By Thomas Lifson

William Barr resigned as Attorney General yesterday, clearing the way for appointment of a special counsel to investigate the crimes of Hunter Biden and any other matters that may arise from that investigation.  That “may arise” language, which was included in the appointment of Robert Mueller, functions as an open door to investigate Hunter’s father, who received a majority of electoral votes yesterday and would become president if challenges in Congress, as laid out in the Constitution and federal code, do not succeed.

The fact that his resignation letter and President Trump’s tweets were cordial tells me that an arrangement between the two men was reached.  My strong suspicion is that Trump asked Barr to appoint a special counsel to take over and potentially expand the investigation of Hunter Biden already underway by the US Attorney for Delaware and that Barr declined, but offered to resign to allow a successor (for now, Deputy Attorney General Jeffery Rosen) to appoint a special counsel.

If Biden is inaugurated, he could easily demand the resignations of all sitting US Attorneys, as has been done before by new presidents. That would relatively quietly kill the investigation of the Biden family’s corrupt arrangements with foreign entities and governments, since the media would raise no questions and the social media oligopolists would suppress discussion. But firing a special counsel, while not impossible, is more difficult.

Many conservatives, including knowledgeable and insightful commentators, are upset with Barr for concealing news of the Delaware investigation of Hunter prior to the election. While I would have preferred an AG that understood we are in a life-and-death struggle in which the other side is not playing fair and so responded in kind, Barr’s devotion was to the institutions of our legal and judicial system, specifically the Department of Justice. Those institutions have self-correcting mechanisms, if they are allowed to operate and the opponents respect the norms. But that’s not how the other side is playing it. To analogize, Barr was a Marquess of Queensbury boxer fighting in a cage with a Mixed Martial Arts tag team.

With the arrangement that I hypothesize, Barr gets to quit and keep honoring the code to which he has devoted his professional life. I bet he understands that having already been attacked as Trump’s hatchet man, his only defense is to continue to publicly adhere to the rules. See, for example, the disgraceful lead paragraph in the Wall Street Journal’s story on his resignation:

Attorney General William Barr will resign just before Christmas, President Trump said Monday, ending a tenure during which Mr. Barr long marshaled the Justice Department to the president’s personal and political agenda before falling afoul of him in recent months. [emphasis added]

The is ridiculous, given that Barr did not reveal the existence of the Hunter Biden investigation prior to the election or during the impeachment process.  EvenChris Cillizza of CNN gets it:

… there’s [sic] been several examples of late in which Barr bucked the President’s wishes in critical moments.

* According to The Wall Street Journal, Barr went out of his way this past fall to ensure that the federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial dealings never went public in the course of a presidential campaign in which Trump sought to make the son of his Democratic opponent a major issue.

* Earlier this month, Barr directly contradicted Trump’s repeated claims that there was widespread voter fraud in the presidential election. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told the Associated Press in an interview.

Those twin moves suggest that, while he was willing to bend to Trump’s will, Barr’s ultimate loyalty — at least in these instances — was with the rule of law.

Barr was playing it by what I call the Marquess of Queensbury rules, as Paul Mirengoff explained at Powerline:

What about the decision not to reveal that Hunter Biden was under investigation? Justice Department policy states, “In general, the Department of Justice does not publicly announce investigations or investigative findings.”

It is also Justice Department policy to be “fair, neutral, and nonpartisan” during elections. This sound policy, in tandem with the sound policy against announcing criminal investigations, strongly supported Barr’s decision not to announce the DOJ’s investigation of Hunter Biden. No dubious motive is needed to explain the decision and the decision was not a “tragic failure.”

My reading of Barr is that he agreed to leave his lucrative private legal practice and take the slings and arrows inherent in serving as Trump’s AG because he was outraged by the abuse and corruption taking place at the DOJ. He returned to the Attorney General’s office because he wanted to right those wrongs and return the Department to the path of righteousness, to which he had devoted himself. That’s why he would refuse to violate guidelines, even in the face of abuse of them by his president’s opponents.

So, he gets to maintain that devotion. But his agreeable resignation opens up the possibility for an MMA-style AG to appoint a special counsel to avoid a coverup of corruption that may reach to the putative president-elect. President Trump, Republicans, and everyone who believes in the rule of law win. Biden, and his faction are the only losers.  Geniuses like Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadlerhaven’t yet figured it out:

“Good riddance,” tweeted House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who said the attorney general had “lied to cover for Trump, launched political investigations, subverted justice and the rule of law and violently cracked down on protestors.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who led an investigation of politicization of the department, said that “whomever Joe Biden chooses as the new Attorney General will have a tremendous amount of work to do to repair the integrity of the Department of Justice.”

 So, you can count on cries of outrage from them when the special counsel is appointed, as I would wager will happen.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/barr_resigns_everyone_except_biden_wins.html

Now his children are heavily incriminating him. But Abdull Hamid M. (39 years old), who allegedly killed the mother of his five children (8 months, 4, 6, 7 and 9 years old) with seven stabs with a knife in a block of flats in Freiberg in May, denies it. On Monday, the verdict was given: nine years imprisonment for manslaughter!

During the trial at the Chemnitz Regional Court, the children’s social workers and carers testified about their descriptions of the bloody deed.

“Dad killed mum with the knife,” one of the children told them.

In the course of conversations, the children acted out the events of the evening of May 19 and demonstrated where the father had injured their mother Mariam (†33).

According to the caregivers, only one of the boys had initially claimed that his mother had hurt herself. Later, however, this child had also confided in his foster father that his biological father, i.e. the defendant, had threatened him and had drummed this version into his head.

The social workers unanimously reported that the children are traumatised and plagued by nightmares.

Abdull Hamid M., who had worked as a police officer in Afghanistan for eleven years, stabbed his wife at least seven times with a kitchen knife during an argument. The woman was fatally injured.

In the trial before the Chemnitz Regional Court, the 39-year-old claimed that he had never stabbed his wife. Rather, the 33-year-old woman had grabbed a knife during an argument in the flat and stabbed her in the stomach “as if she were out of her mind”.Contrary to initial plans, the defence decided on Monday not to interview the children in court and withdrew a corresponding motion. The children were thus spared a testimony.

https://www.bild.de/regional/chemnitz/chemnitz-news/prozess-in-chemnitz-das-raetsel-um-sieben-toedliche-stiche-74457092.bild.html

A recent survey by the TaskForce of the Associations of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians in the German Federal States on the number of female patients with genital mutilation (diagnosis code Z91.7) reveals the following facts:

In 2019, almost 2,000 female patients were diagnosed with genital mutilation requiring treatment. This is almost 40% more than in 2016, when around 1,300 of these diagnoses were made.
Nearly 200 of the diagnosed victims were underage girls, half of them younger than 12.
In total, more than 530 underage girls have been diagnosed with female genital mutilation (FGM) since 2016, of which 250 were younger than 12 and more than 100 were even younger than five.

These figures refer exclusively to girls and women who received outpatient care from panel doctors. Genital mutilations detected in the course of inpatient stays in hospitals or in the course of private medical treatment are not recorded here.

“What we see from these figures is only the tip of the iceberg and constitutes perhaps 2% to 5% of the actual victims of mutilation living in our country, because a complete data collection is not wanted by those politically responsible,” says TaskForce founder Ines Laufer.Only last month, the TaskForce revealed how Franziska Giffey and her Family Ministry are underestimating the problem of genital mutilation in Germany and deceiving the public with figures that are far too low.

According to the Task Force’s estimates, there are more than 20,000 underage girls at high risk who come from high-risk countries with a mutilation rate of more than 75%, e.g. Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Mali, Somalia and many more. The mutilation is carried out in the countries of origin, but increasingly also in Germany.

“The survey result shows that hundreds of underage mutilation victims are indeed being identified by doctors, but – and this is de facto a real scandal – without criminal consequences for the family members who usually act as abettors,” Ines Laufer discusses. This is the direct consequence of the politically intended policy of protecting perpetrators, which for decades has prevented the medical profession, among others, from reporting these acts of violence to the investigating authorities.For over a decade, the TaskForce has called for simple yet effective comprehensive state protection measures for all girls at risk, such as regular medical checks and the introduction of mandatory medical reporting to law enforcement authorities when FGM is detected among underage victims.But while the taxpayer is made to pay for completely failed, ineffective ” information campaigns”, the federal government and parliamentarians still refuse to fulfil their mandate to protect girls who are specifically at risk, and the question arises how long the public will put up with this. Politicians are reluctant to protect girls effectively. In fact, there is a Muslim special right that one no longer dares to take action against. Feminists try very hard to look the other way because criticism of the mutilation of girls could be interpreted as criticism of immigration and Islam.This paves the way for the immigration of stone-age practices and torture from culturally backward countries to Germany.

https://www.tichyseinblick.de/daili-es-sentials/2-000-muslimische-maedchen-in-deutschland-mit-genitalverstuemmelung/

by Giulio Meotti

The Oeuvre d’Orient was founded in 1856, when for the French it was a question of going to the aid of the Lebanese Maronites, Eastern Christians massacred by the Arab tribes.Eastern Christians would have been the architects of the little secularism present in those societies, they were the first to think about the political integration of all minorities and to draft constitutions in which the essential reference was no longer religion. In 1856, France Inter did not exist.

In recent years, Eastern Christians have been severely persecuted, Coptic churches burned, Chaldean and Syriac Christians massacred by Islamic extremists. The Oeuvre d’Orient is raising funds to help them. Advertising is needed, including on France Inter. But the French public radio station has just turned down an advertising campaign for this Christmas. It had asked for a single word to be removed: “Christian”.

On French public radio where one cannot say “Eastern Christians,” the words “Jesus is gay” can be set to music. “Jésus est pédé”, sang Frédéric Fromet on France Inter. The singer-songwriter presented Jesus as a homosexual “in the name of the fight against homophobia”.

Pascal Gollnisch, head of the Oeuvre d’Orient, recalls that the RATP, the Paris public transport company, had also refused an advertisement for the same reasons. In Paris, the performance of “Les Prêtres”, a musical band formed by two French priests and a Vietnamese, was scheduled to raise funds for Eastern Christians. The phrase “au profit des chrétiens d’Orient”, ie the proceeds would go to Eastern Christians, had to disappear and the billboards would have to be reprinted.

Finished in the resulting storm, the RATP had to back down. Like France Inter, which was forced to review the decision.

When, a month ago, the poster of the latest Borat film appeared on the buses of the Paris RATP – nude and with a ring with the word “Allah” in Arabic – the transport company had removed it from the buses running on the Tice network, which covers Essonne and the southern suburb of Evry, with a large population of Muslims.

Abdelhakim Sefrioui, an imam who launched the fatwa against Professor Samuel Paty, beheaded for showing in class the cartoons of the Prophet of Islam, lives there. Therefore, posters on Eastern Christians and those “offensive” to Islam have been censored. France Inter had accepted the Oeuvre d’Orient commercials for the past three years during the Christmas holidays. Then came the beheading of Paty.

The weekly Le Point reconstructed the last lessons of the professor from Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Paty tackled the issue of press freedom and began with two cartoons: a gagged newspaper and a mouth closed with a zipper. To the students, the professor explains that, during the monarchy, there was no freedom of the press and “newspapers were censored”. Then he shows a picture of Place de la République full of people and with “Je suis Charlie” signs. And he concludes: “In 2015 the Islamists attacked Charlie Hebdo. This event shows that press freedom has yet to be defended”. And that the censorship now comes from within.

Laïcité – secularism – is served in installments.. Using the word “Christians” is a great scandal, while in the Paris metro in the recent past there have also been great advertisements for the film “Qu’Allah bénisse la France”.

May Allah bless France! But not Eastern Christians.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/293094

A forensic audit of voting equipment produced by Dominion Voting Systems and used in the State of Michigan for the 2020 election has found major irregularities in the tabulation of votes. The audit found a 68% error rate in Antrim County, where thousands of votes for U.S. President Donald J. Trump were wrongly “flipped” to former Vice President Joe Biden on November 3, 2020.

The high error rate was, according to the auditors, due to an algorithm placed inside the Dominion software that assigned different weights to votes cast for different candidates at a 2/3 to 1/3 ratio. This allowed election officials to apply a weighted numerical value to candidates and change the overall result. The declaration of winners was done on a basis of points, not votes, according to the auditors.

The audit also found that all server security logs prior to 11:03 pm on November 4, 2020 were wiped clean. As a result, all security logs for the day after the election, on election day, and prior to election day are missing. In addition, all vote adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes, according to the auditors. Federal law requires that all election records must be preserved for a period of 22 months from the date of any general election.

The court-ordered audit, which was limited to 22 voting machines in one county, does not prove that fraud occurred in the other U.S. states that use Dominion voting software. It does, however, raise suspicions and will fuel demands for a full forensic audit of the 2020 election in six battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — where Biden leads Trump by relatively small margins.

The 23-page audit — ordered by Judge Kevin Elsenheimer of the 13th Circuit Court for Michigan’s Grand Traverse, Antrim and Leelanau counties and carried out by Allied Security Operations Group, a team of military and intelligence professionals — effectively confirms the conclusions of other data scientists and expert witnesses who have warned that the equipment produced by Dominion is designed to produce fraudulent election results.

Key points of the audit include:

• “We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that the Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.”
• “The Antrim County Clerk and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson have stated that the election night error [the vote ‘flip’ from Trump to Biden] was the result of human error caused by the failure to update the Mancelona Township tabulator prior to election night for a down ballot race. We disagree and conclude that the vote flip occurred because of machine error built into the voting software designed to create error.”
• “The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.”
• “The tabulation log for the forensic examination of the server for Antrim County from December 6, 2020 consists of 15,676 individual events, of which 10,667 or 68.05% of the events were recorded errors. These errors resulted in overall tabulation errors or ballots being sent to adjudication. This high error rates proves the Dominion Voting System is flawed and does not meet state or federal election laws.”
• “It is critical to understand that the Dominion system classifies ballots into two categories, 1) normal ballots and 2) adjudicated ballots. Ballots sent to adjudication can be altered by administrators, and adjudication files can be moved between different Results Tally and Reporting (RTR) terminals with no audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicates (i.e. votes) the ballot batch. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity because it provides no meaningful observation of the adjudication processor audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicated the ballots.”
• “A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency or audit trail. Our examination of the server logs indicates that this high error rate was incongruent with patterns from previous years. The statement attributing these issues to human error is not consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more correctly to systemic machine and/or software errors. The systemic errors are intentionally designed to create errors in order to push a high volume of ballots to bulk adjudication.”
• “Antrim County failed to properly update its system. A purposeful lack of providing basic computer security updates in the system software and hardware demonstrates incompetence, gross negligence, bad faith, and/or willful non-compliance in providing the fundamental system security required by federal and state law. There is no way this election management system could have passed tests or have been legally certified to conduct the 2020 elections in Michigan under the current laws.”
• “Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. The lack of records prevents any form of audit accountability, and their conspicuous absence is extremely suspicious since the files exist for previous years using the same software. Removal of these files violates state law and prevents a meaningful audit, even if the Secretary wanted to conduct an audit. We must conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed.”
• “Likewise, all server security logs prior to 11:03 pm on November 4, 2020 are missing. This means that all security logs for the day after the election, on election day, and prior to election day are gone. Security logs are very important to an audit trail, forensics, and for detecting advanced persistent threats and outside attacks, especially on systems with outdated system files. These logs would contain domain controls, authentication failures, error codes, times users logged on and off, network connections to file servers between file accesses, internet connections, times, and data transfers. Other server logs before November 4, 2020 are present; therefore, there is no reasonable explanation for the security logs to be missing.”
• “On November 21, 2020, an unauthorized user unsuccessfully attempted to zero out election results. This demonstrates additional tampering with data.”
• “Based on the preliminary results, we conclude that the errors are so significant that they call into question the integrity and legitimacy of the results in the Antrim County 2020 election to the point that the results are not certifiable. Because the same machines and software are used in 48 other counties in Michigan, this casts doubt on the integrity of the entire election in the state of Michigan.”
• “On Sunday December 6, 2020, our forensics team visited the Antrim County Clerk. There were two USB memory sticks used, one contained the software package used to tabulate election results on November 3, 2020, and the other was programmed on November 6, 2020 with a different software package which yielded significantly different voting outcomes.”
• “This software programming should be standard across all voting machines systems for the duration of the entire election if accurate tabulation is the expected outcome as required by US Election Law. This intentional difference in software programming is a design feature to alter election outcomes.”
• “The election day outcomes were calculated using the original software programming on November 3, 2020. On November 5, 2020 the township clerk was asked to re-run the Central Lake Township ballots and was given no explanation for this unusual request. On November 6, 2020 the Antrim County Clerk, Sheryl Guy, issued the second version of software to re-run the same Central Lake Township ballots and oversaw the process. This resulted in greater than a 60% change in voting results.”
• “As the tabulator tape totals prove, there were large numbers of votes switched from the November 3, 2020 tape to the November 6, 2020 tape. This was solely based on using different software versions of the operating program to calculate votes, not tabulate votes. This is evidenced by using same the Dominion System with two different software program versions contained on the two different USB Memory Devices.”
• “The Help America Vote Act, Safe Harbor provides a 90-day period prior to elections where no changes can be made to election systems. To make changes would require recertification of the entire system for use in the election.”
• “The November 6, 2020 note from The Office of the Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson states: ‘The correct results always were and continue to be reflected on the tabulator totals tape and on the ballots themselves. Even if the error in the reported unofficial results had not been quickly noticed, it would have been identified during the county canvass. Boards of County Canvassers, which are composed of 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans, review the printed totals tape from each tabulator during the canvass to verify the reported vote totals are correct.'”
• “Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s statement is false. Our findings show that the tabulator tape totals were significantly altered by utilization of two different program versions, and not just the Dominion Election Management System. This is the opposite of the claim that the Office of the Secretary of State made on its website. The fact that these significant errors were not caught in ballot testing and not caught by the local county clerk shows that there are major inherent built-in vulnerabilities and process flaws in the Dominion Election Management System, and that other townships/precincts and the entire election have been affected.”
• “A high ‘error rate’ in the election software (in this case 68.05%) reflects an algorithm used that will weight one candidate greater than another (for instance, weight a specific candidate at a 2/3 to approximately 1/3 ratio). In the logs we identified that the RCV or Ranked Choice Voting Algorithm was enabled. This allows the user to apply a weighted numerical value to candidates and change the overall result. The declaration of winners can be done on a basis of points, not votes.”
• “The Dominion software configuration logs in the Divert Options, shows that all write-in ballots were flagged to be diverted automatically for adjudication. This means that all write-in ballots were sent for ‘adjudication’ by a poll worker or election official to process the ballot based on voter ‘intent’. Adjudication files allow a computer operator to decide to whom to award those votes (or to trash them).”

The audit corroborates testimony by numerous technology experts that Dominion voting machines are inherently insecure and vulnerable to manipulation.

In Georgia, for instance, an election supervisor in Coffee County demonstrated in a video how easily ballots can be altered with no trace.

In Pennsylvania, retired Army Colonel Phil Waldron, a cybersecurity expert, explained how Dominion voting systems were built to be manipulated:

“So, these systems, in a nutshell, allow authorized and unauthorized users to cancel votes, shift votes, pre-load votes, vote blank ballots, all in real-time, and in large numbers. Our experts and other academics believe that up to 1.2 million Pennsylvania votes could have been altered or fraudulent. Only a detailed forensic analysis of the actual machines and software will truly show how many Pennsylvania citizens have had their civil rights violated.”

In Texas, election authorities rejected the use of Dominion hardware and software at least three times due to security concerns. A document dated January 24, 2020 from the Texas Secretary of State noted:

“The examiner reports identified multiple hardware and software issues that preclude the Office of the Texas Secretary of State from determining that the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system satisfies each of the voting-system requirements set forth in the Texas Election Code. Specifically, the examiner reports raise concerns about whether the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system is suitable for its intended purpose; operates efficiently and accurately; and is safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation. Therefore, the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system and corresponding hardware devices do not meet the standards for certification prescribed by Section 122.001 of the Texas Election Code.”

In Arizona, legislators have called for an independent audit of the Dominion hardware and software used by Maricopa County in the 2020 general election.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Gary Miliefsky, a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security and publisher of Cyber Defense Magazine, said of the Michigan audit team:

“Looking at their team, their patents, their experience, we now have a credible analysis that, as I predicted, the Algorithms being used in the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed to create systematic fraud and influence election results and, in this case, not in the favor of President Trump.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16862/dominion-voting-systems