Tenure track Economics professor shocked to find out that corrupt college administrators have been improving poor grades FOR DECADES without telling the professors

 But for an administrator to then change those final grades—behind my back—simply to appease them? How could that possibly be justified?

The response from my department chair, who has been at the college for 17 years, floored me: “This has been occurring ever since I started at Spelman.”

“That’s corrupt,” I blurted out. [In a statement emailed to The Free Press, a Spelman spokesperson wrote that “The College, its administrators, and faculty, exercise appropriate judgment in the delivery of our exceptional learning and living activities in order to maintain consistency across Spelman’s campus.” Spelman declined to comment on any of the specifics in this story.]

More here.

The poor guy got fired in the end, for naively believing that the commitment to excellence meant grading fairly according to long-accepted standards.

Exact same thing happened to me . . . in 1988, at a so-called world class institution of higher learning, where it's all wink wink.

The process got turbocharged in the 1960s by the draft dodgers. They fled to college, or to Canada. Liberal institutions gave them a pass on admissions, and once there relaxed standards to keep them enrolled to escape being drafted. These ne'er-do-wells stayed in school as the Vietnam war dragged on. Many went on to grad school as standards weakened some more. Rinse and repeat.

They are the ones who went on to educate today's hordes of complete lunatics now populating college campi.

Standards were lowered everywhere quite quickly from the 1960s, including at elite small religious colleges by the 1970s where stubborn professors with standards were already then not being renewed, the polite way of firing them.

We are reaping what we've sown.

The rot set in a long, long time ago, and it reflects why the country is in the sorry state it is.

It can't be fixed. The country as we know it will have to collapse first.

Three semesters of Latin used to be required to get into Harvard, let alone graduate from it. That standard was already under attack in 1917 in the name of "science". The widespread requirement of three semesters of college Latin was gone by the mid 1960s. Now you will be hard pressed to find any college requiring any foreign language at all to graduate. Princeton is now infamous for eliminating Latin and Greek for a degree in Classics, you know, the study of everything Greco-Roman. 

The process has its own inertia producing this history. It's inherent in the thing we call America.

 

National Archives admits it has thousands of VP Joe Biden emails in which he used aliases to communicate with many including Hunter Biden about both government and family business

 

National Archives reveals it has 5,400 Biden emails in which the president potentially used FAKE NAMES to forward government information and discuss business with son Hunter

 

James Gordon

Updated: 08:19 EDT, 29 August 2023

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President Joe Biden may have used pseudonyms in nearly 5,400 emails, electronic records and documents when he was vice president, a bombshell letter from the National Archives and Records Administration reveals.

The trove of communications was confirmed after the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for emails connected to aliases allegedly used by Biden, including Robin Ware, Robert L. Peters, and JRB Ware.

Republicans have been demanding the release of the emails they say could show Biden used the names to discuss foreign business with his son and share information on countries where he was doing deals.

The White House has insisted Biden was never in business with his son, and vice presidents and high-level government officials often use pseudonyms to prevent being inundated with spam and emails from the public.

At the time, the Obama administration dismissed criticism the communications were 'secret' because they were all archived.

But the sheer volume of emails raises questions over whether then-VP Biden broke the 'absolute wall' he said he maintained between the 'the personal and private, and the government'. 

Emails from Hunter's laptop also reveal business partners referred to Biden as the 'big guy'.

The SLF submitted the FOIA request in June 2022 and the results appear to confirm that Biden was using the emails connected to the aliases.

Biden used various private email addresses from which he sometimes sent, received and forwarded government correspondence.

The names are all pseudonyms that Biden was known to use while he served as Vice President under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017 and were used on emails that were about both official and family business.

The Southeastern Legal Foundation took legal action against NARA on Monday to secure the records' release. 

The Foundation alleges that the documents might potentially demonstrate instances where President Biden forwarded government information and discussed government matters with his son, Hunter Biden, together with other individuals.

'All too often, public officials abuse their power by using it for their personal or political benefit. When they do, many seek to hide it. The only way to preserve governmental integrity is for NARA to release Biden's nearly 5,400 emails to SLF and thus the public. 

'The American public deserves to know what is in them,' Kimberly Hermann, SLF general counsel, said in a statement. 

The Southeastern Legal Foundation also accuses NARA of using delaying tactics ever since the initial FOIA request was filed more than 14 months ago.

No specific emails have been provided despite NARA acknowledging their existence.

'We have performed a search of our collection for Vice Presidential records related to your [June 9, 2022] request and have identified approximately 5,138 email messages, 25 electronic files and 200 pages of potentially responsive records that must be processed in order to respond to your request,' Stephannie Oriabure, director of NARA's archival operations division, wrote to the Southeastern Legal Foundation on in June  2022, the lawsuit revealed. 

Earlier this month, Kentucky Republican James Comer, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, demanded unredacted records from NARA, that similarly showed President Biden's use of a pseudonym during his vice presidency.

On that occasion, the purpose was to look into the role the former vice president played in his son's international business dealings.

Previously released emails from Hunter Biden's laptop indicated President Biden used the email address 'Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov' during his time as Vice President.

The emails also revealed correspondence between his aide and Hunter Biden over Joe Biden's daily schedule.

For at least four weeks in 2016, a worker in the Office of the Vice President, John Flynn, would send Biden his daily schedule to his private email address,  Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov while copying in Hunter.

There were 10 such e-mails which were copied to Hunter between May 18 and June 15, 2016.   

The Robert Peters e-mail address used a @pci.gov domain. The service had been labeled as problematic by the DNS Institute's Domain Name System security report in 2020.

One email from Flynn to being sent to Joe, a.k.a Robert Peters, from May 2016 which was also cc'd to Hunter schedules '8.45am prep for 9am phonecall with Pres Poroshenko' who was the Ukrainian president. 

At the time, Hunter was being paid $83,333 a month to sit on the board of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings Ltd. 

He had started working for Burisma in 2014 and finally departed two months after his father left the office of vice president.

Just months earlier, in December 2015, Biden had threatened Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless he fired Ukraine's top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the owner of Burisma,  Mykola Zlochevsky. 

Shokin was widely accused of corruption and removed from office in March 2016.

State Department officials are said to have attempted to raise concerns with directly with Biden about Hunter's involvement with Burisma but the complaints were rebuffed. 

Another forwarded email from Joe Biden using one of his alias private emails, RobinWare456@gmail.com, saw him write to both Hunter and his brother Beau, who was the Delaware attorney general, on March 26, 2012. 

The forwarded e-mail was from Deputy Secretary of State (and now current Secretary of State) Antony Blinken.

The email was from the US Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft: 'Beau visited Kyev [Ukraine] on the Friday and gave a talk on corruption at the Hyatt . . . then attended reception at the residence where he met many young Ukrainian lawyers. We received many compliments on his presentation and for simply a frank discussion of a problem that still bedevils this country.' 

Hunter started working for Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company, in 2014. 

He earned $83,333-a-month from Burisma until two months after Biden left office. 

He was referred to as 'the big guy' and described in an email from a Ukrainian executive at Burisma which suggested he'd gotten access to him through Hunter. 

It raised serious questions because the executive was also being investigated by a Ukrainian prosecutor who was ousted after Joe leveraged $1billion in American aide money to get him out.

President Biden has in the past denied ever offering access to him or the White House to any of Hunter's business associates. 

Biden has long claimed there was complete separation between his family's business activities and his vice presidential responsibilities but Rep. Comer said that evidence appears to suggest otherwise. 

'Joe Biden has stated there was 'an absolute wall' between his family's foreign business schemes and his duties as Vice President, but evidence reveals that access was wide open for his family's influence peddling,' Comer said in a statement on August 17.

'The National Archives must provide these unredacted records to further our investigation into the Biden family's corruption,' he added.

One concerning May 2016 email referenced in Comer’s letter and previously reported by DailyMail.com shows White House staffers sent Joe’s schedule, including a call with then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, to Joe’s secret email ‘Robert L. Peters’.

The staffer, John Flynn, also inexplicably copied Hunter, who was working for allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm Burisma at the time, on the email.

White House staffers copied Hunter on a total of 10 emails to Joe’s alias addresses, records from his laptop show.

Joe and Hunter appeared to use the then-VP’s secret email to discuss government business in another incident in June 2014.

Hunter used his Rosemont Seneca consultancy email address to write to his father on June 23, 2014 about the employment of then-deputy White House counsel John McGrail.

‘Before you fill position pls talk to me — J. McGrail very much wants to serve as detail fr treasury,’ Hunter wrote.

‘Re Johnny call me right away Dad,’ Joe wrote back from the email robinware456@gmail.com.

McGrail was promoted to VP’s counsel the following year, then got his desired move to the Treasury as Senior Counsel in January 2017. He is currently Counselor to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance at the department, according to his LinkedIn account.

Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson have been asking for unredacted records from NARA regarding Joe’s alias emails since 2021.

In their letters they cited the Presidential Records Act which requires POTUS to provide copies of all communications involving government business, whether on personal email addresses or not, to the National Archives.

Comer has now also joined the push. In his August 17 letter to NARA, he pointed out that the emails challenge Joe’s previous claim that while VP he had ‘an absolute wall between the personal and private, and the government’.

‘Evidence reveals that access was wide open for his family’s influence peddling,’ Comer said in a statement last week.

‘We already have evidence of then-Vice President Biden speaking, dining, and having coffee with his son’s foreign business associates. We also know that Hunter Biden and his associates were informed of then-Vice President Biden’s official government duties in countries where they had a financial interest.

‘The National Archives must provide these unredacted records to further our investigation into the Biden family’s corruption.’

Other emails show Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote to Joe using his alias addresses while acting as National Security Advisor to then-VP Joe.

Blinken forwarded a March 26 2012 email from Ukraine ambassador John Tefft to Joe’s ‘Robin Ware’ address, describing a speech given by Beau to Ukrainian members of parliament in Kyiv on the topic of corruption.

IRS team investigating Hunter Biden's alleged crimes never investigated the Ukraine-Burisma bribes allegations

Jerry Dunleavy, here:

Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma, was the "foreign national" involved in the alleged "criminal bribery scheme" aimed at shaking an alleged investigation into Burisma by then-Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, according to sources familiar with the FBI record who described its contents to the Washington Examiner.

The sources said Zlochevsky said he believed it would be difficult to unravel the alleged bribery scheme for at least 10 years because of the number of bank accounts involved.

Amid the threat of being held in contempt of Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray allowed members of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee to review an FD-1023 form this month that contained redacted versions of the allegations from the paid FBI informant.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, repeatedly claimed following a late May FBI briefing that Barr and his “hand-picked prosecutor” — Scott Brady, then the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania — ended the investigation into the bribery claims in 2020. But Barr quickly said that is false.

“It’s not true,” Barr soon told multiple outlets in early June. “It wasn’t closed down. On the contrary, it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also revealed this month that a less redacted version of the form he has viewed says Zlochevsky claimed to have 17 recordings of his conversations with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (two of the former and 15 of the latter) as an "insurance policy." 

Zlochevsky’s alleged reference to Joe Biden as the “big guy” appears independent of the apparent reference to the now-president as the “big guy” by a Hunter Biden business associate during negotiations with Chinese intelligence-linked businessmen. The China-related reference occurred in a May 2017 email not made public until October 2020.

Shapley said that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf instructed FBI and IRS investigators not to ask witnesses about “dad” (Joe Biden) or about “the big guy.”

Hunter Biden reached a plea deal on federal charges related to tax crimes and the illegal purchase of a handgun, Weiss’s office revealed in a court filing on Tuesday.

The IRS whistleblower claims detailing the politicization and slow-walking of the Justice Department investigation were made public on Thursday, including allegations that Weiss had sought special counsel status from the DOJ and sought to file charges in California and in the nation’s capital but was repeatedly denied. The whistleblowers also pointed to new apparent links between Joe Biden and his son’s China deals and that the FBI authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop by November 2019.

 

The always feckless Barack Obama makes speeches abroad for $1 million, blames threat of China on Trump when he himself failed to recognize the new threat in Xi Jinping from 2012

 The vacuum was all his.

Here's Obama:

“With my successor coming in, I think he saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system,” Obama said, the Daily Mail reported. "As a consequence, I think China’s attitude [is], 'Well, we can take advantage of what appears to be a vacuum internationally on a lot of these issues.'"

 

It was Obama who never cared about the rules, never challenged China's military expansion in the South China Sea under Xi, and telegraphed nothing but weakness to China. 

Here's Xi Jinping as early as 2014:

Tabled by the popular ultranationalist blogger Zhou Xiaoping, the plan would authorize the assassination of blacklisted individuals—including Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te—if they do not reform their ways. Zhou later told the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao that his proposal had been accepted by the conference and “relayed to relevant authorities for evaluation and consideration.” Proposals like Zhou’s do not come by accident. In 2014, Xi praised Zhou for the “positive energy” of his jeremiads against Taiwan and the United States. ...

But the most telling moments of the two-sessions meetings, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved Xi himself. The Chinese leader gave four speeches in all—one to delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, two to the National People’s Congress, and one to military and paramilitary leaders. In them, he described a bleak geopolitical landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary, exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.”

In his first speech on March 6, Xi appeared to be girding China’s industrial base for struggle and conflict. “In the coming period, the risks and challenges we face will only increase and become more severe,” he warned. “Only when all the people think in one place, work hard in one place, help each other in the same boat, unite as one, dare to fight, and be good at fighting, can they continue to win new and greater victories.” To help the CCP achieve these “greater victories,” he vowed to “correctly guide” private businesses to invest in projects that the state has prioritized.

Xi also blasted the United States directly in his speech, breaking his practice of not naming Washington as an adversary except in historical contexts. He described the United States and its allies as leading causes of China’s current problems. “Western countries headed by the United States have implemented containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said. Whereas U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized “guardrails” and other means of slowing the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, Beijing is clearly preparing for a new, more confrontational era.

On March 5, Xi gave a second speech laying out a vision of Chinese self-sufficiency that went considerably further than any of his previous discussions of the topic, saying China’s march to modernization is contingent on breaking technological dependence on foreign economies—meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies. Xi also said that he wants China to end its reliance on imports of grain and manufactured goods. “In case we’re short of either, the international market will not protect us,” Xi declared. Li, the outgoing premier, emphasized the same point in his annual government “work report” on the same day, saying Beijing must “unremittingly keep the rice bowls of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people firmly in their own hands.” China currently depends on imports for more than a third of its net food consumption.

In his third speech, on March 8 to representatives from the PLA and the People’s Armed Police, Xi declared that China must focus its innovation efforts on bolstering national defense and establish a network of national reserve forces that could be tapped in wartime. Xi also called for a “National Defense Education” campaign to unite society behind the PLA, invoking as inspiration the Double Support Movement, a 1943 campaign by the Communists to militarize society in their base area of Yan’an.

In his fourth speech (and his first as a third-term president), on March 13, Xi announced that the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign was “the unification of the motherland.” Although he has hinted at the connection between absorbing Taiwan and his much-vaunted campaign to, essentially, make China great again, he has rarely if ever done so with such clarity.

One thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.

Xi is now intensifying a decade long campaign to break key economic and technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the United States.

After Nov 2 discovery of UPenn Biden Center classified documents, FBI agreed to let search for more documents be handled by the fox in the chicken coop

 DOJ and FBI are as corrupt as the day is long.

The Wall Street Journal, here:  

After Mr. Biden’s lawyers discovered documents marked as classified dating from his term as vice president at an office he used at a Washington-based think tank on Nov. 2, the Justice Department opened an inquiry into why and how they got there. Mr. Biden’s legal team prepared to search his other properties for any similar documents, and discussed with the Justice Department the prospect of having FBI agents present while Mr. Biden’s lawyers conducted the additional searches.

Instead, the two sides agreed that Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys would inspect the homes, notify the Justice Department as soon as they identified any other potentially classified records, and arrange for law-enforcement authorities to take them.