Yesterday, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that it would agree to freeze all nuclear warheads and extend the New START Treaty, which is set to expire in February. Later in the day, an official from the Trump administration said there were no major remaining obstacles to a deal. According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal:
“We are very, very close to a deal,” the official said. “Now that the Russians have agreed to a warhead freeze, I do not see why we cannot work out the remaining issues in the coming days.”
The remaining issues to be worked out include verification of the warhead freeze and the definition of a warhead, the U.S. official said.
“We appreciate the Russian Federation’s willingness to make progress on the issue of nuclear arms control,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said. “The United States is prepared to meet immediately to finalize a verifiable agreement. We expect Russia to empower its diplomats to do the same.”
Further reporting by TASS suggested that a meeting would happen between the sides within the next few days to hammer out the details:
The United States is ready to hold a meeting immediately with Russia to finalize the agreement to extend the Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START), spokesperson for the US State Department Morgan Ortagus said in a statement Tuesday….
….It is expected that US Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control Marshall Billingslea will inform NATO allies Tuesday about the status of talks with Russia.
On October 14th, the New York Post published an article reporting on what were alleged to be emails from Hunter Biden retrieved from a laptop abandoned at a computer repair shop. The emails purportedly reveal that Biden leveraged his father’s political connections in order to get a cushy compensation package from the Ukrainian oil company, Burisma, for which he sat on the board – a position for which Biden had no experience or qualifications.
As soon as the story hit, many establishment Democrats and their supporters were insisting that the emails were fake and/or part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Here we go again. Those making this accusation offered no evidence and many others have pointed out that if the emails were not authentic, then the Biden family would be howling this from the rooftops, but they aren’t. The Department of Justice and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) have both publicly stated that there is no evidence that this story has anything to do with a Russian intelligence operation. The DNI, John Ratcliffe, stated yesterday after Rep. Adam Schiff – who put out misinformation about Russiagate – tried the “Russia done it” line:
“Let me be clear: The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that. And we shared no intelligence with Chairman Schiff or any other member of Congress that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” Ratcliffe added.
Not long after the New York Post story came out, Twitter prevented users of the platform from sharing it publicly. Some reported that they couldn’t even share the article privately as part of the direct message (DM) feature on Twitter, using the excuse/policy that Twitter would not allow the sharing of stories that involved hacked materials. Facebook also reportedly throttled the dissemination of the article on its platform.
Congressional Democrats have been putting increasing pressure on the CEO’s of social media and tech companies to implement even more censorship policies under the guise of preventing the spread of “disinformation” and “fact checking.” In the video below, Kim Iversen discusses these issues and the implications for free speech: