'Doing My Goodest Job' - Warner Rounds Up Senate Dems V. Biden After 'Redemption' Interview

 On the heels of his flub-filled Fourth of July, President Biden's Friday appearances did nothing to reverse his slow march to a seemingly inevitable exit from the 2024 presidential campaign. The day brought more head-scratching misstatements and garbled lines on the campaign trail, along with an uneven but not devastating performance in his much-anticipated primetime ABC interview.

Perhaps most significantly of all, however, more Democratic legislators called for Biden to leave the race -- and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner is reportedly organizing a meeting with his peers with a goal of building a united plea for Biden to quit.    

Sen. Mark Warner conferring with then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr in 2018 (Andrew Harnik/Associated Press via New York Times)

According to anonymous sources cited by the Washington Post, Warner and allies are weighing various means of intervening, including a meeting at the White House with Biden. While the count of House Democrats who've urged Biden to quit climbed to four on Friday -- as Illinois Rep. Mike Quiqley made his feelings known on MSNBC -- no sitting senators have yet crossed that line. However, per the Washington Post: 

There’s a growing consensus among Senate Democrats that the situation with Biden at the top of the ticket is untenable, and senators are trying to determine the best way to relay that message to an insulated president. Some senators don’t think Biden has people around him who are giving him an accurate picture of the fallout. 

Tellingly, a Warner spokeswoman refused to confirm or deny the reports about his machinations, instead saying, "Like many other people in Washington and across the country, Senator Warner believes these are critical days for the president's campaign, and he has made that clear to the White House.”

While Warner -- the chair of the Senate intelligence committee -- maneuvered on Capitol Hill, Biden spent the day in the battleground state of Wisconsin, which he officially won in the last election by only 20,682 votes. At a rally at a middle school gymnasium in Madison, Biden added to his ever-growing stack of gaffes, confidently predicting he'd beat Donald Trump "again in 2020": 

Proving again that not even a teleprompter can assure Biden's reasonably error-free delivery of a speech, he also said, "We're gonna protect our children from getting weapons of war off our streets!"   

Friday's main event was Biden's sit-down interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos. Though it was pre-recorded after his middle-school-gym rally before airing in a primetime special, ABC said it showed the entire interview without edits.

As we'd predicted, Stephanopoulos, who's demonstrated all the worst tendencies of big-media leftists, played this interview relatively straight. He challenged Biden's previous attempt to blame his debate performance on jet lag from travel that ended a dozen days before the event. He confronted Biden with pointed quotes from a New York Times report, where sources claimed his mental lapses have become more frequent. He also asked pointed follow-up questions when Biden was evasive.

At one point, however, Stephanopoulos sounded like an empathetic family member gently confronting an elderly person with the hard truth about their condition, telling Biden: 

"I’ve heard from dozens of your supporters over the last few days...They love you, and they will be forever grateful to you for defeating Donald Trump in 2020. They think you’ve done a great job as president, a lot of the successes you outlined. But they are worried about you and the country. And they don’t think you can win. They want you to go with grace, and they will cheer you if you do."

One of Biden's worst moments of the interview came in response to what may have been the simplest question. Asked if he'd watched the debate afterwards, Biden said, "I don't think I did, no." Stephanopoulos's follow-up question about when Biden realized the debate wasn't going well triggered a particularly incoherent reply: 

“The whole way I prepared, nobody’s fault mine. Nobody’s fault, mine. I, uh, prepared what I usually would do, sitting down as I did, come back with foreign leaders or National Security Council for explicit detail.

And I realized about partway through that, you know, I quoted The New York Times had me down 10 points before the debate, 9 now or whatever the hell it is. The fact of the matter is that what I looked at is that he also lied 28 times. I couldn’t, I mean, the way the debate ran, not — my fault, no one else’s fault — no one else’s fault.”

Biden repeatedly rejected any possibility of his dropping out of the 2024 contest, and assured Stephanopoulos that Congressional leaders like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries will not call on him to quit. He suggested it would take divine intervention: "If the Lord Almighty came down and said, 'Joe, get out of the race,' I’d get out of the race. The Lord Almighty’s not coming down."  

Biden also insisted that, contrary to a wide variety of polls showing Trump is ahead, the race is actually a tight one. Stephanopoulos persisted in painting a dim picture of his prospects, but also threw Biden a memory lifeline:  

When Stephanopoulos pressed him to commit to taking a "full neurological and cognitive evaluation," Biden, pointing to his presidential duties, replied, "Look. I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world."

"The fact is, that may be true, but 75% of the American people think...he fails," countered former Biden adviser David Axelrod in a post-interview appearance on CNN. He also said he found some of the interview "sad."  

Biden's Democratic detractors seized on one of his answers in particular. Stephanopoulos asked Biden how he would feel if, against so many demands for him to quit, he stayed in the race and then lost to Trump. Biden replied, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all, and I did the goodest [sic] job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” 

Former Obama Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro called that line "the most chilling" of the interview. "That's not good enough for the American people...What people want is to have confidence that whoever Democrats put up can win this election...The overwhelming impression that I got from this is you have a president that's basically in denial...about the decline people can clearly see."   

As for the funniest moment of the interview, our vote goes to when Biden cited his modest  crowd at the middle school gymnasium -- estimated in the hundreds -- as a sign of his campaign's strength. He then asked who else could draw a crowd like that. Stephanopoulos couldn't help but answer what was meant to be a rhetorical question: 

ABC's after-interview panel discussion among the outlet's talking heads had a decidedly grim tone, starting with Jonathan Karl:

"There was nothing in this interview that is calming nerves of jittery Democrats who fear that Joe Biden is on a trajectory to lose this race...to Donald Trump. In fact, for some of those people, the interview is raising new concerns. Particularly the fact that he is unwilling or unaware of the fact that he is in a dire situation...that he is losing." 

The network's Martha Raddatz said administration officials tell her Biden is listening most to a "tight inner circle" that's "telling him he can win, that he needs to keep going. This, of course, includes his wife, Jill, who is lashing out at those who want him to get out of the race." 

On the other side of the tug of war, current and former elected officials aren't the only ones with high potential to steer Biden toward the exit: Major Democratic donors' faith is also crumbling. "Biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous," Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, who's given $20 million to Democrats in recent years, said in an email to the Times. 

"We had been talking to [Biden's] team about doing a fundraiser, but I cooled off on it," an anonymous Arizona donor told ABC News. "I struggled to get other people involved. People were not bullish on Biden. Now, it is a 'hell no'."

Speaking of bullishness...

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/warner-organizing-senate-dems-against-biden-primetime-interview-fails-move-needle

'$14 Billion Walmart Heir Joins Novogratz Urging Biden Exit'

 

• Christy Walton among 168 signing Leadership Now Project letter
• Letter from business leaders comes as pressure mounts on Biden

A coalition of top business leaders is taking their campaign to get President Joe Biden to drop his re-election bid one step further, penning a letter to him signed by billionaires and top executives.

Christy Walton, Michael Novogratz and Paul Tagliabue are among the 168 signatories of the letter from the Leadership Now Project, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg. It states that “nothing short of American democracy is at stake this November” and follows an unsigned statement Wednesday that said the group of business leaders has “heard from many individuals who share our deep concerns about the present course but fear speaking out.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-05/a-14-billion-walmart-heir-joins-novogratz-urging-biden-to-exit

Philippines Says US Will Pull Out Controversial Mid-Range Missile System

 by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

On Thursday, the Philippines said the US was pulling out a new missile system it deployed to the Southeast Asian country for annual military exercises.

The US sent the Typhon missile system for the Balikatan exercises, which were held in April and May. The Typhon is a controversial launcher since it would have been banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a treaty between the US and Russia that the Trump administration withdrew from in 2019.

The INF prohibited land-based missile systems with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles. The Typhon can launch nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles, which have a range of about 1,000 miles. It can also fire SM-6 missiles, which can hit targets up to 290 miles away.

Philippine Col. Louie Dema-ala told AFP that the US planned to withdraw the Typhon from the Philippines following the military exercises.

"As per plan… it will be shipped out of the country in September or even earlier," he said. "The US Army is currently shipping out their equipment that we used during Balikatan and Salaknib (exercises)."

China strongly condemned the deployment of the Typhon system, which US officials have acknowledged was developed to prepare for a future conflict with Beijing over Taiwan or the South China Sea.

Russian President Vladimir Putin also recently mentioned the deployment. He made the comments when calling for Moscow to follow the US and develop missile systems previously banned by the INF.

"We need to start production of these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where — if necessary to ensure our safety — to place them," Putin said last week.

"Today it is known that the United States not only produces these missile systems, but has already brought them to Europe for exercises, to Denmark. Quite recently it was announced that they are in the Philippines," the Russian leader added.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/philippines-says-us-will-pull-out-controversial-mid-range-missile-system

HuffPo Encourages Biden Campaign To Openly Push Disinformation Using AI

by Jacob Bruns via Headline USA,

In a bizarre op-ed, Huffington Post writer Kaivan Shroff suggested that the President Joe Biden and his campaign should consider using artificial intelligence to dupe the American people into voting for him.

Shroff began by noting that “the stakes” of the election “cannot be overstated” because the future of democracy “hangs in the balance,” rhetoric which, he assured the reader, “is not hyperbolic.”

It is “the greatest moral and ethical imperative for those who care about American democracy” to defeat former President Donald Trump, he opined.

As a result, the ends justified the means, even if that entailed continuing the campaign’s ongoing efforts to gaslight low-information voters into thinking Biden is fitter and healthier than he is, but with additional assistance from AI to more “effectively reach the voting public.”

It is not entirely clear that the campaign hasn’t already been relying on this tactic in what have appeared to be the president’s more lucid moments on camera.

While admitting that using AI to present a smoother, more well-spoken Biden could be deceptive, Shroff ultimately concluded that such deception would be worthwhile if it led to a Biden victory.

“We must ask the question, are augmented AI videos that present Biden in his best form―while sharing honest and accurate information―really more socially damaging than our information ecosystem’s current realities?” Shroff wrote. “I think not.”

Such conversations seem to be inevitable for the left after Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, for which his defenders have thrown out every excuse in the book as Trump surges in swing state polls.

On Wednesday, for instance, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blamed Biden’s jet lag from a flight weeks before the debate, along with a cold that he allegedly had.

“It’s the jet lag and also the cold–it is the two things that occurred,” Jean-Pierre told reporters at a Tuesday press conference.

Biden cronies have also used AI as an excuse in the past—but for the opposite end, to accuse Republicans of the threat of spreading disinformation by altering the audio in Biden’s special counsel interview with Robert Hur.

It was the basis of that interview that prompted Hur not to pursue charges, concluding Biden was unfit to stand trial for the felonies.

However, Attorney General Merrick Garland cited executive privilege in insisting that he was under no obligation to release the audio file. House Republicans held him in contempt of Congress and subsequently filed a lawsuit that could result in legal consequences for Garland under the next administration.

Leftists afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome have become increasingly unhinged when faced with the prospect of a Biden candidacy, proposing ever more drastic, dangerous and anti-democratic courses of action to counter the will of the people.

A Pennsylvania lawmaker named Matthew Croyle went viral for all the wrong reasons on Wednesday after authoring a post on X that suggested leftists with Trump-supporting relatives kill them now before they have the chance to strike first.

 https://www.zerohedge.com/political/huffpost-encourages-biden-campaign-openly-push-disinformation-using-ai

Hidden History Of Robert Mueller's Right-Wing Terror Factory, Part 2

 by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

The first article of this series chronicled the FBI’s mid-2000s program to stage neo-Nazi rallies around the country as a means to conduct surveillance and recruit potential informants.

FBI motorcycle group. PHOTO: ChatGPT

Those rallies were just the beginning of a sweeping multi-state investigation, Headline USA can reveal.

Indeed, after an FBI informant was exposed in 2007 for organizing a Nazi rally in Orlando the year before, the bureau launched another operation in the same area. Dubbed “Primitive Affliction,” the FBI set up a neo-Nazi motorcycle front group to infiltrate Florida’s right-wing underground.

Federal agencies are known to have used motorcycle front groups cases against targets such as the Hells Angels for drug- and gun-trafficking investigations. However, Headline USA is unaware of such a tactic being employed in a politically charged domestic terrorism case until Primitive Affliction.

This publication has also found that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller had a personal interest in Primitive Affliction, which ran from about 2007 to 2012. Indeed, Mueller was briefed daily on the operation during its final stages, according to a newly unearthed performance review of one undercover cop on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Because Primitive Affliction collapsed with no terrorism convictions, the case never grabbed the national spotlight. However, a deeper look at the case reveals infiltration and entrapment techniques used by the FBI in 1990s investigations against the Aryan Nations, as well as more recent cases such as the 2020 militia conspiracy to kidnap Michigan’s governor.

Mueller did not respond to an email about Primitive Affliction. The FBI declined to comment.

Reviving the Aryan Nations

In the 1980s and 90s, the Aryan Nations rivaled the Ku Klux Klan as the face of “white hate” in America—and for good reason, having been linked to numerous bank robberies, the assassination of a Jewish radio host and the Oklahoma City bombing, along with other crimes.

But by the mid-2000s, the Aryan Nations was largely decimated by numerous arrests and civil litigation. The group had splintered into various factions around the country. One of its remaining leaders, August Kreis, was desperate to consolidate power.

Working out of a South Carolina mobile home with a man named Joshua Caleb Sutter—who was a known FBI informant since 2003—Kreis attempted several publicity stunts to put his name on the map.

For example, at one point Kreis pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and claimed to seek an alliance with Muslim jihadists. Sutter, who was Kreis’s “minister for Islamic liaison,”  also reportedly posted a “message of solidarity and support” to Saddam Hussein on the Aryan Nations Web site. (If Sutter’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he made headlines in 2021, when it was revealed that he earned more than $100,000 from the FBI while running a Satanic publishing house.)

When that didn’t work in attracting new members or donations, Kreis began plotting with another Aryan Nations member, Robert Killian. Like Sutter, Killian turned out to be undercover law enforcement—Killian an undercover cop on the FBI’s JTTF.

An avid motorcyclist living in Orlando, Killian had been hanging out at a local Outlaw biker bar while posing online as a member of the Aryan Nations. Using the name “Doc,” by 2007 he had risen to become the Aryan Nations Florida state administrator—which, ironically, gave him power to vet applicants. The Orlando Sentinel later described Killian as the Aryan Nations’ “top recruiter.”

Apparently, someone in the FBI had the idea of merging a domestic terrorism case with a biker case. Killian planted the idea in Kreis’s head to start a neo-Nazi motorcycle club, the 1st SS Kavallerie Brigade Motorcycle Division—named after a horse-mounted unit of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS.

For Kreis, a biker gang posed the opportunity to attract publicity, gain members and increase revenue for the Aryan Nations.

But first, they needed bikers. To that end, Killian convinced an Outlaw biker named Brian Klose to become the leader of the 1st SS Kavallerie. According to people familiar with the matter, Killian was able to convince Klose to leave the Outlaws by playing to his ego. Keeping with the neo-Nazi theme, Klose was named “Fuhrer” of the new group.

Klose would come to regret his decision to leave the Outlaws for what turned out to be an FBI front group.

With Klose surrounded by a gaggle of informants and undercover cops, the 1st SS Kavallerie clubhouse was open for business. According to internal law enforcement records, there were at least four undercover employees and an untold number of informants who infiltrated the group, along with numerous wiretaps and other “sophisticated techniques.”

Kelly Boaz a.k.a. ‘Kevin Post’

One of the key undercover agents from Primitive Affliction was Kelly Boaz, a local Orange County cop who, like Killian, had earned a spot on the FBI’s JTTF—receiving specialized training from the ADL and SPLC, according to their personnel records.

Boaz earned a JTTF assignment despite a scandal-plagued career with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, where he was the subject of more than a dozen internal investigations since joining in 1989, several involving allegations of excessive force.

In December 1999, for example, Boaz was involved in a predawn raid where another officer shot a suspect. Months later in August 2000, Boaz was at the center of another controversy when he shot and killed an unarmed thief at a shopping center.

He was cleared of wrongdoing in both incidents, but his supervisor was reportedly demoted and his racketeering squad was disbanded. A civil lawsuit was filed against him and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office over the December 1999 incident, but the case was eventually dismissed.

Despite Boaz’s controversial past, the FBI relied on him to build a complex case against a supposed network of white supremacist terrorists.

Boaz, who declined an interview request, entered Florida’s neo-Nazi scene sometime after the Orlando neo-Nazi rally organizer, FBI undercover operative David Gletty, had his cover blown in the media—as detailed in Part 1 of this series.

According to court records, Boaz was introduced to the Outlaw bikers and the 1st SS Kavallerie in 2009 by his colleague, Killian. By then, Boaz had already infiltrated the Black Pistons biker gang and was posing as one of its members, a renegade bomb maker named “Kevin Post.”

For nearly the next three years, Boaz and the FBI built their case.

During his investigation, one of his informants purportedly learned about another right-wing group in the area called the American Front. Operation Primitive Affliction eventually expanded to the Russia-linked American Front, which will be the subject of Part 3 of this series.

In both cases, Boaz made extravagant claims of the drug deals and terroristic plots he witnessed in his roughly three years as an undercover biker/bomber. He also claimed that his life was threatened when an Outlaw biker put a firearm to his head and accused him of being law enforcement.

Mueller likely heard similar reports. A glowing performance review for Boaz said the case “was briefed to the FBI Director daily during the executions of the disruptions.”

But a deeper look at the evidence produced in court casts doubt on Boaz’s claims, as well as the FBI’s entire case.
Kavallerie Collapse

“Biker Gangsters Busted after Three-Year Probe,” the Orlando Sentinel reported on March 31, 2012.

Two nights earlier, Boaz and the FBI had rounded up the targets of Primitive Affliction. One of those arrested was a woman named Deborah Plowman, who was at her home near Chicago when more than a dozen armed agents swarmed her on March 29, 2012. According to Boaz, he saw Plowman take pills at an Outlaw bikers party several years earlier.

After spending the night in jail, Plowman was told she needed to travel to Florida to face drug-trafficking charges—or else, she’d face extradition. Baffled, Plowman professed her innocence.

She was telling the truth.

On April 19, 2012, Plowman turned herself into law enforcement in Florida to be interviewed by Boaz. It didn’t take long before Boaz realized that he had the wrong person arrested.

“Boaz asked [Plowman] if she has ever used the nickname or has ever been called ‘Sin,’ to which she replied with a ‘no,’” Plowman said in a lawsuit she filed later over the wrongful arrest.

“Defendant Boaz immediately began to break out into a sweat upon viewing and questioning [Plowman], realizing he caused the wrong person, [Plowman], to be arrested in his undercover operation, instead of ‘Sin’ [Kristy Pryzbylla].”

It turned out, Plowman was married to someone Boaz had been investigating, and the undercover agent somehow confused her with Pryzbylla. Plowman quickly hired a lawyer, who blasted Boaz in the Orlando Sentinel for his carelessness.

“Had Boaz pulled her drivers license, he would have known it wasn’t her, and he’d made a huge mistake,” Plowman’s then-attorney, Jerry Theophilopoulos, said at the time. “In all my 20 years of practice, I’ve never seen anything like what they did to Deborah Plowman.”

Plowman had her charges dropped in May 2012, and she eventually won $30,000 from Boaz in a civil lawsuit.

Boaz’s sloppy police work would continue to rear its ugly head as the fruits of Primitive Affliction moved through the courts.

The other defendants—including the “Fuehrer” Klose, Ronald Cusack, Carlos Eugene Dubose and Harold Johnson Kinlaw—were initially charged with violent crimes, such as bomb-making and soliciting murder. However, prosecutors later dropped most of the charges related to violence, instead reaching deals with the defendants to plead guilty to drug charges.

Assistant State Attorney Steven Foster reportedly said at the time that prosecutors were willing to strike plea deals with alleged white supremacist extremists because they were following the “Al Capone theory of prosecution”—referencing how federal authorities jailed the notorious mobster for tax evasion instead of his countless violent crimes.

“We decided to strike against the Kavallerie Brigade by bringing these heavy-duty drug charges to shut the active members down,” Foster reportedly said, bragging about shutting down an FBI front group.

However, one of the Outlaw biker defendants, Dubose, fought his charges.

It was a good thing he did.

A retired U.S. Marine, Dubose’s crime stemmed from when he cracked his skull in a motorcycle accident. Down and out on his luck and looking for cash, Dubose took another blow in life when an FBI informant arranged for him to sell his prescription painkillers to an undercover officer.

Outlaw biker Carlos Dubose was originally charged with trafficking enough pills to land him in prison for the rest of his life, but an FBI 302 shows he only sold a misdemeanor amount. Had Dubose not noticed this, he might still be in prison.

Initially charged with selling more than 28 grams of Oxycodone pills, Dubose could have spent the rest of his life in prison. But when he started receiving pre-trial discovery, he noticed something: An FBI report showed he only gave the undercover officer 9 grams of pills—a crime that carried the far lesser max sentence of seven years imprisonment.

After successfully diminishing the severity of his drug charge, Dubose decided to plead guilty to that lone count. But he continued to vociferously deny any involvement in a bomb plot—a charge that stemmed from a conversation he had with Boaz, aka renegade bomb maker “Kevin Post,” nearly three years earlier in 2009.

To Dubose’s point, the Feb. 27, 2009, conversation he had with Boaz/Post never developed any further over the next three years. And a transcript of the conversation shows Dubose choosing his words carefully when talking about “hypothetically” building a pipe bomb: “We’re not lookin’ to do anything. It’s just a matter if we start to go to war with somebody,” Dubose told Post/Boaz at the end of the discussion.

Florida prosecutors admitted that Boaz’s one recorded conversation didn’t contain smoking-gun evidence of bomb plots, but they claimed there were other discussions where Dubose made such plans.

Even though there were no recordings of those other purported conversations—and even though Dubose never possessed or attempt to build a bomb—the judge accepted the narrative of Boaz and the government. He tossed the motion to dismiss, and Dubose took a plea deal soon thereafter.

Gun to the Head?

Boaz’s credibility would be challenged once more at Dubose’s April 21, 2014, sentencing hearing, where the undercover agent claimed to have had a weapon pointed at his head.

During the hearing, defense attorney Harold Uhrig asked Boaz the obvious question: If Dubose pointed a gun at him, why didn’t the government mention that before?

“I’ve gone through about 600 pages of transcripts, reports, supplemental reports, I don’t find it anywhere mentioned in there. Are you telling me that there’s some information that y’all did not disclose to us?” Uhrig asked Boaz.

Boaz insisted that he did report the gun-pointing incident to the FBI for “intelligence gathering,” but he didn’t tell the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Boaz also admitted that he didn’t have any documentation proving that he reported the alleged incident to the FBI.

After Boaz’s dubious testimony, the judge still sentenced Dubose to five years imprisonment for both the drug trafficking and bomb solicitation charges.

The judge did admit that the available evidence “somewhat” supported Dubose’s version of events.

However, the judge noted that Dubose did talk about having a bomb “in the event of a war.” Therefore, “the Court finds, viewing the evidence in its totality, that [Dubose intended] to obtain a destructive device for the purpose of injuring or causing damage to persons or property,” the judge said, allowing the government to somewhat save face after a disastrous case.

The judge sentenced Dubose to five-year concurrent sentences for the drug and bomb charges.

While prosecutors were able to secure some convictions from the 1st SS Kavallerie investigation—Klose is still in prison on felony drug trafficking charges—they fared even worse in the American Front case, thanks in part to more Boaz blunders.

Bizarre developments would continue to occur outside the courtroom, too. As they prepped for trial around 2013, Boaz and several other government officials would begin receiving strange threats, purportedly from a neo-Nazi fugitive on the run in Mexico—the subject of Part 3 of this series.

Stay tuned…

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hidden-history-robert-muellers-right-wing-terror-factory-part-2

Biden says only the 'Lord Almighty' could oust him from race in ABC News interview

 U.S. President Joe Biden remained resolute in a closely-watched interview with ABC News on Friday that he was the candidate to beat Republican opponent Donald Trump in November's election, but did little to temper Democrats' concerns.

Biden in the interview again called his shaky CNN debate performance on June 27 against Trump "a bad episode."

"No indication of any serious condition. I was exhausted. I didn't listen to my instincts in terms of preparing and -- and a bad night," Biden, 81, told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos in a taped interview in Madison, Wisconsin.

"I just had a bad night. I don't know why," Biden added in a hoarse voice, stumbling occasionally over his words.

Biden was gently but repeatedly probed by Stephanopoulos about whether he was being realistic in his belief that he could beat Trump, given widening polls between the two and growing concern from elected Democrats.

"I don't think anyone is more qualified," Biden told Stephanopoulos in the interview. The polls, he said, were inaccurate.

Asked whether he would drop out if fellow Democrats in Congress said he was hurting their re-election chances in November, Biden said: "If the Lord Almighty comes out and tells me that I might do that."

The 22-minute interview, which Stephanopoulos said was not cut or edited, was being scrutinized by Democrats concerned about the president's ability to serve another four years, or beat Trump, 78, in the election, after his faltering debate performance.

If he stays in the race, and Trump wins, how will he feel, Stephanopoulos asked. "I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did as good a job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about," Biden said.

'THIS IS BAD'

U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett told CNN after the interview, "Every day he (Biden) delays makes it more difficult for a new person to come on board to defeat Donald Trump."

Doggett had already called for Biden to step aside.

"This is bad," one House of Representatives Democratic aide, who declined to be named, told Reuters. "This interview did nothing but confirm the serious concerns we're all having."

Even before ABC News aired the full interview, some had already made up their mind about the interview's impact.

"I don't see how he (Biden) lasts the week as the nominee," a senior House Democratic aide told Reuters after watching a short clip ABC News released before the interview.

However, a senior official with the Democratic National Committee said Biden's performance was "better" than the one he gave at the debate.

"It's pretty clear that he's not going anywhere unless there's a major revolt on the hill," the official told Reuters.

Earlier on Friday, Biden told a crowd in a fiery speech in Madison that some Democrats were trying to push him out of the race in the wake of the debate with Trump. But he said during the ABC News interview that senior Democrats would not ask him to step aside.

He said he spoke for an hour with House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries from New York and longer with Representative Jim Clyburn from South Carolina.

During the interview, Biden highlighted his record in office, saying that he expanded NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), grew the economy and has a peace plan for the Middle East. He talked about expanding healthcare and making changes to the tax system if he won a second term.

It didn't win over some critics.

"I've seen enough," Ron Fournier, senior adviser with communications agency Truscott Rossman and former White House correspondent, said on social media platform X. "It's hard to imagine this good man beating Trump and serving four more years in the most demanding job on earth."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-calls-debate-bad-episode-230749879.html

Rivian's Amazon Delivery Vans Keep Mysteriously Catching Fire

 Amazon delivery vans, manufactured by Rivian, keep catching fire.

That was the topic of a new report from Quartz.com this week which highlighted that the blue Prime vans seen all over the country keep catching fire at Amazon distribution centers.

"One starts to wonder why," QZ.com asked. 

The report notes that footage from Third Coast Drone reveals Rivian vans ablaze outside an Amazon facility in Houston.

While the video doesn't show how the fire started, it captures firefighters working to control the flames. Importantly, the footage also reveals that each van was parked at a charging station.

This isn’t the first time Rivian vans have caught fire at an Amazon location, the report notes.

Last August, a similar incident occurred in Salt Lake City, where vans burned in a distribution center parking lot. Posts in Amazon worker subreddits revealed that drivers have reported issues with the vans charging in high heat and suspected the chargers as the cause of the blaze.

Chargers have been blamed for fires before, either due to improper home wiring or inadequate cooling.

What’s still unclear is whether professionally-installed chargers, like these Rivian units, are prone to the same issues as Level 2 chargers plugged into home dryer outlets.

Heat-related issues with electric vehicles are likely to become more common as global temperatures rise.

The transition to EVs still remains worthwhile according to QZ—just, maybe consider charging in the shade until these issues are resolved.

Sure thing. We'll be back to diesel powered delivery trucks in no time!

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rivians-amazon-delivery-vans-keep-mysteriously-catching-fire