed pursuant to this grant, Dr. Ralph Baric and Dr. Shi Zhengli wrote that they used “reverse genetics” to “generate and characterize a chimeric virus” that was more infectious and more virulent in humans. Dr. Fauci’s own internal email describes that article as addressing “SARS Gain of Function,” the lawyers added.
Dr. Anthony Fauci will appear before the 118th Congress for the first time for a two-day transcribed interview on January 8, 2024 and January 9, 2024, according to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
This is too good. NBC host Kristen Welker on the network’s Sunday morning show “Meet the Depressed” became apoplectic when Trump-supporting House Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY) refused to rubber-stamp the 2024 election certification “no matter what.”
Kristin Welker confronted Stefanik with her loaded question.
Kristen: "Will you vote to certify the results of 2024 election, no matter what they show?"
Rep. Stefanik: "We will see if that is legal and valid election. Democrats are so desperate that they are trying to remove President Trump from the ballot and that's the suppression of… pic.twitter.com/E0wbfTDPFg
— Real Mac Report (@RealMacReport) January 7, 2024
“Will you vote to certify the results of 2024 election, no matter what they show?” Welker asked.
“We will see if that is legal and valid election,” Stefanik retorted. “Democrats are so desperate that they are trying to remove President Trump from the ballot and that’s the suppression of the American people.”
Here is the full transcript of the exchange:
WELKER: Would you vote to certify and will you vote to certify the results of the 2024 election no matter what they show?
STEFANIK: Well, I voted not to certify the state of Pennsylvania because as we saw in Pennsylvania and other states across the country, that there was unconstitutional acts circumventing the state legislature and unilaterally changing election law.
WELKER: What about 2024 Congress?
STEFANIK: We’ll see if this is a legal and valid election. What we’re seeing so far is that Democrats are so desperate they’re trying to remove President Trump from the ballot. That is the suppression of the American people and the Supreme Court is taking that case up in February. That should be a nine to zero to allow President Trump to appear on the ballot because that’s the American people’s decision to make this November.
WELKER: And the matter’s, of course, halted, pending that appeal as you say. But just to be very clear, I don’t hear you committed to certifying the election results. Will you only commit to certify the results if former President Trump wins? [Crosstalk]
STEFANIK: No. It means if they are constitutional, what we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution, not going through state legislatures. When it comes to changing election law, and we’re seeing this in my home state of New York, Kristen, we are seeing Democrats try to steal the election and illegally gerrymander congressional districts that we fairly won and are line. So I see this at a very local level as well as the unconstitutional overreach we saw at the national level in 2020.
This was an outstanding response to a disingenuous line of question: What is the point of certifying an election if literally anything will be automatically certified?
It’s a question that seems to boggle many Democrat-supporters’ minds.
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, host of the Sunday show “This Weak,” interviewed former Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the third anniversary of the January 6 “insurrection.”
Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton lackey, pressed Pelosi to declare Donald Trump “ineligible” to be re-elected as President of the United States.
George: " If you believe he [Trump] engaged insurrection into the plain meaning of 14th amendment, you believe he is ineligible to be president?"
Nancy Pelosi: "Those are upto the states. They have different laws from state-to-state. I don't think he should ever.."
George:… pic.twitter.com/85yaHu53Z5
— Real Mac Report (@RealMacReport) January 7, 2024
“If you believe he [Trump] engaged in insurrection under the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment, you believe he’s ineligible to be president?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“Those laws… are up to the states,” Pelosi replied. “They have different laws from state-to-state. I don’t think he should ever have been president.”
“It’s the Constitution,” Stephanopoulos pressed.
“But nonetheless, but that there is a view of the Constitution in Article 14, section three, that he should not be able to run for president,” she went on. “But that’s not the point. The point now is that, again, different states have different laws. We don’t think in California that it applied in our state. That’s what the decision was made here.”
“But anyway, not to go into that, because that’s very intricate,” she added. “What is very clear is that the American people want us to honor our oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
More than a dozen states have filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, asking the court to put former President Trump on the Colorado Republican presidential ballot and warning that failure to do so could throw the 2024 presidential race “into chaos.”
The attorneys general of Indiana, West Virginia, and 25 other states have warned the court that the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to label Trump a “insurrectionist” under the Fourteenth Amendment “has vast consequences that reach far beyond Colorado.”
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on February 8 and has set a deadline of January 18 for comparable filings. The judges ordered an administrative stay, directing the Colorado Secretary of State to place the former president’s name on the Republican primary ballot until the dispute is resolved.
Former President Trump filed an appeal on Tuesday against the landmark Maine decision that barred him from running for president in the state in 2024.
Trump’s attorney made a number of arguments that the former president and current frontrunner in the 2024 race has been denied his due process rights because of the Maine Secretary of State’s unilateral decision to disenfranchise the state’s voters of their free choice.
The complaint stated that the Secretary was a “biased decisionmaker” who should have recused herself and “otherwise failed to provide lawful due process.”
Furthermore, it states that “the Secretary had no legal authority” under any Maine statute to “consider the federal constitutional issues presented by the Challenges.” In addition, the complain argues the Secretary “made multiple errors of law and acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner.”
The document also notes that “President Trump will be illegally excluded from the ballot as a result of the Secretary’s actions.”
As legal scholar Jonathan Turley said about Joe Biden’s pitch to American voters that they should re-elect him president to ‘save democracy’: “Biden’s ‘defender of Democracy’ pitch would have been a tad more convincing if Democratic activists were not trying to remove Trump from ballots. Likewise, his party is seeking in some states to prevent anyone other than Biden appearing on primary ballots.”
SOUTHAVEN, Miss. (TCD) — A 46-year-old man will spend 45 years in prison for fatally stabbing his father and attacking his live-in girlfriend and her daughter in 2021.
DeSoto County District Attorney Matthew Barton announced Jan. 3 that Keith Tucker pleaded guilty to the murder of his father, 86-year-old Charles Tucker. A judge subsequently handed down the sentence following the plea.
According to the Southaven Police Department, on Sunday, Sept. 5, 2021, shortly before 8 a.m., officers responded to the 8300 block of Cedarcrest Drive in reference to a stabbing. Police found one deceased victim at the scene and transported another victim to a hospital in critical condition.
Police arrested Tucker at the scene on one count of murder and two counts of attempted murder. He was booked into the DeSoto County Jail.
Barton said Tucker, “in an alcohol-induced rage, killed his father by stabbing him with a knife multiple times in the abdomen and neck.” Tucker then “turned his violence toward his live-in girlfriend and her daughter.”
In a statement, Barton added, “While nothing we do can remedy the harm that he caused, I hope this result will provide the family the strength needed to press forward. There is no place in our society for this kind of evil.”
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McKINLEY COUNTY, N.M. (TCD) — Three Navajo Nation members face charges after allegedly kidnapping and killing a Zuni man with a ligature in Indian Country in 2020.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Mexico, between Feb. 6 and Feb. 15, 2020, 44-year-old Camille Damon and 40-year-old Ronald Belone of New Mexicao and 38-year-old Tyran Begay of Arizona allegedly kidnapped the victim, then brought the man to a remote location near Smith Lake, New Mexico. The victim was “restrained, beaten, and strangled with a ligature.”
The U.S. attorney’s office only identified the victim as John Doe.
The indictment alleges Damon, Belone, and Begay restrained John Doe, then killed him “willfully, deliberately, maliciously, and with premeditation, by beating and strangulation.”
The suspects reportedly kidnapped John Doe for “some purpose and benefit,” which was not disclosed by officials.
On Thursday, Jan. 4, the U.S. attorney’s office said Damon, Belone, and Begay appeared in federal court, and they were charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping resulting in death.
Begay remains in custody pending a trial, which has not yet been set. Damon and Belone were remanded to temporary custody pending their detention hearing, which was set for Friday, Jan. 5.
The three suspects face life in prison if convicted.
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NEWARK, N.J. (TCD) — A Muslim leader died this week after he was mortally wounded in a shooting outside his mosque in the early hours of the morning.
According to the Newark Department of Public Safety, Hassan Sharif, an imam at the Masjid Muhammad-Newark Mosque, was shot outside the building on Wednesday, Jan. 3, at 6:15 a.m. Police said they “do not believe the shooting was motivated by bias or domestic terrorism.”
Essex County Prosecuting Attorney Theodore Stephens II said in a news conference Sharif was shot “more than once” and immediately transported to University Hospital, where he later died from his injuries. Stephens said the motive for the “heinous” and “dastardly” shooting remains unclear.
Law enforcement officials are putting up a $25,000 reward for information related to the shooting.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the New Jersey chapter of the council are also offering a $10,000 reward. The council said Sharif was shot as he prepared to lead morning prayers at the mosque.
NorthJersey.com reports Sharif was held up at gunpoint over the summer, but he reportedly managed to wrestle the gun away from the perpetrator, and the suspect ran away.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said in a statement following the shooting, “At a time when the Muslim community is concerned by an increase of bias incidents and crimes, I want to assure the Muslim community and people of all faiths that we will do everything in our power to keep all residents safe, especially in or near our houses of worship.”
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SAN DIEGO (TCD) — Some out-of-town visitors made a tragic discovery last month when an elderly woman’s body was found inside a chest freezer in the city’s Allied Gardens neighborhood.
On Friday, Dec. 22, at 11:45 a.m., San Diego Police Department officers were called to a home on the 4900 block of Zion Avenue for a death investigation. Police said some relatives who did not live in the area were at the residence and located a body in the freezer. The San Diego Police Department Homicide Unit was brought in to investigate due to the “unusual location of the body.”
The medical examiner conducted an autopsy and identified the woman as 81-year-old Mary Margaret Haxby-Jones. Investigators said she lived at the Zion Avenue home “at some point prior to the discovery of her body.” According to San Diego Police, there is a possibility Haxby-Jones could have been either missing or dead for up to nine years.
Police said Haxby-Jones’ cause of death remain undetermined, but there did not appear to be any signs of traumatic injury. However, the case is still being investigated as a “suspicious death.”
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DUNNELLON, Fla. (TCD) — A 31-year-old man was arrested on several charges for allegedly traveling to Ohio to pick up his underage girlfriend, driving her to Florida, and planning to hide her until they could get married.
According to the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, on Wednesday, Jan. 3, an FBI agent contacted a Marion County detective regarding a missing child case out of Ohio. FBI agents reportedly learned the missing teen’s “World of Warcraft” account had been accessed from an address in Dunnellon. Investigators traced the location to Thomas Ebersole’s house and said he also logged into his gaming profile from the same address.
Law enforcement went to Ebersole’s home, and he allegedly initially said he did not know the teen. During further questioning, he admitted to picking up the teen from her home in Ohio and driving her back to Florida. He reportedly stated he was “in a romantic relationship with the juvenile victim and was going to hide her in his home with plans for her to become his wife.”
Investigators obtained messages between Ebersole and the victim, which the sheriff’s office said “further outlined his plans to meet the victim in Ohio and engage in sexual activity despite knowing that he was committing a crime.”
Ebersole was arrested on charges of traveling to meet a minor to engage in sexual activity, interfering with child custody, and sheltering an unmarried minor.
According to Ebersole’s arrest affidavit shared by Law & Crime, Ebersole and the teen call each other pet names, including “darlin,” “baby girl,” “little wolf,” “babe,” and others. They also texted each other “ILY” (I love you) and “ILYSM” (I love you so much).
Ebersole reportedly admitted to officials that he kissed the teen girl in his car, but “not much” in his house. Ebersole had hickeys on his neck that he said the victim gave to him.
The affidavit alleges the two texted and joked about their relationship being a crime and how Ebersole knew the girl was only 16 years old. Ebersole does not have any prior criminal history, according to the affidavit.
Ebersole was booked into the Marion County Jail and is being held without bond.
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