The lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, alleges that Hunter Biden worked during the Obama administration as a foreign agent for "Ukrainian and Chinese principals and therefore was legally obligated to register as such." The Justice Department never "required Mr. Biden" to register as a foreign agent, even though the FBI took custody of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained evidence of his overseas business dealings, in November 2019, the lawsuit states.

American First Legal argues that Hunter Biden worked as a foreign agent during his time as a board member for Burisma Holdings Limited, a Ukrainian gas company that paid him $1 million a year. Emails obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration "confirm," according to America First Legal, that Hunter Biden "directly represented Burisma in its dealings with the Obama White House."

The lawsuit, which demands that Hunter Biden be required to register as a foreign agent, is the latest in a series of allegations that Hunter Biden received special treatment from the Department of Justice. Republicans have long contended that Hunter Biden violated the Foreign Agent Registration Act during his work with Burisma and CEFC China Energy, a Chinese energy conglomerate, but only received two misdemeanor tax-related charges and a gun charge that is expected to be expunged from his criminal record.

"The Attorney General has a non-discretionary duty to ensure that Hunter Biden registers as a foreign agent under FARA and provides the American people with transparency into his activities on behalf of foreign principals," America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton said in a statement.

The emails released by the National Archives and Records Administration show Hunter Biden communicating with one of his father’s senior staffers in May 2014 about his work at Burisma. Hunter Biden wrote that he is "of counsel … on matters pertaining to corporate governance, transparency, and expansion."

Just over two years later, a separate senior staffer in the Office of the Vice President sent an email to Hunter Biden indicating that both he and his father were on a phone call with then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. The contents of that conversation are unknown.

The Department of Justice earlier this month unsealed charges against former Biden business associate Gal Luft for, among other things, failing to register as a foreign agent for his work with CEFC China Energy. Luft said after his arrest earlier this year that the Justice Department was retaliating against him because he provided information about the Bidens to the Justice Department in 2019.

"Any other American would have been criminally prosecuted for failing to register as a foreign agent for this conduct—but not under Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice, which continues to go out of its way to help President Biden, his family, and his radical liberal allies," Hamilton said.

The post Justice Department Erred In Allowing Hunter Biden to Forgo Foreign Agent Registration, Lawsuit Alleges appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The supervisory special agent’s testimony to the House Oversight Committee in a closed-door interview on Monday corroborates key claims from IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley about the peculiarities surrounding the bureau’s investigation. According to the agent, who was identified by Shapley as Joe Gordon, the two planned to interview Hunter Biden in Los Angeles on Dec. 8, 2020, but were stymied at the last minute after FBI headquarters notified the Secret Service and the Biden transition team about their plans.

Gordon said that intervention meant Biden, who pleaded guilty earlier this month to misdemeanor tax charges, avoided ever having to meet face-to-face with law enforcement. Such an intervention from FBI headquarters was unprecedented in the course of Gordon’s career, he testified.

Those claims match with what Shapley told lawmakers in an interview in May. Shapley, an IRS supervisory special agent, said that the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware took unusual steps to slow down or block certain aspects of the investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes and his foreign business dealings. Shapley also said that prosecutors prohibited investigators from inquiring into Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business affairs.

Gordon’s testimony is the first time an employee of the Department of Justice has corroborated some of Shapley’s claims, fueling Republican criticism that Hunter Biden received special treatment from prosecutors. Senior Republican lawmakers previously blasted Hunter Biden’s charges—none of which will result in jail time—as a "sweetheart deal."

"The Justice Department’s efforts to cover up for the Bidens reveals a two-tiered system of justice that sickens the American people," said Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

Hunter Biden’s attorneys have tried to discredit Shapley as a disgruntled IRS employee. Abbe Lowell, one of Hunter Biden’s attorneys, called Shapley "biased" and "aggrieved." Chris Clark, who also serves on Hunter Biden’s legal team, has suggested that Shapley "committed a crime" by discussing Hunter Biden’s taxes.

Shapley, who will testify at a public hearing on Wednesday, alleged in his House testimony that prosecutors initially approved of felony tax charges against Biden, although those were never filed. He also called the case against Biden for tax evasion related to millions of dollars of income from foreign sources a "slam dunk." One of the ways Hunter Biden tried to evade taxes, Shapley said, was deducting payments he made to prostitutes and sex clubs from his taxes.

But those charges never came. Shapley testified that he and Gordon developed plans to interview Hunter Biden on Dec. 8, 2020. FBI agents planned to interview other Biden associates as part of their investigation as well, but Shapley said he was informed the night before the interview that someone at FBI headquarters "had notified Secret Service headquarters and the transition team about the planned actions the following day."

"This essentially tipped off a group of people very close to President Biden and Hunter Biden and gave this group an opportunity to obstruct the approach on the witnesses," Shapley said.

Shapley said Gordon was "clearly dejected" that someone had "interfered" with their plan to interview Biden. The two, according to Shapley, were later instructed to wait in a car outside Biden’s home until he called, but only heard from an FBI official who said that Biden’s lawyers refused to allow him to speak with the agents.

"We received a telephone call later that morning from Hunter Biden's attorneys, who said he would accept service for any document requests, but we couldn't talk to his client."

The post FBI Agent Confirms Agency Slow-Walked Hunter Biden Probe, Republicans Say appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Voters in the greater New Hampshire area gathered at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester for a question-and-answer session with the West Virginia Democrat and former Utah governor John Huntsman (R., Utah). Both Manchin and Huntsman flirted with the prospect of potentially running together on a "unity ticket," should they believe voters are unhappy with the Democratic and Republican Party options in 2024.

But Manchin was characteristically coy about his presidential ambitions.

"I’m not here running for president tonight. I’m not," the centrist Democrat said at the town hall’s conclusion. "I’m here trying to basically save the nation. I’m more concerned now than I’ve ever been concerned in my lifetime."

Whether No Labels—which says it will announce by Super Tuesday next year whether it plans to run a candidate—has the resources to mount a serious challenge to the two-party system is unclear. The group has repeatedly said it will spend up to $70 million on a campaign, but controlled just $10 million in assets at the end of 2021.

"We’re going to gain, as an insurance policy, ballot access," former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory (R.) said at the start of the event.

As of June, No Labels has gained ballot access in just four states. The Arizona Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in March to remove No Labels from the 2024 ballot. That litigation is still ongoing.

Still, the prospect of No Labels offering voters a viable third option in 2024 has caused severe anxiety among many Democrats, who are convinced such a scenario would hand the 2024 election to former president Donald Trump. A group of veteran Democratic operatives and former White House staffers, including former chief of staff Ron Klain, met with No Labels last month to implore the group to ditch their plans.

Manchin and Huntsman brushed aside fears from Democrats that a No Labels presidential ticket would hand the election to Trump, who holds a wide lead in the Republican presidential primary. Huntsman compared efforts by Democrats to intimidate No Labels out of the 2024 race as something out of "China or Russia."

"This is the latest talking point," Huntsman said when asked about one poll that showed a third party would siphon more votes away from Biden than Trump. "The only element of American society that hasn’t been transformed … is politics."

For most of the town hall, Manchin and Huntsman discussed the issue of partisanship in Washington, D.C. Partisan gridlock, as well as both parties allegedly playing to their respective bases, has stopped any serious efforts to tackle the nation’s record-high debt.

Manchin, who has not yet announced whether he will seek another Senate term, said Democrats are "putting the cart in front of the horse" over whether he will run for president. But, Manchin said, if he won, he wouldn't cost Biden anything.

"I’ve never spoiled a race," he continued. "If I get into the race, I’m going to win."

The post 'If I Get Into the Race, I’m Going to Win': Manchin Teases Third-Party Run At No Labels Event appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Just 22 percent of Whitehouse’s office identifies as a race other than white. Only 2 individuals on Whitehouse’s nearly-30 person staff identify as black. One of the two is Whitehouse’s chief of staff, whom the senator hired in 2021 following a Washington Free Beacon report that Whitehouse had no minorities on his senior staff.

The demographic information comes from the Senate Democratic Diversity Initiative's sixth-annual staff survey, released just weeks after the Supreme Court's decision overturning affirmative action in college admissions. The initiative, started in 2007 by then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), is meant to "develop a Senate staff who reflect the diversity of our Nation and are demographically representative of the constituents they serve."

Whitehouse has for years faced scrutiny for his membership at an exclusive all-white beach club in Newport, Rhode Island. The senator, who claims to have "worked relentlessly toward bringing greater equality of opportunity and outcome to all Americans," pledged to terminate his membership at Bailey’s Beach Club in 2006. But Whitehouse merely transferred the membership to his wife, Sandra Thornton.

Whitehouse has since defended his relationship with the club, which was once described by the New York Times as a retreat where "the ruling class keeps its guard up." When asked by a local paper in 2017 about Bailey Beach Club’s racial composition, Whitehouse said, "It would be nice if [Bailey’s] changed a little bit" and that he would take up the issue "privately."

There is little evidence that Bailey’s has changed. Two years ago, a local Rhode Island paper prodded its members and staff about its pallidity.

"We have Asians, we have [sic] Indian. We have a lot of different ethnic groups here," a Bailey's Beach club employee said.

Just four other Democratic senators employ fewer minorities than Whitehouse: Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Tammy Baldwin (Wisc.), Angus King (Maine)—an independent who caucuses with Democrats—and Joe Manchin (W. Va.), who has the whitest Senate office.

The great-great-grandson of a railroad magnate, Whitehouse’s assets are well north of eight figures, according to his latest financial disclosure report. He was educated at the exclusive St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and attended Yale University before earning a law degree from the University of Virginia.

A spokesman for Whitehouse did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Whitehouse's White Office: Rhode Island Senator Has One of the Least Diverse Dem Staffs appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The event, first reported by the Daily Mail, will take place on July 17 at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, a popular spot for presidential primary candidates. Former Republican governor John Huntsman will also attend what was described as a "townhall meeting." The moderate Manchin has been floated by senior No Labels staff as a top contender for the group’s presidential gambit for months.

It is unclear whether No Labels is capable of mounting a serious political operation in 2024. The Washington Free Beacon reported that No Labels controlled just $10 million in assets at the end of 2021, a far cry from the $70 million it says it is prepared to spend on a presidential candidate. The group has not even committed to running a candidate, saying only that it is "preparing for the possibility of nominating a candidate" should "proper environmental conditions" arise.

Still, Democrats are anxious to keep those proper conditions at bay. A group of Democratic operatives and former White House staffers, including former chief of staff Ron Klain, convened in June to discuss No Labels. During that meeting, according to the Washington Post, Democrats implored No Labels to ditch their presidential ambitions, pointing to polls that show a moderate candidate jumping into the race would heavily favor Republicans as Biden faces historically low approval ratings. A coalition led by former House minority leader Dick Gephardt (D., Mo.) and former senator Doug Jones (D., Ala.) is also working to stop the bipartisan group from entering the race, the Washington Post reported.

No Labels says its research shows that Democrats are overreacting.

"They are really working overtime to prevent the voters from a choice," No Labels cofounder and former senator Joe Lieberman (D., Conn.) said. "We feel that the voters in this country deserve a third choice, a bipartisan choice. And I will also repeat that we will not be spoilers in this."

Although Manchin has yet to announce a Senate reelection bid, polls routinely find him behind his likely Republican challenger, West Virginia governor Jim Justice. Manchin has been coy about his presidential ambitions, recently dismissing speculation by saying "everybody’s getting so worked up and scared to death and we’re a year and a half away."

"I don’t rule out anything," he said. "There’s tremendous concern about our country and the direction the country is going in. That’s all."

No Labels says it would not announce a candidate until next year. For now, it is working on gaining ballot access in all 50 states.

The post Manchin to Headline No Labels Event as Democrats Race to Stop Third-Party Bid appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

But Beau Biden's life of public service probably wouldn't have been possible without his father's helping hand, which was so evident in the early years of Beau Biden's professional life that it generated scrutiny from a local Delaware newspaper in 1996. Both Beau Biden and his father were forced to answer questions about how the young lawyer earned a spot in a hyper-competitive Justice Department program that would serve as the springboard for his political career.

Today, the story of how Beau Biden got that job provides an awkward backdrop to his father's rage in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision outlawing affirmative action in higher education: The president has responded not just by attacking the decision and the Court, but also by taking aim at so-called legacy admissions and directing his Department of Education to look at how such practices "hold back" diversity and inclusion on college campuses.

"When a poor kid—maybe the first in their family to go to college—gets the same grades and test scores as a wealthy kid whose whole family has gone to the most elite colleges in the country and whose path has been a lot easier, well, the kid who faced tougher challenges has demonstrated more grit, more determination," President Biden said.

In 1996, Beau Biden was far from the ideal applicant for a prestigious Justice Department job that saw 4,000 applicants for only 163 spots. He graduated with a 2.69 GPA from a third-rate law school, Syracuse University, and his only prior job experience was clerking for a New Hampshire judge—who, coincidentally, served as a New Hampshire co-chairman of Joe Biden's failed 1988 presidential campaign.

Still, the Wilmington, Del., News Journal reported in 1996 that Beau Biden snagged a spot in "an entry-level program for lawyers at the Justice Department." The article does not name the program, but it seems to be the Attorney General's Honors Program, described by the Justice Department as "the nation's premier entry-level federal attorney recruitment program" for "high-caliber attorneys." Beau Biden's father at the time was the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice Department.

The arrangement raised eyebrows at the News Journal, whose reporters reached out to both Bidens to ask if favoritism played a role in Beau's new job. But the Bidens brushed them off. "I don't see any conflict," Joe Biden responded.

"Why would there be? The Justice Department is a gigantic department and he's qualified. At least they assumed he was," Joe Biden added.

Beau Biden struck a similar note. "Are you trying to say we should have been doctors?" he snapped at a News Journal reporter who pressed him about the fact that his brother, Hunter, was also pursuing a career in law.

After Hunter Biden passed the Connecticut bar exam, he took a job at MBNA, a Delaware-based bank. Months before Hunter Biden started working at MBNA, Joe Biden sold his home to the bank's chief marketing officer for $1.2 million—more than six times what Biden paid 20 years earlier. In 1996, Joe Biden's Republican opponent ran ads slamming the senator for his seemingly cozy relationship with the bank. The press had questions, too.

"Unfortunately, no matter where I went to work, some people would make an issue of it," Hunter Biden told the News Journal, when asked if his father helped him get the job.

With a degree from Yale Law—where he served as editor of the law review—Hunter Biden seemed qualified for the lucrative banking job. But how Hunter Biden ended up at Yale was a different story.

When Hunter Biden first applied to Yale Law School, he did so with the help of a powerful alumnus. In 1993, then-president Bill Clinton called then-Yale Law dean Guido Calabresi and urged him to admit Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden was not initially admitted to Yale. But Calabresi, one of Clinton's earliest supporters, agreed to meet with the younger Biden, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2019. Calabresi suggested that Hunter Biden enroll in a different law school and apply for a transfer after one year.

Hunter Biden took Calabresi's advice and was accepted to Georgetown University, where Clinton had earned his undergraduate degree. After a year he applied for a transfer and was admitted to Yale Law. Shortly thereafter, Calabresi resigned his deanship to serve on the federal judiciary. The man who presided over his confirmation: then-senator Joe Biden. (Calabresi has since denied playing a role in Hunter Biden's admission to Yale Law.)

Both Hunter Biden's and Beau Biden's careers took off in the following years. The latter eventually parlayed his entry-level Justice Department position into a job as a federal prosecutor, followed by a stint as Delaware's attorney general. Beau Biden was widely held to be a shoe-in for the Delaware governor's mansion when he died from cancer in 2015.

As for Hunter, his extravagant lifestyle has been well documented for years. Before his descent into drug addiction, Hunter worked as a lobbyist and an investor, where he regularly took home seven-figure paychecks. His last-known residence was a $5.4 million home in Los Angeles.

A generation later, Joe Biden's view of the favors entitled to his own family members appears unchanged. Another poor student, Biden's granddaughter Maisy, was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania after her grandfather made a phone call to then-university president Amy Gutmann. Gutmann now serves as President Biden's ambassador to Germany.

The post Today, Joe Biden Rails Against Legacy Admissions. His Past Casts An Awkward Shadow. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In reality, the group funds research with the goal of promoting DEI practices in education and partners with other left-wing organizations to promote "inclusive mathematics environments" and push universities to abandon standardized tests. Earlier this month, the Student Experience Research Network took a victory lap after the University of California system said it would toss out the SAT in its admissions process.

The Student Experience Research Network and hundreds of other left-wing activist groups like it are controlled from the top down by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consultancy that plays an integral role in Democratic causes, fueled by donations from billionaires including George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. The company, which distributes billions to Democratic pet projects, has established five tax-exempt nonprofit groups that pay Arabella a hefty fee—ostensibly for back-office work—and in turn operate a vast array of left-wing advocacy groups including the Student Experience Research Network.

In fact, the Student Experience Research Network’s ostensible employees don’t even work there. They are employees of an Arabella offshoot, the New Venture Fund. The average citizen would have no idea who’s pulling the strings.

This is the first of two reports based on internal Arabella documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. They provide a rare window into the inner workings of the Left’s dark-money network, revealing just how centrally controlled a vast swath of activist organizations are by a central clearinghouse based in the nation’s capital—as well as the lengths to which Arabella’s leaders go to disguise that control and create the illusion of grassroots political activism.

This is hardly the sort of relationship that Arabella and two of its offshoots, New Venture Fund and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, described to the IRS when seeking tax-exempt status.

The agency challenged New Venture Fund when it first applied for that status in 2006, over its obvious conflicts of interest with Arabella. At the time, Arabella founder and sole owner Eric Kessler served as both New Venture Fund’s chairman and president, and the New Venture Fund proposed paying Arabella a 5 percent overhead fee to handle administrative tasks. Arabella’s current ownership is unclear: It is owned by a Delaware business called Arabella Acquisition, LLC, which doesn’t disclose its ownership.

The IRS had concerns that New Venture Fund didn’t seek competing bids for the contract and that Kessler would reap illegal profits from his own charity. But the feds ultimately relented, granting the fund nonprofit status after Kessler claimed New Venture Fund’s contract with Arabella would last only a year, or until New Venture Fund could run its own human resources department.

"The Advisors are providing management and administrative support services until such time as the Organization has sufficient financial resources to make the operation of its own back office cost-efficient," New Venture Fund told the IRS. "Further, the Agreement is anticipated to be temporary and, indeed, only has a one-year term. As soon after this period as the Organization has adequate funding, it would no longer require the services of the Advisors."

Suffice it to say, the services are still flowing. What is true for the Student Experience Research Network is also true for hundreds of other activist groups, including Stop Deficit Squawks, Americans for Tax Fairness, the Institute for Responsive Government, Defend American Democracy, Fix our Senate, the Voter Engagement Fund, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, and hundreds of other groups—they are controlled by the Democratic elites who staff Arabella Advisors.

"If the New Venture Fund anticipated their agreement with Arabella Advisors to only be temporary when seeking a tax exemption, why has this arrangement continued for nearly two decades?" said Americans for Public Trust executive director Caitlin Sutherland. "For Arabella to collect over $200 million in fees for a ‘temporary’ agreement warrants a second look from the IRS."

Arabella’s five funds serve as fiscal sponsors of the network’s pop-up groups, organizations that exist for a brief period and then disband, often rallying support for or opposition to a particular political objective. Fiscal sponsorship is a unique arrangement that allows the initiatives to operate as nonprofit entities without disclosing their board members and obfuscates the sources of their revenue, expenses, or to whom they distribute grants. From protest movements to lobbying, if there is a new liberal pet cause, there is usually an Arabella group to advocate on its behalf.

Some of Arabella’s more prominent pop-up groups, such as Demand Justice, end up breaking away from the network and establish themselves as independent nonprofits. Others, such as Kansans for Secure Elections, SoCal Healthcare Coalition, and Justice March exist for a brief period and then disband.

Arabella’s former CEO, Sampriti Ganguli, has described the company as a humble business that provides human resources, accounting, and legal guidance to clients. However, the New Venture Fund’s employee handbook, obtained by the Free Beacon, paints a different picture of centralized control.

It reveals that Arabella controls New Venture Fund and its various pop-up groups with management teams of Arabella employees.

"NVF’s board of directors has hired Arabella Advisors, to provide staffing and management services," the handbook states. "Arabella Advisors provides support to NVF projects via dedicated oversight by a managing director (MD), an account manager (AM), accounting and financial services, and human resources support."

The account manager serves as the "first point of contact at NVF for all transactions and inquiries related to the project," according to the handbook. In some cases the manager has a team of Arabella employees assisting in the operations of a pop-up group.

Those teams, including the manager, are considered contractors. Therefore they are hidden from IRS disclosure forms and not listed as staff members of New Venture Fund or its pop-up groups.

New Venture Fund’s pop-up groups do not operate within typical nonprofit parameters outlined by federal law. They are effectively departments of the New Venture Fund and each of their employees are on the fund’s payroll. That means a group like the Student Experience Research Network or the Institute for Responsive Government doesn’t have its own employees, but rather, New Venture Fund employees under the guise of the Institute for Responsive Government. The same goes for the Compassion Project, the Alaska Venture Fund, the Healthy Voting Project, and countless other New Venture Fund "pop-up" groups.

IRS does not require New Venture Fund to report how many pop-up groups operate under its wings, let alone the names of the groups or how many of its employees work at each initiative. The fund employed 986 people in 2021, according to its tax return that year.

And the staff of New Venture Fund’s pop-up groups are prohibited from discussing their ties to the broader network, according to the fund’s employee handbook, which, according to the document’s metadata, was prepared in April 2019 by Arabella senior director Gideon Steinberg.

"In general, only staff with designated authority may represent NVF or its projects externally," the handbook states. "NVF staff should always clearly state the project they are representing and not imply that they are representing all of NVF unless explicitly authorized to do so."

New Venture Fund does not hide the ball from its employees. The handbook refers to itself as well as the network’s other funds—the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, and the Windward Fund—as "managed organizations," each of which is overseen by a team of Arabella staffers.

The benefits of Arabella’s centralized control over the network are made clear to New Venture Fund employees. With Arabella in control, it can "coordinate collaborative initiatives between donors" and gain access to "expert philanthropic strategy development, execution, and evaluation support services."

In practice, this means Arabella can shuffle around big money between its funds, and it does: The network’s five funds passed a combined $189 million between themselves those two years, according to their tax returns.

Arabella’s funds hauled in a combined $3.3 billion in 2020 and 2021. Its primary political arm, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, doled out $61 million to Democratic Super PACs during the 2020 election cycle, second only to Majority Forward, a dark money group associated with Senate Democrats. The Sixteen Thirty Fund spent so much on politics in 2020 that the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel urged the commission in June 2022 to "find reason to believe" the fund violated federal law by failing to register as a political committee. The FEC, however, went against its attorney’s recommendation and closed the case in September.

More than a decade after New Venture Fund and the Sixteen Thirty Fund filed for nonprofit status, Arabella still controls the funds. Its management fee for some of them has increased to 15 percent. New Venture Fund ended 2021 with assets exceeding $1.2 billion and funneled nearly $30 million in service fees to Arabella. The Sixteen Thirty Fund, which ended 2021 with more than $97 million in the bank, paid Arabella more than $5 million the same year.

The post Documents Provide Rare Glimpse Into How Arabella Advisors Exerts Centralized Control Over a Vast Left-Wing Advocacy Network appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The dark money behemoth, an arm of Arabella Advisors’ sprawling nonprofit network, was looking to challenge red-state voting laws that curtailed mail-in voting, but staffers were keenly aware of the hurdles they would face making inroads with Republican lawmakers.

They embarked on a project to take control of a 501(c)4 nonprofit, Secure Democracy, and lobby Republican lawmakers—and run ads against them—on voting rights issues from behind the veil of an ostensibly nonpartisan group.

For a time, they gained traction. In 2020 and 2021, Secure Democracy pushed lawmakers in over 20 states to expand mail-in balloting and other liberal voting initiatives. Those lawmakers were seemingly unaware that they were being influenced by political operatives working at the highest levels of the Democratic Party. New Venture Fund, after all, is the largest branch of the multibillion-dollar Democratic dark money clearinghouse controlled by Arabella Advisors.

"Every lawmaker at the state level was misled," a former New Venture Fund employee involved in Secure Democracy’s lobbying operations, who requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation, told the Washington Free Beacon.

That tactic, lawyers say, may have put the charity on the wrong side of nonprofit tax laws. In October 2021, the New Venture Fund dismissed a senior executive who blew the whistle internally, arguing that the group was illegally using charitable resources to direct Secure Democracy’s 501(c)4 political activities. New Venture Fund abruptly shut down Secure Democracy a month later.

This story is based on a trove of internal New Venture Fund records obtained by the Free Beacon that suggest the group ran roughshod over tax laws in an effort to influence Republicans to change voting laws before and after the 2020 elections. Legal experts and watchdog groups said the New Venture Fund’s apparent use of charitable resources to direct Secure Democracy’s partisan political activity provides grounds for the IRS to investigate New Venture Fund and potentially strip it of its charity status.

The New Venture Fund operates hundreds of liberal projects that present themselves to the public as grassroots initiatives. The charity pays a hefty fee to Arabella Advisors, a for-profit business, to manage and provide legal compliance for its projects, according to a New Venture Fund employee handbook obtained by the Free Beacon.

But interviews with five former New Venture Fund employees involved in the Secure Democracy arrangement raise questions about Arabella’s commitment to the law.

The group of New Venture Fund employees pulling the strings at Secure Democracy came from a team within the New Venture Fund that worked on one of the organization’s legitimate projects, the Voting Rights Lab. Led by former Everytown for Gun Safety executive vice president Megan Lewis, Voting Rights Lab billed itself as a nonpartisan organization that tracks election-related legislation in states across the country. But behind the scenes, former employees told the Free Beacon, they were working away at Secure Democracy.

And the New Venture Fund’s control of Secure Democracy was absolute. Lewis approved "everything" the 501(c)4 group did both internally and externally for "organizational consistency," according to a document outlining internal processes dated Feb. 4, 2020.

Under New Venture Fund’s direction, Secure Democracy embarked on "under-the-radar battleground state campaigns" in the leadup to the 2020 elections to "prevent interference" from Republican lawmakers concerned about widespread mail-in ballots, records obtained by the Free Beacon show. Secure Democracy lobbied in North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, and other critical battleground states, the records show. Among the GOP officials the group lobbied: the now famous Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffenspberger, who did not respond to a request for comment.

But Secure Democracy never publicly disclosed its ties to New Venture Fund because it would have hurt their ability to engage with GOP lawmakers and voters on both sides of the aisle, four former staffers told the Free Beacon.

"There were so many discussions about how Secure Democracy had to remain pristine and separate, and there could not be any illusion of a link between the two," said a former employee. "One of the reasons was because they obviously wanted to appear unbiased and influence voters."

Emails reviewed by the Free Beacon also reflect New Venture Fund’s efforts to conceal its ties to Secure Democracy. Former Secure Democracy communications director Jay Riestenberg told the head of another left-wing organization in July of 2021 that New Venture Fund’s control of the group "is not publicly advertised for strategic reasons."

New Venture Fund also controlled Secure Democracy’s hiring decisions. Secure Democracy launched in 2018 and operated with a small pool of no more than eight part-time employees on its payroll, all of whom were simultaneously employed by New Venture Fund.

"I applied for a position that was listed as Voting Rights Lab. It was only later in the interview process I was told you’re going to be on the Secure Democracy side," a former staffer said.

Lewis and other senior New Venture Fund employees who ran Secure Democracy were compensated solely by the charity rather than by Secure Democracy.

It’s not uncommon for charities to partner with other 501(c)4 nonprofit groups. But Secure Democracy financial records reviewed by the Free Beacon and accounts from three former New Venture Fund employees indicate that the charity had no formal cost-sharing agreement with Secure Democracy in 2020 and 2021. The lack of such an agreement, which is typical in partnerships between 501(c)3 charities and 501(c)4 groups, meant no legal guardrails were in place to prevent New Venture Fund’s charitable resources from subsidizing Secure Democracy’s political activities.

"I think they’re sort of skating on thin ice," said nonprofit attorney Alan Dye. "The IRS could take the position that the 501(c)4 is acting as the agent of the charity. And since that includes activity the charity could not itself engage in, that’s a problem."

Several legal experts said New Venture Fund may have crossed a legal red line as it directed Secure Democracy’s partisan political activities, given that charities are prohibited from engaging in partisan political activism.

In one instance, Secure Democracy had to seek Lewis’s approval before running nearly $90,000 in political ads against five Republican senators in September 2020, emails reviewed by the Free Beacon show. But that campaign, according to Secure Democracy’s attorney David Mitrani, needed to be logged as political spending.

Despite Mitrani's advice, Lewis approved the ad purchase from her New Venture Fund email account. That exchange, according to former IRS Tax Law Specialist Patrick Sternal, may be evidence of unlawful activity.

"Theoretically, the prohibition on charity intervention in political campaigns is absolute, meaning that any amount of political activity could lead to revocation," Sternal said.

Nonprofit tax attorneys Jason Torchinsky and Paul Kamenar urged the IRS to investigate New Venture Fund’s use of charitable resources to advance Secure Democracy’s political activity.

"Since NVF appears to be directing the political expenditures of Secured Democracy, as a c3 they are doing indirectly what they cannot do directly. NVF is at risk of losing their tax-exempt status," said Kamenar, an attorney with the National Legal and Policy Center watchdog group.

"It’s something the IRS should take a serious look at since charities are expressly prohibited from engaging in partisan campaign activity," added Torchinsky.

The extent of New Venture Fund’s control over Secure Democracy was of particular concern to former Secure Democracy executive director Sarah Walker, who emailed New Venture Fund general counsel Andrew Schultz on Oct. 28, 2021, expressing her fears that the arrangement was "fraught with compliance and potential legal ramifications," and put her, Secure Democracy, and New Venture Fund in "legal jeopardy."

Walker now alleges she lost her job for blowing the whistle on the group’s mismanagement. She retained a high-powered legal team that included former independent counsel Ken Starr and filed a wrongful termination lawsuit in federal court in November 2022. Her legal team informed New Venture Fund of their belief that the charity had illegally subsidized Secure Democracy to the tune of more than $10 million.

"New Venture Fund, and any project they manage, are expressly prohibited from engaging in any political activity," said Americans for Public Trust executive director Caitlin Sutherland. "Not only do these records show careless and sloppy bookkeeping, but also seem to indicate a pattern of flagrant violations of the rules governing nonprofits."

By that time, however, New Venture Fund and Arabella Advisors had already started their attempt to shield the charity from IRS scrutiny.

On Nov. 5, 2021, Schultz, the New Venture Fund general counsel, sent a letter informing Secure Democracy he had instructed the charity’s staff to refrain from interacting with Secure Democracy employees. Also around that time, Walker alleges New Venture Fund booted her from her Secure Democracy email, according to her wrongful termination lawsuit.

This left Secure Democracy’s small pool of part-time employees in a lurch.

"Suddenly Sarah disappeared. And then who we worked for became very unclear," a former Secure Democracy lobbyist told the Free Beacon. "We started receiving conflicting information about who we worked for and who of our colleagues we were allowed to work with."

New Venture Fund then moved to shut down Secure Democracy and replace it with a new group, Secure Democracy USA, formed in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 17, 2021.

Smith, the Secure Democracy board chair, and Schultz, the New Venture Fund general counsel, signed a contract on Dec. 1, 2021, agreeing to disburse Secure Democracy’s assets to New Venture Fund and Secure Democracy USA. New Venture Fund also agreed to pick up the tab for Secure Democracy’s outstanding bills.

"The most damning thing in this sordid story is the way the Arabella empire shuttered Secure Democracy within weeks of the whistleblower’s warning," said Capital Research Center president Scott Walter. "The powers-that-be must have feared possible damage to the billion-dollar-a-year New Venture Fund, Arabella’s crown jewel."

A former New Venture Fund employee involved in the transaction said Secure Democracy's abrupt shutdown was directly related to the legal implications of New Venture Fund’s control of the organization’s political activity.

"It was determined that there were compliance issues," the former staffer said.

New Venture Fund went on to alter employee timesheets to make it appear that another Arabella Advisors offshoot, the North Fund—a 501(c)4 nonprofit that can legally engage in political activity—had subsidized Secure Democracy’s work in 2021, two former staffers said.

The staffers said they received orders from Eva Keller, an Arabella Advisors employee, around March 2022 to modify timesheets for their colleagues that worked with Secure Democracy the prior year.

"It was all just kind of haphazard," one of the former staffers said.

Sometime later in 2022, the two former employees said, the North Fund billed Secure Democracy USA hundreds of thousands of dollars for the work it supposedly provided to Secure Democracy the previous year. The figure was based on the modified New Venture Fund timesheets.

"The number I saw on a budget sheet was between $630,000 and $700,000," one of the former employees told the Free Beacon.

The modification of time sheets so long after the fact is highly unusual and warrants an IRS investigation, legal experts told the Free Beacon.

"The attempt to retroactively involve a c4 in the spending is an indication that someone realized how risky the political activity is for the charity," said Torchinsky, the nonprofit attorney. "While nonprofits regularly file amendments, going back and changing time sheets after the books are closed and nearly 18 months prior is unusual to say the least."

Secure Democracy’s IRS tax returns for its 2020 and 2021 tax years also contain curious discrepancies. The group’s attorney regularly instructed employees during those years to categorize work as partisan political activity, emails reviewed by the Free Beacon show. But Secure Democracy told the IRS that it engaged in no political activity whatsoever.

"It is certainly odd that they had internally flagged activity as political, and then reported nothing on the 990," said Sternal, the former IRS Tax Law Specialist.

New Venture Fund cut ties with the Voting Rights Lab project in June 2022 because of the compliance issues surrounding its control of Secure Democracy, two former staffers said.

"It was because of the Sarah matter," one source said. "It didn’t make any sense to keep them under their umbrella."

Voting Rights Lab is now a project of SD Foundation, a charity Lewis launched in August 2022. SD Foundation got its start thanks to a $4.8 million cash injection from New Venture Fund, according to an IRS tax exempt application obtained by the Free Beacon.

A New Venture Fund spokesperson told the Free Beacon that the charity complies with the law.

"New Venture Fund supports a wide range of nonpartisan projects from across the ideological spectrum, appropriately uses funds, and complies with the law," the spokesperson said. "Allegations to the contrary are false, and we are litigating them with the former NVF employee making these false claims."

Secure Democracy USA did not return a request for comment.

The post Top Democratic Operatives Were Quietly Pulling the Strings at a Voting Rights Group. Lawyers Say They May Have Broken the Law. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

A Washington, D.C., fire department dispatch call on Sunday said the white powder, identified as "cocaine hydrochloride," was discovered in the "library" of the executive mansion. But a Secret Service spokesman later said it was found in the West Wing.

While the West Wing houses the daily work offices for President Joe Biden and White House staffers, the library is located in the White House living quarters below, where access is more restricted.

The location of the substance could provide clues to whether it was brought into the building by a White House staffer, a visitor, or a Biden family member. Hunter Biden, who pleaded guilty to tax and gun charges in June, has publicly struggled with cocaine addiction for years and was booted from the U.S. Navy in 2014 after testing positive for cocaine.

The discovery of cocaine at the White House is politically inconvenient for Biden, who has faced questions about his son’s rampant drug use and foreign business dealings. During Biden’s time in the Senate, he drafted a 1986 law that instituted significantly harsher prison sentences for crack cocaine possession as compared to powder cocaine. Critics have slammed the law as racist, arguing that it disproportionately targeted the black community.

The White House was briefly evacuated on Sunday after Secret Service agents discovered the suspicious substance during a sweep of the building. President Biden and his immediate family, including son Hunter, were not at the White House at the time.

The D.C. fire department was called in to test the substance. "We have a yellow bar saying cocaine hydrochloride," said a responder in a dispatch call published by the Daily Mail, adding that it was discovered in the library. Cocaine hydrochloride refers to the powder version of cocaine.

Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Secret Service, later said the substance was found in the "work area of the West Wing," according to the New York Times. Two law enforcement officials also told the Associated Press that the cocaine was found in an "area accessible to tour groups." A subsequent CBS report said the drug was found "near an entrance where visitors taking tours are directed to leave their phones."

But West Wing tours are not typically available on Sundays, according to the White House's website. Those tours are also expected to end at 12:30 PM.

A White House spokeswoman said it is "not accurate" to say tours are not given on Sundays. While the spokeswoman initially declined to answer a question on whether any outside guests or tour groups were invited into the White House the same evening the Secret Service discovered the bag of cocaine, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre later said during a Wednesday briefing that there was a White House tour on Sunday. Jean-Pierre refused to disclose what time the tour occurred.

It is not uncommon for senior White House staff to invite friends for unofficial visits to the West Wing. Former president Donald Trump instituted a crackdown on outside devices allowed into the premises in an attempt to stop leaks to the press. Two individuals who visited the White House during that time told the Washington Free Beacon they were instructed to leave their phones in a small cubbie outside of the West Wing for the duration of their trip.

Hunter Biden was rumored to be living at the executive mansion earlier this spring, but this has not been confirmed by the White House.

President Biden has publicly embraced his son since his guilty plea in June. Hunter Biden attended a state dinner with the Indian prime minister last month, and he joined the president and First Lady to watch July 4th fireworks from the White House balcony this week after the white substance was discovered. On Friday, shortly before the substance's discovery, White House pool reporters saw Hunter Biden depart the White House with his father to travel to Camp David.

While Biden has defended his scandal-plagued son, other presidents have moved to distance themselves from drug users. Former president Dwight Eisenhower, for example, was "so anti-pot" that he barred actor Robert Mitchum from the White House movie theater because the celebrity had been convicted of a marijuana charge, presidential historian Tevi Troy told the Free Beacon.

Update 2:55 p.m.: This piece has been updated to include additional information.

The post Who Left Cocaine at the White House? Shifting Stories Make It Difficult to Determine. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The department could start by examining how politically connected families like the Bidens get their children into Ivy League schools.

In 2018, Hunter Biden tapped his father and a number of Biden family connections to help get his daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country.

Maisy Biden's college admissions process could raise a number of uncomfortable questions for the president. The saga highlights exactly the kind of "legacy admissions" Biden has slammed. The story also highlights the Biden family's occasionally shady dealings with the University of Pennsylvania just as congressional Republicans are probing alleged ethical misconduct by both Joe and Hunter Biden.

Maisy Biden was never much of a student. But she had her sights set on the University of Pennsylvania, whose 5.9 percent acceptance rate made it one of the most exclusive schools in the country.

"I applied early decision to Penn today!!" Maisy Biden texted Hunter Biden on October 31.

Just two days later, Maisy asked her father for an update on her application. In the coming months, Hunter and Joe Biden would mount a full-court press on university administrators to get Maisy's application over the finish line. The Bidens took their case directly to the top: University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann.

On December 13, 2018, the elder Biden texted Hunter that he was "going to try to see [University of Pennsylvania] Pres GUTMANN tomorrow." Two days later, Joe Biden told Hunter Biden that he "had a great talk with Guttman [sic]."

"Maisy still in the game for regular acceptance. But must do well in class this period. It's real," Joe Biden wrote on December 15. "We should talk about tutors etc starting tomorrow."

The next day, Hunter Biden told his daughter the good news—she had not been rejected. Hunter Biden said his father received some advice from Gutmann: Maisy needed to get her grades up in her senior year. Hunter also suggested that Maisy could see her chances improve if she expressed interest in playing lacrosse at Penn. Although it's unclear whether the lacrosse tip was from Joe Biden's conversations with the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Hunter was peeved that the counsel came so late.

"I also think it would help if you had lax coach talk to their lax coach," Hunter wrote. "Bottom line is that Guttman [sic] made clear that in order for her to explain the 11th grade you had to show improvement in 12th," Hunter wrote. "Which is something I think we would have all liked to know form [sic] the start, but in fairness we were much later in the app process than usual and made it look like we weren't 100% about Penn."

In March 2019, Joe Biden told Hunter that he asked the university's dean of admissions about Maisy's application.

In the same conversation with Hunter, Joe Biden also said Gutmann would call him directly to let him know whether Maisy was accepted.

"If I hear before 1pm on [March 29, 2019] I'll call immediately so you can call Maisy," Joe Biden wrote. "Let me know if there's anything I can do on anything."

The influence campaign worked. Maisy Biden matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2019. President Joe Biden was present in the stands four years later, when Maisy graduated with a bachelor of arts degree.

Biden's infatuation with the Ivy League goes back decades.  "There's a river of power that flows through this country," Biden said in 1988, according to a book by journalist Richard Ben Cramer. "Some people, a few, get to swim in the river all the time. … And that river flows from the Ivy League."

The Biden family had cultivated a close relationship with Gutmann by the time Joe Biden leaned on him to tip the scales for Maisy. Gutmann in 2013 awarded Joe Biden an honorary doctor of laws degree from the university and has called the president "one of our nation's foremost statesmen."

Joe and Hunter Biden held a flurry of meetings with Gutmann in 2016, emails from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop show. In January 2016, the three met at Joe Biden's Delaware beach house, according to the emails.

In April 2016, Joe and Hunter Biden met with Gutmann at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Hunter Biden directed his business partner Eric Schwerin to cancel a preexisting appointment with the prime minister of the Ivory Coast so that he could attend the meeting.

"You are supposed to meet with the Ivory Coast PM at 8:30am at the Sofitel downtown. Cancel?" Schwerin wrote to Hunter Biden two days before the April 15 meeting.

"Yes I guess so—can he reschedule—the Guttman [sic] mtg is a must attend for me per Dad," Hunter Biden responded. "I need to be at NAVOBS at 9AM sharp."

It's unclear what the meetings were about, but they took place one year before the University of Pennsylvania launched the Penn Biden Center.

The Penn Biden Center proved to be a lucrative endeavor for both the university and Joe Biden. The University of Pennsylvania raked in over $1 billion in foreign funding after launching the think tank, the Free Beacon reported. And the university paid Joe Biden more than $900,000 from 2017 through April 2019, even though he taught no regular classes and attended around a dozen ticketed events at the campus, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Hunter Biden was so confident in his connection to Gutmann that he thought he could reinvent himself as a professor at her prestigious school.

"I went to ask dad for the money to go to rehab. … And to tell him I want to get sober and teach at Penn," Hunter Biden told his sister-in-law and then-lover, Hallie Biden, in a December 26, 2018, text.

Three days later, Hunter Biden referenced Gutmann by name in a text to his uncle that reiterated his desire to teach at the University of Pennsylvania.

"That night I tell dad I want to probably stay in the area and specifically I wanted to live by you and teach my course at Penn and maybe develop another one," he texted Jim Biden on December 29, 2018.

Hunter Biden never taught his class at the University of Pennsylvania. But the Bidens weren't done with Gutmann yet.

In July 2021, President Joe Biden nominated Amy Gutmann to serve as his ambassador to Germany. The Senate confirmed Gutmann's nomination with a 54-42 vote in January 2022.

The post Joe Biden Says He Wants To Crack Down on 'Privilege' in Education. He Once Called UPenn's President To Get His Granddaughter In. appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In an afternoon speech to supporters in Chicago, Biden celebrated the nation’s "fundamental break from the economic theory that’s failed the middle class." "Bidenomics," he said, would strengthen the middle class and raise wages through favorable treatment for organized labor, a large expansion of welfare, tax credits for green industries such as solar panel manufacturers, and higher taxes on the wealthy.

"Bidenomics is about the future. Bidenomics is just another way of saying ‘restore the American dream.’ Because it’s worked before," he said.

This message has proven to be a tough sell to the public so far. The inflation rate sits at just over 4 percent, roughly double what the Federal Reserve and most economics consider healthy. Biden’s approval rating is also at a nadir, with a plurality of voters consistently citing the economy as their biggest concern. Economists told the Washington Free Beacon that most of the economic gains the White House is touting have little to do with Biden’s agenda.

But the president’s speech suggests the White House will not divert from their policies in the lead-up to 2024. The president is banking on the hope that voters will change their opinions about the state of the economy after hearing about his legislative accomplishments over the last two years.

The White House previewed Biden’s remarks Monday in a memo circulated to the press. "Bidenomics," the memo states, "is both a winning economic strategy that is delivering results, and an approach that is strongly supported by the vast majority of the American people." "Bidenomics" is intended to be a clear alternative to more conservative and traditional economic theories.

Biden touted the various new spending initiatives, which total more than $4 trillion, passed since he took office. Bills such as the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden explained, are examples of the three pillars of "Bidenomics."

"First, making smart investments in America. Second, educating and empowering American workers to grow the middle class," Biden said. "And third, promoting competition to lower costs and help small businesses."

Some economists are skeptical that Biden’s policies have contributed to the nation’s post-COVID 19 economic recovery. His $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that passed in March 2021, they believe, is partially responsible for the high inflation rate that has translated into workers taking home less pay each month since he took office.

The post 'It's Worked Before': Biden Defends Economic Agenda In Chicago Speech appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Senior White House advisers circulated a memo on Monday previewing what they characterized as Biden's economic accomplishments: enormous domestic spending, higher taxes, and favorable treatment for unions. "Bidenomics," the memo says, "is both a winning economic strategy that is delivering results, and an approach that is strongly supported by the vast majority of the American people."

But not everyone shares the White House’s optimism. Some economists say recent economic gains have nothing to do with Biden’s policies, and have resulted from businesses returning to normal operations after a year of shutdowns. Meanwhile, these economists note, Americans still struggle with inflation levels not seen since the 1980s—a problem exacerbated by the same programs Biden heralds as a success.

"I think the legacy of Biden thus far is rapid inflation, stagnant real wages, and soaring debt," said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. "I just think we would have been better off without inflation in the first place."

New spending under Biden totals roughly $6.5 trillion, the most since World War II. More than $4 trillion of that came during Biden’s first two years in office. It includes the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, the nearly $1 trillion infrastructure bill, and the nearly $1 trillion Inflation Reduction Act.

The White House calls these bills part of the president’s "Investing in America agenda," and argues they are an integral part of turning "the page on the failed trickle-down policies of the past." Economic data, they say, prove "that Bidenomics is both a winning economic strategy that is delivering results, and an approach that is strongly supported by the vast majority of the American people."

The inflation rate sits at just over 4 percent, down from 8 percent in 2022, but double what the Federal Reserve and economists generally agree is healthy. Persistent inflation means average Americans have seen their real wages fall every month since Biden took office, and there is little evidence things will change any time soon.

"For the average American family, they have seen their weekly paychecks go up on average 200 bucks, so that sounds really great. And it is by historic standards," said EJ Antoni, an economist and research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "The problem is that prices have gone up so much faster than wages. It’s one thing to say something that sounds good but it’s another thing to actually improve people’s lives, and we just haven’t seen that."

The economic reality is reflected in Biden’s historically low approval rating. A recent Harvard survey found that 74 percent of Americans say their financial situation is not improving, and a May Fox News poll found 83 percent of respondents saying the president’s policies have not benefited them.

Where the Biden administration sees bright spots, such as the unemployment rate, others see a mirage. Although it is true that the unemployment rate sits at historic lows, Riedl said, such an outcome is unremarkable given the nation’s "overheated economy."

"Of course you’ll see short-term low unemployment and healthy nominal GDP growth under these conditions," said Riedl. "I think the Federal Reserve has had to perform heroically in order to keep unemployment down and managing the recovery from your policies shouldn’t be the same as taking credit for good policies."

There is little reason to believe Biden’s more recent legislative economic accomplishments are responsible for the strong labor market. Less than a year has passed since the president signed the Inflation Reduction Act, and many of the tax and spending initiatives the White House touts in its policy memo are spaced out for a decade.

Although the White House claims the Inflation Reduction Act will be responsible for "hundreds of thousands of good-paying clean energy jobs," the center-right Tax Foundation concluded that the law would ultimately cost the country nearly 30,000 jobs by the end of 2032. The unemployment rate is still higher than it was during the Trump administration, and the labor participation rate has dropped below pre-pandemic levels.

The White House’s policy memo says "our work isn’t done," but expresses confidence that the country’s worst economic days are behind it.

Antoni suggested this is a risky bet, and that although growth remains positive, leading economic indicators suggest trouble may be ahead.

"Effectively their message is ‘don’t believe your lying eyes,’" said Antoni. "You just can’t spend, borrow, and print trillions upon trillions of dollars and not expect negative consequences. I just don’t know when we forgot that."

The post 'Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes': Biden Hits the Road to Sell ‘Bidenomics’ appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Sens. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) and Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.) will rub shoulders with donors at a fundraiser hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), according to an invitation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Tickets for the event start at $3,300, and go for as much $26,400. Casey and Baldwin both face tough reelection battles in 2024, and represent states traditionally considered part of the Democratic Party’s "blue wall."

The Harvard Club is a curious venue for Casey and Baldwin, who represent states with large white working-class populations and below-average college attainment rates. Dues for the private Harvard Club, which boasts "the amenities of a luxury hotel," costs nearly $3,500 a year for full access. Membership is restricted to Harvard graduates, their spouses, and faculty.

Casey and Baldwin are keenly aware of their states’ demographics and make a point of brandishing their working-class credentials on their campaign sites. Casey says "he’s working to cut through the gridlock, stand up to powerful corporate special interests, and make the lives of hardworking Pennsylvanians a little bit easier." Baldwin claims she "is committed to making sure that working people, not just big corporate special interests or the super wealthy, have a fighter on their side."

Along with Schumer, the fundraiser’s hosts include lobbyist Tonio Burgos and superyacht owner Dennis Mehiel, who recently bought a nearly $11 million apartment on Central Park West. Public relations consultant Ken Sunshine, who represented Hollywood serial rapist Harvey Weinstein and hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett, is also listed as a host.

Hats, gym clothing, and shorts are not permitted on the Harvard Club’s premises, which may complicate efforts to hold similar fundraisers there with Casey’s colleague, Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman (D.).

The post Senators Of The People: Swing State Lawmakers To Fundraise at Harvard Club With Chuck Schumer appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

IRS investigator Gary Shapley on Thursday told Congress that Garland’s Department of Justice blocked the agency from bringing felony tax charges against Biden. Shapley alleged that U.S. Attorney David Weiss told investigators he did not have final say in bringing charges against Biden, which contradicts Garland’s claims that he would not interfere in the investigation.

McCarthy says the inconsistencies in Garland and Weiss’s statements could warrant an impeachment inquiry.

"If it comes true what the IRS whistleblowers are saying," McCarthy said Monday morning on Fox and Friends, "we’re going to start impeachment inquiries into the attorney general." The speaker said he would begin impeachment investigations into the attorney general on July 6, barring significant problems with whistleblower testimony.

McCarthy’s announcement is the latest escalation in Republicans’ investigations into Biden’s business dealings. Republicans have long suspected Biden was receiving special treatment from the Department of Justice during its criminal investigation into him. Biden was slapped with two misdemeanor tax charges and a felony gun charge that can be expunged from his record, which critics have slammed as a "sweetheart deal."

White House spokesman Ian Sams, who once modeled aprons for the failed Hillary Clinton campaign, says the push to impeach the president shows Republicans have no "positive agenda." He suggested McCarthy "should work with the president" rather than deliver "partisan stunts."

"Speaker McCarthy and the extreme House Republicans are proving they have no positive agenda to actually help the American people on the issues most important to them and their families," Sams said. "Instead of pushing more partisan stunts intended only to get themselves attention on the far right, they should work with the President to actually put the middle class and working Americans first."

Shapley and an anonymous IRS whistleblower earlier this month warned House Republicans about what they say were serious irregularities with how the Department of Justice handled its probe of Biden. Both whistleblowers say they began investigating the younger Biden in 2018, only to face numerous delays from the Justice Department.

Virtually every step of the investigation, the pair say, saw interference from Justice Department officials. The anonymous official alleged the IRS had a "slam dunk case" against the president’s son, only for Justice Department prosecutors to file minor charges.

Garland has since defended the Justice Department’s investigation into Biden and called criticisms over its conclusion "an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy and essential to the safety of the American people."

House Republicans would use an impeachment hearing to investigate other allegations against Biden, two senior House Republican staffers told the Washington Free Beacon. That includes Shapley’s allegation that Biden threatened a Chinese businessman and invoked his father’s name over a dispute related to a more than $5 million payment.

The Free Beacon reported that Biden was at his father’s Wilmington, Delaware, residence the same day he sent that text. Rob Walker, a longtime Biden family associate, told FBI agents that he was present when Biden and his father met with the Chinese businessman’s firm in December 2020.

The anonymous whistleblower claimed that the FBI verified Hunter Biden’s laptop as authentic and not part of a foreign disinformation campaign as early as 2019, even though the agency briefed Facebook months before the election that they were expecting a "foreign dump." Facebook subsequently censored all posts and news stories referencing Biden’s hard drive in Oct. 2020.

The post McCarthy Floats Garland Impeachment After Whistleblower Allegations appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The whistleblowers, IRS supervisory criminal investigator Gary Shapley and a second unnamed IRS investigator, provided evidence to the House Ways and Means Committee that top Justice Department officials stonewalled an investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business ventures. They also call into question President Biden’s repeated denials that he has no knowledge of his son’s business dealings.

Here are 16 of the biggest revelations from transcripts of their interviews:

Hunter linked dad to Chinese deal in threat to business partner

Hunter Biden invoked his father’s name in a text message, threatening his Chinese business partner to come down on him with their full weight if the business partner did not fulfill his "commitment."

Biden claimed he was sitting right next to his father in an encrypted message on July 30, 2017, to an associate at CEFC China Energy. While the message does not verify that Joe Biden was sitting with his son, the Washington Free Beacon obtained photographic evidence that places Hunter Biden at his father’s Delaware home the day of the text message.

"I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father," Hunter Biden wrote to CEFC official Henry Zhao. Hunter pressed Zhao to call him to discuss a delay in payment as part of the multimillion-dollar consulting agreement.

"I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. All too often people mistake kindness for weakness—and all too often I am standing over top of them saying I warned you," Hunter wrote.

Joe Biden attended other business meetings with Hunter and his Chinese partners

Biden family friend and business partner Rob Walker told the FBI that the elder Biden often attended business meetings with his son, including when he was vice president.

The bombshell claim undermines Joe Biden’s claims to have never been involved in his son’s business ventures.

Walker said he was present when Joe Biden stopped by a meeting at the Washington, D.C., Four Seasons hotel with executives from CEFC China Energy.

The FBI authenticated Hunter Biden's laptop almost a year before we knew it existed

The FBI authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop as far back as November 2019 and knew the device was not part of a foreign disinformation campaign.

Democrats had questioned the authenticity of the laptop after it was released in October 2020. They cast doubt on Delaware computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, who said Biden had abandoned his computer at his store in April 2019. The Biden campaign even orchestrated an initiative to portray the laptop as a Russian intelligence operation.

But FBI agents authenticated the laptop as Biden’s in November 2019 and found no evidence that its contents were manipulated, according to IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley.

Investigators also obtained evidence that placed Hunter Biden near Isaac’s computer shop on the day he allegedly dropped it off for repairs.

Hunter deducted hooker and sex club payments from his taxes

Hunter, who has been known to frequent strip clubs and pay for sex, deducted payments he made to prostitutes and a Los Angeles sex club from his 2018 taxes, according to Gary Shapley, who called the evidence a "slam dunk case" of tax fraud.

According to another whistleblower, Biden sent wire payments to a "West Coast assistant," who was actually a prostitute. He also sent a $10,000 wire earmarked for a golf club membership that was actually a dues payment for a sex club.

The FBI division that investigates foreign spies was involved in Biden probe

The FBI’s national security division, which investigates foreign intelligence and espionage operations, took an interest in Biden’s dealings with China, according to Shapley.

"The FBI is considering a lot of national security type issues here," Shapley said in a discussion about Hunter Biden’s work with CEFC China Energy, which had links to Chinese military intelligence.

Hunter Biden received at least $6 million from CEFC China Energy. The company approached Biden in late-2015 with an offer to donate to a charity affiliated with the first son.

Biden referred to one of his CEFC associates, Patrick Ho, as the "fucking spymaster of China" in a 2018 audio recording. CEFC had hired Biden to the tune of $1 million to represent Ho after he was indicted for trying to bribe African officials for oil rights.

The Justice Department and FBI obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to surveil Ho based on suspicion that he was acting as a covert agent of China.

Shapley said he does not know the status of the FBI’s national security probe.

The investigation into Biden had porn-related origins

The investigation into Hunter Biden has a strange but not entirely shocking origin given Hunter’s history of sex addiction.

"The investigation into Hunter Biden, code name Sportsman, was first opened in November 2018 as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform," Shapley testified.

Shapley did not provide additional details, but said that the investigation turned up evidence that Biden had committed tax crimes.

Prosecutors wanted to charge Hunter with felonies, but he ended up with misdemeanors

In early 2022, prosecutors and IRS investigators recommended felony tax evasion charges against Biden for the years 2014 to 2018.

Shapley said Biden engaged in "textbook" tax evasion and detailed Biden’s scheme to record his foreign income as loans, which are not taxable. Biden evaded $2.2 million in taxes, by Shapley’s conservative estimate.

U.S. attorney David Weiss ultimately settled on a plea deal with Hunter Biden on misdemeanor charges of failure to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018.

Biden’s Department of Justice blocked investigation at multiple turns

According to Shapley, Biden-appointed prosecutors in Washington, D.C., and California rejected David Weiss’s requests that they charge Biden with tax crimes in their jurisdictions.

Shapley also claimed that Weiss said in an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting that he sought special counsel status for the investigation, but was rejected by "Main DOJ" and told to "follow the process."

The denial prevented Weiss from taking aggressive steps in the investigation or from bringing charges against Biden in jurisdictions where he allegedly committed tax fraud.

The IRS whistleblower’s boss corroborated bombshell claims

Shapley’s boss, IRS special agent Darrell Waldon, confirmed Shapley’s recollection of the meeting with Weiss on Oct. 7, 2022.

Shapley emailed his summary of that three-hour meeting to Waldon, who concurred with his memory.

"You covered it all," Waldon wrote.

Hunter won’t ever pay tax on $400,000 income from Ukraine

While Biden has paid off around $1.4 million in unpaid taxes, he will never have to pay taxes on more than $400,000 in income he received in 2014 from Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings.

That’s because the statute of limitations has expired on Biden’s possible tax evasion crimes for that year, according to Shapley.

In his testimony, Shapley described Biden’s alleged scheme to conceal income from Burisma, where he served as a director. Shapley said Biden funneled his Burisma income through his consulting firm, and then disguised payments to himself as loans, which are untaxable.

Agents wanted to search Biden family homes, but were shot down due to ‘optics’

IRS and FBI agents were blocked from searching Hunter Biden’s residence and a guest house at Joe Biden’s compound where his son often stayed, according to Shapley.

The whistleblower said the Biden investigative team discussed search warrants during a meeting on Sept. 3, 2020. Assistant U.S. attorney Lesley Wolf said there was enough probable cause to support a warrant, but she questioned the "optics" of conducting a search of Biden properties close to the election.

The next day, officials at the Justice Department ordered investigators to "cease and desist" from any "overt" investigative steps—such as search warrants—because of the upcoming election.

Ironically, if that search had been conducted, investigators may have discovered the reams of classified documents that Joe Biden stored at his house.

IRS wanted search warrant for Hunter’s storage locker, but prosecutor tipped off his lawyers

After Joe Biden’s election, investigators learned that Hunter Biden maintained a storage locker in northern Virginia where he stored documents related to his company, Owasco.

Seeing this as a potentially fruitful tranche of evidence, Shapley and other investigators pushed for a search warrant for the unit.

But before agents could conduct the search, according to Shapley, assistant U.S. attorney Lesley Wolf informed Hunter Biden’s legal team that investigators had identified his storage unit.

This gave Biden a chance to remove evidence from the facility. 

A mole tipped off Hunter that FBI wanted to interview him

According to Shapley, someone from the FBI informed Hunter Biden’s legal team and the Joe Biden transition team of investigators’ interests in interviewing Hunter Biden on Dec. 8, 2020.

"I was informed that FBI headquarters had notified Secret Service headquarters and the transition team about the planned actions the following day," Shapley testified.

He said the tip-off gave Hunter Biden and his team "an opportunity to obstruct" the investigation.

Hunter’s lawyer said prosecutors would be committing ‘career suicide’ if he was charged

According to Shapley, Hunter Biden attorney Chris Clark threatened prosecutors that if they charged his client, they would be committing "career suicide."

Clark did not respond to the Free Beacon’s request for comment about this allegation. But he smeared Shapley in a statement on Friday as a "very biased individual" whose allegations are "dangerously misleading." Clark claimed without merit back in April that Shapley broke the law by making whistleblower disclosures to Congress.

Joe Biden visited FBI Delaware office during investigation

As vice president, Joe Biden visited an FBI field office in Delaware, the unnamed whistleblower alleges. Although that visit was about an "unrelated matter," the whistleblower said it was "joked" about with investigators.

"Delaware was in the State in which the subject's father lived, and the family was extremely well-known throughout the State, including people on the team," the whistleblower said.

Hunter deducted hotel rooms for father and drug dealer from his taxes

The unnamed whistleblower said that Hunter Biden "deducted expenses for hotel rooms for one of his drug dealers, or what we believed to be one of his drug dealers."

In another instance, investigators found a hotel invoice in President Joe Biden’s name. That stay was for two nights and subsequently deducted as a business expense.

The post 16 Bombshells on Hunter Biden From The IRS Whistleblowers appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

One whistleblower, an IRS criminal investigator whose identity remains a mystery but who worked on the Biden tax probe, told members of the House Ways and Means Committee in a June 1 interview that Biden improperly deducted those expenses from his 2018 taxes.

That's one of the years covered under Biden's plea deal with federal prosecutors, which critics are deriding as a sweetheart deal. Another whistleblower, IRS criminal supervisory special agent Gary Shapley, told lawmakers that the Justice Department's tax division and the prosecutors handling the Biden probe viewed the deductions as "a slam dunk case" of tax fraud. The whistleblowers' testimony fills in many of the gaps on how exactly Biden evaded paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes.

Payments like the ones described, doled out to prostitutes and sex clubs, were not just unlawful tax deductions but also may have been violations of federal sex trafficking laws, the whistleblower alleged, if the prostitutes crossed state lines. And the IRS had indeed located records showing that Biden flew prostitutes across state lines, "paying for their travel, paying for their hotels."

According to the IRS investigator, a self-described Democrat, Biden underreported his total income in 2018 by $267,000, resulting in an underpayment of $106,000 in taxes. "That includes deductions for personal wages and salaries paid, personal travel expenses paid, personal children expenses that he paid, and personal other expenses that he paid," the investigator said, according to a transcript of the interview released Thursday.

The investigator told Congress that Biden made deductions for payments to "no-show employees," including a woman Biden called his "West Coast assistant."

"But she was essentially a prostitute," said the investigator.

Biden also made $18,000 in wire payments to another woman, using coded language to conceal the purpose of the transaction. Another payment of $10,000, labeled as a "golf club member deposit," was actually for a sex club membership.

"We've talked to the person that owned that sex club, and they confirmed that he was there," the investigator said. Biden went on to deduct that $10,000 expense from his tax return.

The embattled first son, who carried on an affair with his late brother's wife following his own divorce, has admitted to his frequent use of prostitutes and is known as a regular at strip clubs. Though the sex club in question is not identified, Shapley told lawmakers that Biden’s payment was for a membership in Los Angeles. The owner of the Los Angeles club Snctm recently revealed that Biden was a client.

In an ironic twist, the investigation into Biden, who was given the FBI code name "Sportsman," was an offshoot of an FBI probe into a foreign online amateur pornography site that started in November 2018, the whistleblowers said. Shapley said the FBI agent who opened that case found Biden's name on a list of some sort, but did not provide additional detail.

Update June 23, 9:20 a.m.: This piece has been updated with additional context.

The post Hunter Biden Deducted Payments to Hooker and Sex Club From His Taxes, Whistleblower Says appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The Bureau learned of the laptop in October 2019, the whistleblower, IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley said, and just one month later verified its authenticity. The IRS was notified about the laptop in December 2019 and told that "it likely contained evidence of a tax crime," the whistleblower said.

Shapley's stunning claims raise important questions about the Department of Justice’s conduct over the last several years.

FBI director Christopher Wray refused as recently as March to verify that the contents of Hunter Biden’s hard drive were not part of a foreign disinformation campaign. Numerous outside investigators and newsrooms, including the Washington Free Beacon, have concluded that Hunter Biden’s hard drive is authentic since its existence was made public by the New York Post in October 2020.

One week after the New York Post's initial report more than 50 former senior intelligence officials signed a letter alleging that it "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." Signatories of that letter included former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, as well as former CIA directors Leon Panetta and John Brennan. That letter was later cited in an Oct. 22 presidential debate by Joe Biden, who said the release of the laptop was part of a "Russian plan." Since he took office, Biden’s White House has insinuated that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

"I think it’s broadly known and widely known…that there was a broad range of Russian disinformation back in 2020," former White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in Sept. 2021.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in August 2022 that the FBI briefed Facebook ahead of the 2020 presidential election about "Russian propaganda" and said his platform should be on "high alert." Zuckerberg said that meeting, which the FBI confirmed took place, was the rationale behind his company censoring all news stories that mentioned the laptop’s contents.

Shapley says the tax agency recommended felony charges against Hunter Biden and that the federal prosecutor handling the probe of the first son was prevented on multiple occasions from filing charges.

Federal prosecutors knew that no content on the Hunter Biden hard drive was fabricated prior to the 2020 election, according to a memo Shapley prepared on Oct. 22, 2020 and provided to the House Ways and Means Committee. Content on the hard drive were exact matches to files authorities had obtained from a search warrant of Hunter Biden’s iCloud account, the memo states.

"We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer and or hard drive," the memo states. "There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive."

Authorities also knew the New York Post explanation that Hunter Biden dropped his laptop off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and then neglected to pick it back up, was accurate, Shapley said.
Investigators had obtained financial records and "other intelligence" showing Hunter Biden was in the vicinity of the computer repair shop the same day he dropped his computer off for repair.

"Financial records show [Hunter Biden] was around Wilmington DE shop at a cigar shop on the same day," the memo states.

The FBI determined the device was Hunter Biden’s by comparing its device number to Hunter Biden’s iCloud account.

""The FBI case agent, Josh Wilson, called up the computer shop owner, John Paul, and basically got the device numbers from him," Shapley said, according to an interview transcript released by the House Ways and Means Committee. "And then we bounced those device numbers off third-party records, and it showed that it was, in fact, Hunter Biden's device. So it was a very first important step."

This is a developing story. 

The post Whistleblower Says FBI Verified Authenticity of Hunter Biden Laptop in November 2019 appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In a January press release, the Justice Department said that "federal prosecutors [are] aggressively pursuing those who lie in connection with firearms transactions," arguing that its tough-on-offender policies were essential to  "reduc[ing] gun violence."

The Justice Department listed eight individuals who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of lying on a federal firearms application. The agency stated that "keeping guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them is of paramount concern" and will "prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands by holding accountable those who lie to get them."

"There is no higher priority than protecting our citizens and their loved ones from firearms violence," said Jeffrey C. Boshek, the special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Dallas Field Division, in a statement at the time. "The lesson learned here is that if you buy a gun for someone that shouldn’t have one, you will go to prison. And trust me, prison is not somewhere you want to be."

None of the eight individuals received a "sweetheart deal," as Republican critics have described the plea agreement given to Biden. The first son, who was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm while addicted to a controlled substance, was offered a pretrial "diversionary program" that will clear him of all charges if completed.

The differing outcomes then and now would seem to bolster GOP allegations of a two-tiered justice system in which Biden is benefiting from his relationship to the White House. President Joe Biden has often called for more stringent gun control measures and signed several executive orders that created stricter background checks for firearms purchases.

The cases cited by the Justice Department in January include an individual who pleaded guilty to making false statements during the attempted purchases of firearms after omitting a conviction for carrying a gun under the influence of marijuana.

Another of the men spent 16 months in federal custody after he was arrested for making a false statement during the purchase of a firearm. That individual had been deemed incompetent by a court and was also the subject of a protective order that banned him from gun ownership. He is serving a two-year sentence of supervised release.

Prosecutors weighed charging Hunter Biden with lying on a federal gun form in purchasing the firearm in October 2018. Biden answered "no" to a question on the form that asks whether the buyer is "an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance." Lying on the questionnaire is a felony.

Text messages on Biden’s abandoned laptop strongly suggest he attempted to buy crack cocaine just one day prior to his gun purchase, the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this month. In his memoir, Biden wrote that he was smoking crack "every fifteen minutes" during that period of his life. Federal prosecutors, however, never charged Biden with lying on the gun form.

The revolver Biden bought, a .38 special, was stolen less than two weeks later by his then-girlfriend Hallie Biden, who was also the widow of his recently deceased brother, Beau Biden. Hallie Biden, who texted Hunter Biden that she was "scared when you walk out the door," disposed of the handgun in a garbage can across the street from a Wilmington, Delaware public school.

The missing gun prompted an investigation by both the FBI and the Secret Service and was eventually retrieved by an elderly man who was searching the trash for cans and bottles. No charges were brought against Hallie Biden over the incident.

Hunter Biden’s attorney, Chris Clark, said Tuesday that his client is likely to remain free "without conditions."

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Months Before Hunter Biden Plea, DOJ Touted Crackdown on Gun-Related Crimes appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

But how much money has the group actually raised to fund its effort to get on the ballot? It’s hard to say. No Labels won't say how large its staff is, so, in the face of several resignations last year -- a POLITICO report put the number at at least 11 out of a staff of 20, while its website lists just three staff members -- it is difficult to know whether the group has the manpower to shake up the two-party system.

Several news reports have indicated the group is in the midst of a $70 million fundraising haul. That figure has a single source, a September 2022 New York Times column by David Brooks, who wrote then that the "No Labels operation is a $70 million effort, of which $46 million has already been raised or pledged." Brooks has since reneged on his enthusiasm for a third-party bid, writing earlier this month that "this is not the right election to carry out their strategy." He nonetheless repeated that No Labels is a "$70 million effort."

It's possible that No Labels has seen a fundraising surge in the last two years, but publicly available evidence suggests otherwise. The group controlled just $10 million at the end of 2021, according to tax documents. Its 2022 IRS filings have not yet been released, and a spokesman for the group did not respond to a request for comment about its fundraising since that time. Nor did a spokesman indicate how much of that $46 million was raised, how much was pledged, and whether there were any contingencies attached to the pledges. Brooks did not respond to a request for comment about the source of the $70 million figure.

No Labels has recently made headlines for its efforts to gain ballot access in several states. The tip of the spear in that project is the political action committee Insurance Policy for America, Inc. (IFPA).

No Labels launched IFPA in 2021 with a $2.4 million donation. IFPA nonetheless told the Internal Revenue Service that it had no related entities, though it listed No Labels’ Washington, D.C., headquarters on Connecticut Ave. as its address. The group changed its name to No Labels Ballot Access, Inc. in July of 2022, but continued to submit IRS filings under the IFPA name. At the end of 2022, it had raised just $190,800 from 36 donors. No Labels Ballot Access Inc. did not respond to a request for comment.

The group’s strategy has been as much of a muddle as its finances, and even its chief strategist, Ryan Clancy, has said he has little clue how an independent bid would impact the presidential race. "To sit where we are and say we know exactly how an independent ticket would impact a race, it’s cherry-picking," he told NBC News last month.

Since then, the group has dialed back its ambitions. No Labels co-chair Dr. Ben Chavis told the network on Thursday that the group would shut down its efforts if polls showed Biden "way, way out ahead" of Trump. "No Labels is not and will not be a spoiler in favor of Donald Trump in 2024," Chavis said.

That statement came on the heels of another from Clancy, who told Politico days earlier that if Florida governor Ron DeSantis or former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley leads the Republican ticket, No Labels might also pack things up: "Polling and modeling," Clancy said, could lead them to conclude a third presidential option is no longer necessary.

Even so, the group remains remarkably cagey about its plans. Its website is an exercise in empty prose: No Labels is "preparing for the possibility of nominating a candidate"; it will proceed with that project only if "proper environmental conditions" are met; it will release a policy agenda "in the summer of 2023," chock-full of "commonsense solutions."

No Labels has gained access to the ballot in just four states as of April, although that number may dwindle to just three. The Arizona Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in March to kick No Labels off the 2024 ballot in the state.

A senior White House official told the Free Beacon that the Biden campaign has no plans to comment on No Labels' plans.

In the meantime, the group has a six-point outline that summarizes "what we believe." Those principles include "America isn’t perfect, but we love this country and would not want to live any place else" and "We support, and are grateful for, the U.S. military."

The post Why No Labels May Have No Cash and No Plan appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Biden's campaign speech rehashed familiar themes—Republicans, he told the Philadelphia crowd, want to slash Social Security and Medicaid benefits, and the wealthy need to "pay their fair share." The message appeared to resonate with the union members in attendance, but several who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon said their colleagues at home felt different. Inflation and a leftward lurch on social issues, those members told the Free Beacon, had alienated many blue-collar voters who once were the bedrock of the Democratic Party but now don't want to show up to support the president.

"I'm a little worried about my membership in my union, and how they feel," said Eric Houghtaling, a retired electrician who served as a Democrat in the New Jersey Legislature. "They don't think he's rough-and-tumble enough, they think he's too old. I gotta tell you, the guys at home want to talk more about stuff like guns and immigration."

Biden is one of the most unpopular first-term incumbents in recent history, a reality that even his staunchest supporters who gathered in Philadelphia acknowledged. The RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows his approval rating at a meager 41 percent, while nearly 66 percent of voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Voter dissatisfaction with Biden is evident in his own party as well. Only about half of Democrats want Biden to seek a second term, and his most significant Democratic primary challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., consistently registers double-digit support in polls.

Brad Schneider, 54, said his fellow steelworkers in Pittsburgh feel as though Biden has forgotten them.

"The members here think Biden's in good shape, but the members at home? Not so much," said Schneider. "The members at home don't really think he’s done enough. They don't see him enough."

A senior White House official in attendance insisted that the speech—which featured signs displaying the slogan "LABOR FOR BIDEN HARRIS 2024"—was not a campaign event. That same official declined to comment on Kennedy's challenge and said Biden's team doesn't "feel that we have to be out there campaigning."

The AFL-CIO on Friday backed Biden's reelection bid, the earliest the organization has ever given an endorsement to a presidential candidate.

AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler told the Free Beacon that the early endorsement was not meant to rally Democratic voters behind an unpopular president, but rather to "unlock support" early on in the campaign. Union member support for Democrats has slipped in recent years.

David Wu, a member of the Screen Actors Guild and staunch supporter of the president, blamed Biden's poor numbers on political polarization, which he said has increased since 2021. Asked about Biden's reelection chances, Wu said that anyone would have a hard time winning a second term in this "oddly divided political environment." Wu, however, discounted Kennedy's support in polls as a real threat to Biden.

"People say they want RFK because you've got to protest, and you want to send a message," Wu said. "Those poll results are good tools for political advisers, but a lot of it is just about how the wind is blowing that day."

Biden's speech did not outline a vision for a second term but rather was a laundry list of his legislative accomplishments, such as the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the $500 billion Inflation Reduction Act.

"I came with a plan and it started with passing the American Rescue Plan, a plan to vaccinate the nation and get our economy going again," Biden said. "And that's exactly what it did."

Issues that polls say are on the minds of voters, such as inflation, crime, and immigration, were unmentioned by the president.

The post 'A Little Worried': Union Members at Biden's Philly Speech See Uphill Climb for 2024 appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.