Biden stumbles again on Air Force One, almost falls on Alabama trip

 President Biden faltered and nearly fell for at least the fourth time going up the steps of Air Force One on Sunday while boarding his flight back to Delaware from Alabama.

Biden, 80, visited the town of Selma to commemorate the 58th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march during the civil rights era and push for Congress to pass sweeping election reform before making his perilous way up to the plane hours later.

The oldest-ever president has staggered at least three other times when taking the stairs up to the aircraft, most recently when departing Poland after a three-day trip to Kyiv amid Ukraine’s ongoing war against Russia.

In May 2022, Biden lost but quickly regained his balance by grabbing the handrail while boarding the presidential airplane at Andrews Air Force Base before a trip to Illinois. The next month, he stumbled ahead of a flight to Los Angeles for the Summit of the Americas — and a week later, took a spill from his bike while out for a ride in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

President Biden stumbles as he boards Air Force One while departing Alabama Sunday.

WSFA

Former President Donald Trump used the bike incident to ridicule Biden during his weekend speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying: “We all smile when he falls down stairs and things. It’s cute, when he falls off his bicycle.”

Biden also stumbled twice and fell to one knee when bounding up to Air Force One in March 2021 before traveling to Georgia to attack Republican-passed state election legislation, which he called “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” Then-White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said a gust of wind precipitated the fall.

The missteps have made Biden an easy target for Republicans who see the president as not physically or mentally fit to serve. Presidential physician Kevin O’Connor in February made note in a five-page report of Biden’s “significant spinal arthritis, mild post-fracture foot arthritis and a mild sensory peripheral neuropathy of the feet.”

Biden also went wobbly while boarding Air Force One in Warsaw Feb. 22.

Reuters

GOP presidential hopeful and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has called during her campaign for annual mental competency tests for politicians who are older than 75 years.

During the speech he delivered in Selma, Biden recalled being a “student up north” in 1965 and said he regretted not being with activists whose attempted march from Selma to Montgomery was cut short by police violence.

“I remember feeling how guilty I was; I wasn’t here,” the commander-in-chief said. “How could we all be up there, and you going through what you went through.”

Biden’s most frightening fall came in March 2021 before a trip to Georgia.

Reuters

Since the 1980s, Biden has asserted varying degrees of involvement in the civil rights movement, at one point highlighting his work “at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Delaware.” He admitted, though, after his failed 1988 presidential campaign that he “was not an activist.”

“I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. But I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans,” he said in October 1987 after dropping out of the race.

Nevertheless, when he served as vice president, Biden told attendees at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in 2014 that he “was involved in desegregating movie theaters.” And when running for president five years later, Biden told deep-pocketed donors during a San Francisco fundraiser that he “got involved in the civil rights movement as a kid.”

Last year, the president even told students at two historically black colleges in Atlanta that he had been arrested for his role in the movement.

“I did not walk in the shoes of generations of students who walked these grounds, but I walked other grounds,” he said on the campus of Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University in January 2022. “Because I’m so damn old, I was there as well. You think I’m kidding, man. It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested. Anyway.”

The president has yet to announce his 2024 presidential campaign, but first lady Jill Biden said in February that her husband is “not done” and will kick off his candidacy in the coming months.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/biden-nearly-falls-before-leaving-alabama/

WH won’t say why Hunter Biden-tied Russian oligarchs avoided sanction

 President Biden’s top spokesperson refused to comment Monday on why two Russian billionaires associated with first son Hunter Biden have escaped US sanctions over the year-old war in Ukraine.

The Post asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for an explanation after reporting fresh details last week on the association between the Biden family and oligarchs Vladimir Yevtushenkov and Yelena Baturina.

“Could [you] share the reason why President Biden hasn’t sanctioned the Russian billionaires Vladimir Yevtushenkov and Yelena Baturina?” The Post asked Jean-Pierre at her regular briefing.

“How is he handling the conflict of interest there given his son was a business associate of these two people? And can you confirm that, as sitting vice president, he dined with Baturina in Georgetown?”

“I’m just not speaking to anything that’s related to his son from here,” Jean-Pierre said, adding: “If you want to ask a question about Hunter Biden specifically, I would refer you to his family. And as it relates to any sanctions, I’m not speaking to individual persons from Russia.”

Vladimir Yevtushenkov and Yelena Baturina allegedly expressed interest in courting the Biden family for reciprocal “favors.”

Getty Images/Mikhail Svetlov
Yevtushenkov and Baturina partnered with Hunter Biden while searching for US property investments while Joe Biden was vice president, according to communications from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and witnesses who spoke with The Post.

Yevtushenkov allegedly expressed interest in courting the powerful political family for reciprocal “favors” and Baturina allegedly dined in 2015 with then-Vice President Joe Biden and a group including other Hunter Biden associates from Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

“I think it’s very fishy,” a source with firsthand knowledge of the relationship between Hunter Biden and Yevtushenkov told The Post — noting that the oligarch, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.7 billion, is sanctioned by the UK and Australia but not by the US.

“I think he should be sanctioned,” Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, told The Post last week. “I don’t understand why he has not been.”

Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop exposed his partnership with the Russians.

Paul Morigi

Yevtushenkov, whose Sistema business empire until recently included Russian rocket and radar-maker RTI and drone-maker Kronstadt, admitted last year he met with Hunter Biden for breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton in Manhattan on March 14, 2012 — but denied any further contact.

However, emails and calendar entries from Hunter’s former laptop show that they were set to meet again on Jan. 27, 2013 for dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano before looking at a commercial real estate development the next day near Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia.

“I asked [Yevtushenkov], ‘Why are you doing this?’ on the front end — before I understood that they were going to buy some real estate,” a source told The Post. “‘Why are you even doing this? Why would you be paying the son of the vice president to meet at a public restaurant in New York City?’

“He made it very clear to me that, you know … ‘I think it would be good to have a good relationship with this guy … maybe he can do a favor for us and we can do a favor for him,’” the source continued. “It was a complete quid pro quo that he was going in for.”

“I told him that’s not the way it works in America, [but] he basically laughed at me and told me I was so naïve,” the source recalled of Yevtushenkov, whose holdings also include Russia’s largest cellphone provider, MTS, which faced a long-running US investigation into nearly $1 billion in bribes paid to officials in Uzbekistan between 2004 and 2012.

MTS, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange before trading in its shares was suspended in July 2022, ultimately settled the case with the Trump Justice Department in 2019 and agreed to pay an $850 million fine.

A different source told The Post last week that he vividly recalled Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, looking “like an odd couple” at an intimate April 16, 2015, dinner with Hunter and his father, the then-vice president, more than a year after she allegedly wired $3.5 million to a corporate entity associated with the then-second son.

It previously was uncertain whether Baturina, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.4 billion, and Luzhkov actually attended the dinner at Cafe Milano — the same Georgetown restaurant where Hunter and Yevtushenkov set a date more than two years prior.

“They could have played themselves on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said the source, who attended the dinner and was able to identify the couple in part because he met Luzhkov — who died in 2019 — on several other occasions. (Another source previously told The Post that a pair matching Baturina and Luzhkov’s general appearance was there.)

Luzhkov, who was Moscow’s mayor for 18 years until 2010, “looked a lot older” than Baturina — 27 years her husband’s junior — who “went overboard” on her look and ended up resembling actress Jennifer Coolidge’s comedic portrayal of an insecure heiress in HBO’s “The White Lotus,” the source recalled.

“It was an odd dinner because there was [then-Kazakhstani Prime Minister Karim] Massimov, Luzhkov and his wife, and it was not a big table and then there was somebody there from some food charity making a pitch for support,” they added. “I mean, it was, was — it was a little odd, the whole thing.”

In an email at the time, Hunter wrote that the meal would be “ostensibly” about his role a chairman of the World Food Program (WFP) USA.

His father, the sitting vice president, arrived at the dinner and stayed for about 40 minutes, during which time he sat down to eat and posed for a photo with the Kazakhstani group, the second source recalled.

The gathering also featured Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid Hunter up to $1 million per year beginning in 2014 while his VP dad controlled the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. Pozharskyi emailed Hunter the next day to thank him for “giving an opportunity to meet your father” — forming the basis of The Post’s first October 2020 bombshell from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Republican members of Congress say President Biden has conflicts of interest in deciding on sanctions, which his administration has touted as a top mechanism to end the Ukraine war by crippling Russia’s economy.

Hunter’s laptop scandal continues to bring the Biden family into question.

Teresa Kroeger

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told The Post last week: “It is clear that Hunter Biden’s questionable business dealings with individuals from Russia and China have compromised President Biden and continue to raise conflicts of interest concerns.”

“It is extremely concerning that Biden-linked Russian nationals are avoiding sanctions. If this happened under a Republican White House, the mainstream media would be up in arms,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), whose panel is leading investigations into the Biden family’s overseas influence-peddling, said, “It’s alarming that Hunter Biden’s Russian oligarch pals are missing from the Treasury Department’s public sanctions list of Russian elites and oligarchs.”

Yevtushenko declined to comment though Sistema spokespeople. Baturina did not respond to a request for comment.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/jean-pierre-wont-say-why-hunter-biden-linked-russian-oligarchs-arent-sanctioned/

Kidnapped Americans crossed border to buy medicine: Mexican president

 The four Americans kidnapped in Mexico had crossed over the border to get medicine, the Mexican president revealed Monday, as new details emerged about the moment they were taken.

The US citizens came from Texas before they got caught in the crossfire and were abducted, officials said. At least one Mexican citizen was killed in the broad daylight shooting.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Monday the four were going to purchase medicine but offered few details.

“There was a confrontation between groups, and they were detained,” he said, adding Mexico’s public safety ministry was working with the FBI to find the missing Americans.

“I believe it will be resolved, I hope so,” Obrador said during a regular news conference.

The four were riding in a white minivan with North Carolina license before getting shot on Friday shortly after they entered the dangerous city of Matamoros in Tamaulipas from Brownsville, Texas, the FBI San Antonio Division office said Sunday.

The kidnapping occurred Friday.

An “innocent” Mexican citizen died in the attack, US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar said Monday.

A witness to the attack and kidnapping told The Associated Press she saw the white minivan get hit by another vehicle before shots rang out. Another SUV arrived and several gunmen emerged, said the woman, who did not want to give her name.

A photo posted to Twitter reportedly shows the kidnapping of four U.S. citizens in Matamoros, Mexico.

“All of a sudden they [the gunmen] were in front of us,” she said. “I entered a state of shock, nobody honked their horn, nobody moved. Everybody must have been thinking the same thing, ‘if we move they will see us, or they might shoot us.’”

The kidnapped woman, who was able to walk, was forced into the back of the truck and another person was carried by the suspects, but could still move his head, she said.

“The other two they dragged across the pavement, we don’t know if they were alive or dead,” she said.

Gunmen kidnapped four US citizens who crossed into Mexico from Texas last week to buy medicine and got caught in a shootout.

Associated Press

Video of the purported shooting and kidnapping matches up with that witness account, showing men wearing bulletproof vests dragging a person across the ground and pushing a woman into the flatbed of a white pickup truck.

The startling footage also shows the suspects grab two men who appear to be wounded or dead and throw their bodies in the same flatbed.

The identities of the four kidnapped victims were not revealed as of Monday afternoon, but a Mexican official told Reuters that three men and one woman were taken.

Photo of the scene reviewed by the AP show white minivan’s driver side window shot out and all the doors open. Multiple people were seeing lying in the street besides it surrounded by armed men.

President Biden was told about the ongoing situation, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday, but declined to answer other questions.

“Our thoughts are with the families of these individuals and we stand ready to provide all appropriate consular assistance,” she said. “We will continue to coordinate with Mexico and push them to bring those responsible to justice.”

Tamaulipas state police said people were killed and wounded Friday, but did not pinpoint how many. Authorities also said on social media that neither law enforcement nor the military were involved in “two armed incidents between unidentified civilians.”

State police officers stand guard near a crime scene in downtown at a Mexican city on the border with Brownsville, U.S. Texas, in Matamoros on March 3.

REUTERS

The Mexican city deals with warring factions of drug cartels, and the Americans’ kidnapping there followed gun battles Friday that were so fierce, the US Consulate issued an alert about the danger.

The border city commonly sees Americans cross over to visit family, attend medical appointments or go shopping.

The FBI is offering a whopping $50,000 reward for the return of the captives and arrest of those alleged kidnappers.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/4-kidnapped-americans-entered-mexico-to-buy-medicine/