Hunter Biden

Aug. 30 (UPI) — The California Highway Patrol reportedly will provide security protection for former Vice President Kamala Harris after she lost her Secret Service protection on Thursday.

California officials on Friday bestowed dignitary status on Harris, who has been a private citizen since leaving office on Jan. 19, and will provide her with security protection instead of the Secret Service, The Los Angeles Times reported.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom must sign off on CHP-provided security protection for Harris, but his office declined to comment on the matter.

“Our office does not comment on security arrangements,” Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gordon told The Los Angeles Times.

Harris lives in Los Angeles and has a pending 15-city book tour that starts in New York City on Sept. 24, according to USA Today.

The book tour is scheduled to last for 107 days, which would have required advance Secret Service work if Harris’ protection were to continue.

Outgoing vice presidents receive Secret Service protection for six months after leaving office, but President Joe Biden extended Harris’protection beyond six months upon a request from her aides.

Harris continued benefiting from the protection until President Donald Trump ended it as of Monday via a signed memorandum on Thursday.

The president also had ended Secret Service protection for his adult children, Hunter and Ashley Biden, after their father extended the protection to them through July.

Hunter Biden recently traveled to South Africa with his Secret Service team, The Washington Post reported.

Only former presidents and first ladies receive lifetime Secret Service protection in accordance with federal law.

Ending Harris’ extended protection also ends all extended protections provided by the former president just before Biden left office in January.

Hunter Biden finally made news outside the MAGA mediasphere for something that’s usually the work of Fox News and other deep state disseminators: He verbally bashed the Democratic Party, CNN’s Jake Tapper, former Obama aides and even Hollywood’s devastatingly handsome ambassador George Clooney.

President Biden’s son, whose very name inspires a Pavlovian response among right-wing conspiracy theorists, appears to have pulled a page from the opposition’s playbook when during two recent interviews he leaned into grievance politics, repeatedly hurled expletives and condemned those who “did not remain loyal” to his father.

Hunter Biden’s first round of interviews since the 2024 election started out tame enough when last week on a new podcast hosted by Jaime Harrison, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he said that Democrats lost to Donald Trump because they abandoned his father. There was no “grand conspiracy” to hide his father’s health issues, he said. “We lost the last election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party. That’s my position. We had the advantage of incumbency, we had the advantage of an incredibly successful administration, and the Democratic Party literally melted down.”

Fair enough. Then it was on to Clooney, one of the first high-profile figures on the left to call for Biden to step aside from his reelection campaign after a disastrous debate performance. Hunter Biden disparagingly referred to the actor as “a brand” and told Harrison, “Do you think in Middle America, that voter in Green Bay, Wis., gives a s— what George Clooney thinks about who she should vote for?”

Then came the knockout punch. In a separate, three-hour-plus interview released Monday with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, he said of the star: “George Clooney is not a f— actor. He is a f—, I don’t know what he is. He’s a brand. … F— him and everybody around him.”

George Clooney was among Kennedy Center honorees welcomed by President Biden at the White House on Dec. 4, 2022.

(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)

Hunter Biden also had some words for senior Biden aide Anita Dunn. “The Anita Dunns of the world, who’s made $40 [million], $50 million off the Democratic Party, they’re all going to insert their judgment over a man who has figured out, unlike anybody else, how to get elected to the United States Senate over seven times, how to pass more legislation than any president in history, how to have a better midterm election than anyone in history and how to garner more votes than any president that has ever run.” Former Obama aide and political analyst David Axelrod was also on the list. He said Axelrod “had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama, and that was because of Barack Obama.”

And if the above sentiments were attributed to the current president’s sons, who’ve characterized the Democratic Party as Nazis and referred to those who were protesting immigration sweeps by the patently offensive term “mongoloids”? Meh, it’s just another Monday. But Hunter Biden, like most public-facing Democrats, is held to a different standard. When they go low, we go high. Remember that sage advice that worked for Democrats back in the late aughts and early 2010s but now sounds like advice pulled from a 1950s guide to etiquette? The younger Biden not only deviated from that lefty code but also mirrored his tormentors, then unleashed his ire onto his own party.

Hunter Biden‘s own reckless actions over the years made him grist for all manner of right-wing helmed investigations. Then there are the stupid conspiracies, whether it’s the missing laptop or that mysterious bag of cocaine found in the White House. Hard to keep track, but the younger Biden went there during his recent interview. “I have been clean and sober since June of 2019. I have not touched a drop of alcohol or a drug, and I’m incredibly proud of that,” he told Callaghan. “And why would I bring cocaine into the White House and stick it into a cubby outside of the Situation Room in the West Wing?”

But he also attributed at least one recent alleged conspiracy to those outside the right-wing cabal or, more specifically, to Jake Tapper. The CNN anchor co-wrote “Original Sin,” a provocative book that claimed President Biden’s confidants worked to conceal his declining health from the public.

Hunter Biden argued that it was nonsense and that the “ability to keep a secret in Washington is zero.”
“What sells, Jaime?” he asked Harrison. “What sells is the idea of a conspiracy.” And the public spectacle of flaming your enemy’s enemy.

May 27 (UPI) — President Donald Trump is set to pardon Todd and Julie Chrisley, former television stars serving lengthy prison terms after being found guilty of conspiring to defraud banks and committing tax evasion.

The couple gained fame in the United States through their Chrisley Knows Best reality show in which they flaunted their wealth. They were found guilty in 2022 of manipulating financial records to make it appear as if they were wealthier than they really were, when applying for more than $30 million in loans from 2007 to 2012.

They received a combined 19-year prison sentence, with Todd Chrisley to serve 12 years in prison and Julie Chrisley sentenced to serve seven. Both sentences came with three years’ supervised release.

Trump, a former reality star, is expected to grant the couple the latest presidential pardons of his second administration.

In a video excerpt published on X by a White House aide of a phone call Tuesday between Trump and the jailed couple’s adult children, the president is heard stating, “your parents are going to be free and clean, and I hope we can do that by tomorrow.”

“I don’t know them, but give them my regards and wish them a good life.”

“Mr. President, I just want to say thank you for bringing my parents back,” Grayson Chrisley is heard responding.

“Yeah, well, they were given a pretty harsh treatment from what I’m hearing,” Trump replied.

Margo Martin, the White House aide who published the clip online, said in the caption that Trump will be granting them “full pardons.”

“Trump Knows Best!” she added.

The Conservative Political Action Conference said in a statement that it “appreciates” Trump’s pardoning of Todd and Julie Chrisley, the parents of its Nolan Center for Justice senior fellow, Savannah Chrisley, who was on the phone call Tuesday with Trump.

“The Chrisleys were targeted by weaponized prosecutors who abused the power granted to them by our criminal justice system,” CPAC said in a statement.

“Thank you to President Trump for restoring order and integrity to the justice system.”

According to prosecutors, the Chrisleys, who were found guilty in June 2022, spent money they defrauded from banks to purchase luxury cars, real estate and travel and then used new fraudulent loans to pay off the old loans.

Todd Chrisley filed for bankruptcy and walked away from $20 million in debt. On top of the conspiracy to defraud banks, they were found guilty of conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. Julie Chrisley was also found guilty of wire fraud and obstruction of justice.

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has used his executive powers to punish political adversaries with executive orders and to seemingly reward convicted friends, supporters and donors with presidential pardons.

On Monday, Trump pardoned disgraced former Virginia sheriff Scott Jenkins who was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment after a federal court found he accepted tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to appoint local businessmen as auxiliary deputy sheriffs. The president described Jenkins as being a victim of a “corrupt and weaponized Biden” Department of Justice.

Last month, Trump pardoned Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who was sentenced to 18 months in jail for tax crimes and whose mother had raised millions for the New York real estate mogul’s campaigns.

In March, he also pardoned Devon Archer, a former business associate of Hunter Biden who was sentenced to a year and a day in prison in 2022 for a scheme to defraud a Native American community. However, he testified against the Biden family during the Republicans’ failed investigation to try and impeach former President Joe Biden.