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UPN: United Patriot Network
03/18/2024 07:54 PM
Secret Service Agent Blocked Trump From Going To Capitol On Jan. 6: Driver

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

When then-President Donald Trump finished his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, he wanted to go to the U.S. Capitol.
Surrounded by campaign staff and members of the U.S. Secret Service, former U.S. President Donald Trump (C) waves to supporters as he visits the Iowa Pork Producers Tent at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa, on Aug. 12, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

But a Secret Service agent blocked him from going, according to a newly disclosed account.

“The president wanted to go to the Capitol,” the Secret Service agent who was driving the vehicle, told a U.S. House of Representatives panel.

President Trump and Robert Engel, his lead Secret Service agent, entered the SUV around 1:10 p.m. after President Trump concluded his speech, which was delivered on the Ellipse.

“He asked Bob Engel if we could go to the Capitol and why couldn’t we go to the Capitol and was insistent on going to the Capitol,” the driver testified, adding later that the president “was pushing pretty hard to go.”

“Mr. Engel’s response was essentially to tell him that we didn’t have any people at the Capitol, we didn’t have a plan in place, and that we needed to essentially go back to the White House and assess what our options were and wait till we can get a plan in place before we went down there,” the driver added.

President Trump responded by saying he felt it would be fine because he was not concerned about the people at the Capitol, describing them as being his supporters, according to the driver, although the driver could not recall specifically what words the president used.

“Mr. Engel consistently had the same response, that we didn’t have a plan in place, we didn’t have people at the Capitol, and that we needed to go back to the White House and reassess,” the driver said, adding later that whether the crowd at the Capitol was comprised of supporters of President Trump “was immaterial.”

President Trump did not say anything like, “I’m the president, I’ll decide where I get to go or where I’m going,” the driver said, responding to a question from the panel.

The driver took President Trump and Mr. Engel to the White House, which is 1.2 miles from the Ellipse. By 1:25 p.m., President Trump was told about violence at the Capitol, according to a White House employee.

After arriving at the White House, the driver communicated what transpired to other agents and said they should stand by as a decision was made as to whether the president would at some point be taken to the Capitol.

The agents remained with the presidential vehicles until they were told they would not be going to the Capitol, according to the driver. The communication came within 15 minutes after Mr. Engel met with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows or Meadows’s deputy, the driver said. “My understanding was that … a decision came out of that meeting,” he said.

The driver was speaking on Nov. 7, 2022, to a House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021. The transcript was obtained and reviewed by The Epoch Times. The transcript was not released by the committee when it published online a final report and accompanying materials, including many transcripts, as it disbanded in late 2022.

The select committee also interviewed Mr. Engel, who could not be reached, but did not release a transcript of that interview. Portions of the interview, which have still not been disclosed, were quoted in the panel’s report.

The report says that President Trump entered the SUV after the Ellipse speech ended and “forcefully expressed his intention that Bobby Engel, the head of his Secret Service detail, direct the motorcade to the Capitol.” It does not mention who made the decision not to adhere to the request.

“I said … ‘let’s go down to the Capitol and the Secret Service very nicely said, ’Sir, really better for you to go back to the White House, it really is, you know, we’re not prepared to go down there,’” President Trump said on a Just the News podcast this week. “And I understood that and it was no big argument.”

Former White House official Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified in public to the select committee, has claimed that President Trump grew irate after not being taken to the Capitol and lunged at the wheel of the vehicle. Both Mr. Engel, according to the select committee, and the driver, according to the transcript, refuted that claim.

Ms. Hutchinson, whose lawyer has not returned an inquiry, changed her testimony dramatically after testifying to the panel three times, according to a new House Republican report. She did not mention the alleged grabbing incident until her fourth interview. Mr. Engel and Mr. Meadows could not be reached. The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment.
Word of Possible Trip

President Trump was not scheduled to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but some officials received word that he might go there, according to testimony.

Anthony Ornato, a Secret Service agent not on the scene, said in a recently released transcript that he was asked by officials if President Trump could walk to the Capitol after the speech on the Ellipse. He thought the idea was “ridiculous” and referred the officials to Mr. Engel.

An email from an agent to the driver and others on Jan. 5 said that President Trump planned to go to the Ellipse the following day. “There are also unconfirmed rumors of a move to the Capitol following the event on the Ellipse, but that will be an OTR if it happens,” the email stated, according to the select committee.

OTR stands for off-the-record movement, meaning the move would not be placed on the presidential schedule, according to the driver.

He said his superior did not inform him on Jan. 6 of any plans to take President Trump to the Capitol.

According to summaries released by House Republicans of testimony given by four White House employees to the select committee, several White House employees became aware of President Trump possibly going to the Capitol, although one said that both the Secret Service and Mr. Meadows told him such a trip was not happening. The White House employee transcripts were not released by the select committee and have not otherwise been disclosed.

“The committee’s principal concern was that the President actually intended to participate personally in the January 6th efforts at the Capitol, leading the attempt to overturn the election either from inside the House Chamber, from a stage outside the Capitol, or otherwise. The committee regarded those facts as important because they are relevant to President Trump’s intent on January 6th. There is no question from all the evidence assembled that President Trump did have that intent,” according to the summary.

After President Trump arrived back at the White House, the president said “he wanted to physically walk and be a part of the march” to the Capitol, former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told the select committee. Mr. Meadows, according to Ms. Hutchinson, said President Trump was upset Mr. Engel did not arrange a Capitol trip, and that Mr. Meadows did not make plans for a trip official.

President Trump remained at the White House, where he watched events at the Capitol unfold on television. He later released a video showing him standing outside the White House and telling people to “go home.”
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UPN: United Patriot Network
03/18/2024 07:47 PM
The Five FUBARs

“How many of these places where polite society turns out to be provably insane do we have to see before we stop taking their judgment on anything as significant? — Bret Weinstein

James Howard Kunstler
Mar 4, 2024

The USA is a runaway train with a dead man in the engineer’s seat. The conductor goes through the cars assuring the passengers that everything is fine. . . never mind the screeching wheels on the curves. . . or the blinding strobe effect of low sunlight passing through the trees out the window at a hundred and forty mph. . . or the bump that made half the stuff in the overhead luggage rack jump out. More than half the people on-board are at tachycardia levels of fright — some are wailing — but the other less than half just remain fixed on their phones and laptop screens. They can’t be bothered to look out the window. . . .

Okay, that’s a metaphor. But if you’re a citizen of our country and care about it, these are the matters you’d better pay attention to, because they are all going off the rails:

The war in Ukraine. We started it in 2014 to mess with Russia and Russia is going to finish it. Who knows what our real motives were. A resource grab? A desperate ploy to erase our national debt by creating a global fiasco? Sheer psychopathic hatred of this Putin fellow? We can’t bring ourselves to acknowledge the failure of this ill-conceived venture. Instead, our feckless allies in Europe are foolishly rattling their sabers, apparently forgetting that you don’t bring a sword to a nuclear missile fight.

Mr. Macron in France affects to offer up his army for slaughter on the blood-soaked plains of Ukraine, just as the Ukrainians offered up a half a million of their young men so that Victoria Nuland could feel good about herself. Mr. Macron is insane, but the society he presides over is collectively insane, so perhaps he represents them well. Similarly, Olaf Scholz in Germany, whose top generals were caught on a leaked recording last week discussing their plan to blow up the Kerch Bridge that connects Crimea to Russia. Do you understand that this would be a direct attack on Russia, an act of War by NATO? And what the obvious consequence would be?

The phantom government of “Joe Biden” is too weak and mindless to join any negotiation. Ukraine and Russia are up to some kind of cross-talk down in Riyadh with Prince MBS. Even Mr. Zelensky went down for a day, though video appears to show him coked-up, sniffling and snarfling, not a good sign. If ever there was a time to end this stupid conflict, it’s now, before the Russian election. After that, terms will only be more difficult for Ukraine, up to direct custodial supervision instead of remaining a nation. It was never any of our business (though the Biden family, BlackRock, and the CIA saw fabulous opportunity to profit there).

Next is the border. You saw last year how the blob elite greeted the transfer of illegal immigrants to their happy little island of Martha’s Vineyard. (They were not amused by Governor DeSantis’s prank, and off-loaded the mutts post-haste.) But that same smug demographic doesn’t care if hundreds of thousands are distributed to the big cities, which are now fiscally destabilized by them to an extreme, probably to bankruptcy.

Of course, that is not the main thing to worry about with what altogether amounts to millions of border-jumpers flooding our land. The main reason to worry is what the blob that invited them here intends for them to do, which, you may suspect, is to unleash mayhem in the streets, malls, stadiums, and upon our infrastructure just in time to derail the election — perhaps even to make war on us right in our homeland. The US government is paying for this whole operation, you understand, funneling our tax money to international cut-out orgs who set up the transfer camps in Panama, and buy the plane tickets for the mutts to cross the ocean, and coordinate with the Mexican cartels to shuttle this horde of mystery people among us to work their juju for the Democratic Party. The pissed-off-ness of the public has passed the red line on this treasonous scam.

A third FUBAR is the lawfare campaign of the Democratic Party and its regime in power against the citizens of this land. This folder includes overt and obvious political prosecutions by DA’s and AG’s who make election promises to “go after” individuals without such niceties as probable cause. It includes the gigantic new scaffold of inter-agency censorship and propaganda. It includes the psychopathic struggle sessions mandated by “diversity and inclusion” policy. It includes election-rigging directed by the likes of Marc Elias and Norm Eisen, getting states to fiddle laws on voter ID and mail-in ballots. It includes the political protection of rogue groups ranging from looter flash-mobs to Antifa anarchists who bust up things and people and burn buildings down. It includes state officials who peremptorily kick candidates off the ballot. It includes a nakedly biased judiciary, and especially the use of the DC federal district court to punish people extralegally, unjustly, extravagantly, and cruelly. In short, lawfare is the complete perversion of law, and we-the-people are entreated by reprobate officials such as Merrick Garland and Letitia James to accept it.

A fourth item on this list is the US economy which has been overwhelmed by maladministration of an overgrown monster bureaucracy, and the gross (perhaps fatal) mismanagement of the government’s money. The people of this land are not being allowed to do business, to find a livelihood, to transact fairly. “Joe Biden’s” shadow string-pullers are messing as badly with the oil and gas producers as they have messed with Ukraine. And they are doing it in pursuit of a laughable mirage: their “green new deal.”

John Podesta, the “clean energy czar” who replaced the Haircut-in-search-of-a-brain called John Kerry, sits on a $370-billion slush fund that can be used to just dole out to anyone and everyone as a political patronage payoff, especially to janky “community” orgs and NGOs with fake agendas. This really just amounts to an asset-stripping operation that will leave the American people busted and with broken supply chains for everything. Instead of annual budgets, Congress raises the US debt ceiling by “continuing resolutions” to keep the government from shutting down. The national debt races to the $35-trillion mark. As interest rates on debt rise, our debt payments now exceed our military spending. You can be sure that our country will break down financially very soon.

The capper on today’s list is the nation’s health, the racketeering system we’ve set up to care for it, and the public health agencies of the government that enabled the Covid-19 operation to happen. The CDC continues to push vaccines that have killed millions of Americans and more millions around the world, and has probably compromised the well-being of millions more going forward. Corporate medicine — that is, your doctor, and your hospitals — is a sinking Titanic of grift and chaos. Try to get an appointment to even see a doctor for an emergency. Try to avoid being bankrupted by your treatment. Try to get out of a hospital alive. Yeah, it’s that bad.

The doctors have surrendered your trust in them with their lying and their bullshit. The current director of the CDC, Mandy Cohen and her predecessor, Rochelle Walensky, have knowingly presided over the mass killing and injuries imposed on the mRNA vaccinated. Hundreds of their deputies should be liable for prosecution, and so should many of the other prominent characters in the Covid Saga: Fauci, Birx, Collins, Baric, Bourla, Daszak, Califf, Woodcock, Hahn, and many more.

What are we going to do about any of this? Return to the metaphor. The runaway train is still picking up speed. You can’t just jump off at 150 mph. If you’re one of the passengers watching this in horror, maybe you can decouple your car, or get the conductor to do it by any means necessary. Let’s say that each car behind the engine of this train is a state of the United States. Let the engine up front with the dead man at the controls ride that runaway to its terrible conclusion. Cut loose the cars behind it to take care of themselves, to slow down, get a grip on their situation, and make plans to find a better engine to pull the train. Decouple. Cut loose. It’s the only way.
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UPN: United Patriot Network
03/15/2024 05:39 PM
The intervention in Somalia in the early 90s to facilitate the distribution of humanitarian aid also didn’t go the best.

This in my humble opinion is purely political. The corrupt child sniffing dementia rattled commander in thief is loosing critical Arab/muslim/hamas support in several critical swing states (like Michigan) that he needs to shore up to win the election. He is putting our servicemen and women in harms way for personal political gain.
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UPN: United Patriot Network
03/08/2024 09:18 PM
U.S. Northeast Gasoline Reserve Could Be Sold Off
By Tsvetana Paraskova - Mar 04, 2024, 7:30 AM CST

The U.S. could sell off its 1-million-barrel Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve in the fiscal year of 2024, a funding bill up for discussion at U.S. Congress says.

Under the draft text of the bill, “the Secretary of Energy shall draw down and sell one million barrels of refined petroleum product from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve during fiscal year 2024.”

“Upon the completion of such sale, the Secretary shall carry out the closure of the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve,” says the bill.

Furthermore, one of the provisions is that “The Secretary of Energy may not establish any new regional petroleum product reserve unless funding for the proposed regional petroleum product reserve is explicitly requested in advance in an annual budget submitted by the President,…and approved by the Congress in an appropriations Act.”

The Department of Energy established in 2014 the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve (NGSR)—the first federal, regional, refined petroleum product reserve containing gasoline—following the 2012 Superstorm Sandy in the northeastern United States.

The NGSR holds one million barrels of gasoline, including 700,000 barrels located in the New York Harbor area, 200,000 barrels in the Boston area, and 100,000 barrels in South Portland, Maine.

The same bill about selling off the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve aims to prohibit Chinese entities from buying crude oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the latest push to limit Chinese access to U.S. markets.

The bill follows a sale of about 1 million barrels from the SPR to Unipec America, a U.S. subsidiary of state-owned major Sinopec. That was back in 2022 when the Biden Administration unleashed more than 180 million barrels of crude from the SPR to limit the spike in oil prices.

The House is yet to vote on the bill, which allocates funding for half of the federal segments that Congress is in charge of organizing funding for, Reuters reported, but with anti-Chinese sentiments pretty popular among both Democrats and Republicans, its chances appear pretty good.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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UPN: United Patriot Network
03/07/2024 11:13 PM
If a comparable book was upon the right that flagrantly misrepresented scholarly research to justify overtly racist theories about inner city people… imagine how they would be treated by the press and public? True signs of a double standard. They are totally fine with academic dishonesty that fans hatred and ignorance… as long as it is supportive of an overriding agenda that they endorse!
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UPN: United Patriot Network
03/07/2024 10:45 PM
They did cut ATF funding, a little bit, sort of. But they used some pretty fuzzy math to do so. Read the whole thing at the link.

Quote
...In their press release, House Republicans boasted that the appropriations package "utilizes the power of the purse to address the weaponization of the growing bureaucracy within the FBI and ATF." Specifically, they do this by "reversing [ATF's] anti-Second Amendment overreach…by significantly reducing its overall funding by $122 million, a 7% decrease" from 2023, as well as holding the FBI "accountable for targeting everyday Americans by reducing its overall operating budget by $654 million and cutting its construction account by 95%."

But these already-meager cuts don't involve very much actual cutting.

The FBI's salaries and expenses totaled over $10 billion in 2023, and it requested over $11 billion for 2024; the appropriations bill would grant $10.6 billion—a bit less than the FBI wanted but only about one-half percent less than last year's budget and certainly nothing approaching the 6 percent cut Republicans bragged about.

Republicans get around this with some tricky math: In a 2022 omnibus spending bill, the Bureau received $652 million toward the construction of a campus in Huntsville, Alabama. Republicans include the $652 million when touting a 6 percent cut, even though the money apportioned for salaries and expenses barely budged.

In fact, when Republicans bragged about "cut[ting] the FBI's construction account by $621.9 million"—for a whopping 95 percent decrease—that precipitous drop uses the one-time Huntsville cash as its starting point. Besides, the FBI only asked for a $61.9 million construction budget, which would have constituted a 90 percent decrease on its own.

Meanwhile, the ATF received $1.672 billion for salaries and expenses in 2023, while the appropriations bill would apportion $1.625 billion—a decrease of just 2.8 percent, not the 7 percent drop House Republicans claimed. That supposed 7 percent cut of $122 million comes from adding the $47 million cut in salaries and another $75 million cut from construction costs. The ATF did not request any construction money in its 2024 budget, so boasting that this a cut is laughable. Just like with the FBI, judging salaries and expenses in an apples-to-apples comparison yields a much more modest cut.

Any sort of fiscal discipline should be welcomed, of course. But it's not like Republicans are dedicated to pruning federal law enforcement agencies across the board....


And the DEA? It actually got an increase in funding.

Onward and upward,
airforce
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UPN: United Patriot Network
03/06/2024 07:31 PM


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UPN: United Patriot Network
02/19/2024 07:31 PM
You beat me to it! I was just about to post this link.

Most of these boycotts end up not being much, though Bud Lite certainly learned a lesson. It'll be interesting to see how far this spreads.

Onward and upward,
airforce
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