PAYBACK COMING: Senate Republicans Request Hunter Biden’s Travel Records from Secret Service
Mairead McArdle
Just after the Senate voted to acquit President Trump on the two articles of impeachment against him, Senate Republicans announced Wednesday that they have requested Hunter Biden’s official travel records from the Secret Service.
Senator Chuck Grassley, chair of the Finance Committee, and Senator Ron Johnson, chair of Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, requested the documents on former vice president Joe Biden’s son as part of their ongoing investigation into his possible conflicts of interest involving his business dealings with China and his lucrative position on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
The committees are “reviewing potential conflicts of interest posed by the business activities of Hunter Biden and his associates during the Obama administration, particularly with respect to his business activities in Ukraine and China,” the chairmen said in a letter to the director of the Secret Service.
Johnson and Grassley previously requested from the Treasury Department any documents pertaining to the younger Biden and the the Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings.
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House Democrats launched the impeachment inquiry after news broke about a July 25 phone call Trump had with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. During that call, Trump repeatedly asked Zelensky to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, over allegations that Biden leveraged his position as vice president to benefit his son, who held a lucrative position at a Ukrainian gas company. Biden was in charge of addressing corruption in Ukraine as vice president at the time.
Lawmakers subsequently accused Trump of obstructing the congressional inquiry by refusing to provide documents and allow witnesses to testify.
The White House temporarily withheld $391 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine intended to help the country ward off Russian aggression, prompting suspicion of a quid pro quo scheme in which Trump is said to have finally released the aid in exchange for the promise that Biden’s conduct would be investigated.
The Senate voted Wednesday afternoon to acquit Trump of the two impeachment charges brough by the House, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Accused CIA leaker grew ‘belligerent’ before WikiLeaks dump, witness says
This article was sourced from NYpost
A CIA programmer accused of passing classified information to Wikileaks became increasingly hostile toward coworkers in the months ahead of a massive online document dump, a witness said in court Wednesday.
The software engineer, Joshua Adam Schulte, 30, forced himself into meetings he wasn’t invited to, referred to a woman higher-up as a “dumb b—h,” and fueled a nasty, escalating feud with a coworker, according to the witness in Manhattan federal court.
“Josh became increasingly belligerent to another employee,” said the witness, a colleague who testified under the pseudonym “Jeremy Weber” in order to protect his identity.
That fight was cultivated in what Weber described as shockingly lax work culture, where government hackers responsible for top-secret spy projects traded childish barbs and shot off Nerf guns at the secretive, austere administration.
Prosecutors are seizing on the dispute between Schulte and the coworker, identified only as Amol, in an attempt to paint Schulte as a disgruntled hacker seeking retaliation for workplace slights.
As they developed software to help uphold national security, workers in Schuttle’s unit would goof off by swiping and hiding items from workers’ cubicles, Weber testified
But bad blood formed amid the hijinks between Schulte and Amol — with each casually trading personal insults about the other’s physical appearances, Weber said.
The disputes between Schulte and Amol escalated to the point where Schulte eventually filed a restraining order against Amol, according to Weber.
Schulte was then transferred to a different cybersecurity unit altogether. But Weber said he became increasingly difficult and continuously logged back into systems he was no longer supposed to have access to.
In March 2017, about a year after Schulte began complaining about Amol, Wikileaks published a massive dump about CIA malware and other virus projects code-named “Vault 7” and “Vault 8,” to which prosecutors believe Schulte contributed.
At that point, Weber had distanced himself from Schulte, whom he once considered a friend.
“I didn’t want to deal with the drama around him anymore,” Weber said.
Schulte is charged with the illegal gathering of national defense information and other counts and faces up to 135 years in prison if convicted.
This article was sourced from National Review