The Story and the Bigger Stories

A judge in New York has stripped Trump of control of properties. It’s going to be appealed. Trump does not have clean hands. It is pretty clear he did lie about properties to inflate their values or minimize their values. But also, the judge really overreached in cases as well.

The judge assigned a value to Mar-a-Lago, a twenty-acre property, that is less than the asking price for surrounding half-acre lots. The reality is that tax assessors and banks use different valuation measures. It is not common at all for a property tax assessment to match a sales price valuation a bank uses. It is highly common for wealthy property owners to use one assessor to help determine the taxable value of a property and another assessor to help determine the bank value of a property. The only people shocked by this are those bending over backward to defend the judge’s decision.

This is going to be appealed. But Trump still has underlying problems in the case related to valuation and claims he made about his properties that do not hold up. It is not the fatal blow, however, the left and judge want you to believe.

But I expect we will have a massive pile of dominant news coverage about this story to overshadow a few larger stories.

The first is that the Biden Administration has been infiltrated by the Iranians and it turns out the Obama Administration was too. Now we understand why both administrations pushed so hard for an Iran deal. They were prodded internally by those with Iranian sympathies. In fact, Iran set up an influence operation that, if documents recovered from Iran are to be believed, implicate the Chief of Staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations. A security clearance is needed for that job.

This is a much bigger deal than the Trump judgment. If the Iranians could undermine and influence our national security to the extent it appears they have, how have the Chinese and Russians proceeded?

Tabatabai currently serves in the Pentagon as the chief of staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, a position that requires a U.S. government security clearance. She previously served as a diplomat on Malley’s Iran nuclear negotiating team after the Biden administration took office in 2021. Esfandiary is a senior advisor on the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, a think tank that Malley headed from 2018-2021.

Tabatabai and Esfandiary didn’t respond to requests for comment on the IEI. Esfandiary’s current employer, the International Crisis Group, confirmed her participation in the initiative. But the Crisis Group, which promotes conflict resolution globally, said the IEI was an informal network of academics and researchers that wasn’t overseen by the Iranian Foreign Ministry and that it received funding from a European government and some European institutions, which they declined to identify.

This is a really big deal.

Additionally, the investigation into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents has expanded.

The federal investigation into President Joe Biden's handling of classified documents prior to becoming president has grown into a sprawling examination of Obama-era security protocols and internal White House processes, with investigators so far interviewing scores of witnesses, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News.

In light of the story about Iran, this is a good thing and deeply problematic for Biden.

Then, of course, there is the latest on the Hunter Biden saga. A Chinese Communist wired Hunter Biden $250,000.00 to Joe Biden’s home at a time Hunter Biden was not living there.

The wires allegedly were addressed to Hunter Biden when his father was not in office and do not prove that Joe Biden received any of the money. CNN previously reported Hunter Biden used the Wilmington address on his driver’s license and the home was the site of a family intervention over his drug addiction in 2019.

Comer told CNN his panel is trying to put together a timeline on where Hunter Biden was living around this time.

According to the committee, the wires allegedly showed that Hunter Biden received a $10,000 wire from Wang Xin on July 26, 2019. Separately, on August 2, 2019, Hunter Biden allegedly received a $250,000 wire from Jonathan Li and Tan Ling. Both of the wires listed Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, as the beneficiary address. The committee did not provide the bank wires in their announcement on Tuesday.

Some will undoubtedly want to spend all their time on the Trump story to ignore the Biden stories. But the Biden stories suggest a compromised administration wherein our foreign adversaries are pulling the strings.

That is really big news indeed.