The Frightening Precedent of Indicting an Innocent Former President The U.S. devolves into a Banana Republic – with a deteriorating legal system.

BY RACHEL ALEXANDER

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-frightening-precedent-of-indicting-an-innocent-former-president/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

We are living in an Orwellian era when the formerly most powerful man in the world, who remains very powerful, is being prosecuted in order to stop him from becoming president again. If they can take him down, they can take down any conservative. The left has weaponized lawfare, which started with merely civil lawsuits but has now progressed into disbarring attorneys and prosecution. Once they’ve gone after Trump through prosecution — even if unsuccessful — it will be easier to go after him again on other charges, and easier to go after any other conservative. And they won’t stop there, they’ll go after RINOs and those on the left who side with the right against the abuse of the legal system next. 

Left-wing billionaire George Soros contributed $1 million to Color of Change’s PAC, which then spent over $500,000 to support the campaign of Alvin Bragg, the New York DA prosecuting Trump. Soros has been contributing millions to defeat conservative prosecutors and sheriffs around the country in recent years. When Bragg ran for office, he gloated about how he went after the Trump Foundation while serving as New York State’s chief deputy attorney general from 2017 to 2018. His primary opponent Tali Farhadian Weinstein accused Bragg of going after Trump “for political advantage every chance he gets.”

It’s an ethical violation for prosecutors to run for office on a platform of getting someone on the possibility they might find new crimes. The rule regarding trial publicity, which states have adopted, prohibits attorneys “from making an extrajudicial statement that the attorney knows or reasonably should know will be disseminated by means of public communication and will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding.”  

Everyone knows the old saying, a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. That’s because the grand jury doesn’t get to see any arguments from the defense, they are only shown the prosecution’s case.

After five years of a fishing expedition, the indictment is expected to result in charges that Trump falsified business records on a payment his former attorney Michael Cohen made to porn star Stormy Daniels, allegedly disguising the payoff as routine legal fees. 

Daniels is now saying she was paid to keep quiet about an alleged affair she had with Trump. Hush money payments aren’t illegal. Falsifying records is a misdemeanor, but claiming it benefited him in the election, to cover up another crime, can turn into a felony. However, Trump is required to have known he was committing a crime. Trump denies he had the affair. And the statute of limitations for prosecuting him over the 2016 payment may have run

Both Daniels and Cohen are not credible witnesses, having made previous contradictory statements. When a witness has conflicting statements, they can be “impeached” when testifying, rendering their trial testimony invalid. 

Daniels issued a statement in 2018 that said, “I am not denying this affair because I was paid ‘hush money’ as has been reported in overseas-owned tabloids. I am denying this affair because it never happened.

A letter Cohen’s attorney Stephen Ryan sent to the FEC in 2018 states that Cohen paid $130,000 to Daniels, Trump was not a party to the deal, and he never reimbursed Cohen. Ryan asked the FEC to dismiss the complaint.  

Cohen changed his story a little over six months later as part of a plea agreement, pleading guilty to making an excessive campaign contribution to Trump with the payment to Daniels.  

Even if it was a campaign finance violation due to not reporting the payments as campaign contributions, politicians are frequently allowed to modify their campaign finance reports after they’re due with amendments to add omitted contributions or expenses. Look at any campaign’s finance reports online and you’ll almost always see amended reports, it’s routinely done. Unless you’re a juicy target of the left like conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, most quietly amend their reports.

When prosecutors tried to charge former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards with a similar crime in 2008, he argued that he was trying to hide the affair from his wife, not from the voters. The jury acquitted him on one charge and hung on the others, and the Justice Department dismissed the charges. 

Former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas pointed out that when President Bill Clinton got caught having an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, the RINO special prosecutor “refused to prosecute Clinton for perjury, fraud or anything else,” even though Clinton helped her line up blue-chip job interviews. 

Clinton paid off Paula Jones after sexually harassing her. After Jones filed a lawsuit against him, alleging that he exposed himself to her in a hotel room, he agreed to settle it for $850,000 to make it go away. He was never prosecuted. 

Daniels lost her defamation lawsuit against Trump and must pay him $300,000 in legal fees. Her former lawyer Michael Avenatti is sitting in prison. Daniels had sued Trump over a tweet he made dismissive of her claim that a man threatened to hurt her daughter if she didn’t keep quiet about the sex allegation. His tweet said, “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!”

The left is throwing everything it can at Trump in order to stop him from becoming president again. They brought impeachment charges against him twice. The FBI was sent to search his home. More indictments by other prosecutors are expected.

The U.S. is turning into a banana republic with this deterioration of the legal system combined with election fraud determining elections. As Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria famously said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Similarly, criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote a book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,” which explains how there are so many vague and broad laws now the average person commits three felonies a day and doesn’t know it. If they want to get you, they’ll figure out a way.

Vatican repudiates papal bulls calling for resistance to jihad violence

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/04/vatican-repudiates-papal-bulls-calling-for-resistance-to-jihad-violence;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

They might harm the “dialogue.”

“Rome Cancels Anti-Muslim Papal Bulls As Uncatholic,” by Jules Gomes, ChurchMilitant.com, April 4, 2023:

VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) – The Vatican has abrogated three papal bulls claiming that the documents are offensive to indigenous peoples and “have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.”

The bulls Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455) and Inter Caetera (1493) contain the basis for the “doctrine of discovery,” which “is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church,” the Vatican has announced.

Cultural Imperialism

“The Church acknowledges that these papal bulls did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples,” the dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development said in a joint statement published Thursday.

The Vatican dicasteries quoted Pope Francis’ words endorsing the repeal of the bulls: “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”

Since the Magisterium “upholds the respect due to every human being,” the “Catholic Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery,'” the Vatican statement categorically declared.

The bulls’ contents “were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities,” the statement added.

Modern-day Islamophiles have sought to present these as wars of conquest and colonization.

But top Islamic scholars told Church Militant that the Vatican had annulled the bulls not so much because of their purported relationship to colonialism and slavery but because the documents were offensive to Islam and an obstacle to ongoing dialogue.

Appeasing Islam

“The revocation of these bulls is likely the result of Francis’ ongoing ‘dialogue’ with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayeb,” Robert Spencer, Islamic scholar and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades), told Church Militant.

“That ‘dialogue’ only resumed, after al-Tayeb broke it off during the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, when Francis agreed not to criticize Islam or speak out against Muslim persecution of Christians. Al-Tayeb, meanwhile, made no similar concessions. The ‘dialogue’ is entirely one-sided,” Spencer noted.

“The public repudiation of these long-forgotten documents is intended to buttress the pope’s efforts to engage Islamic groups in this dialogue, which results only in the issuance of soothing falsehoods and will not prevent a single Christian from Muslim persecution,” Spencer added….

In fact, all three bulls are mentioned together in volume seven of the scholarly series Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History — Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and South America (1500-1600), published in 2015 by the academic publisher Brill.

Enemies of the Cross

“The Dum Diversas of 1452 authorized the king of Portugal to attack, conquer and subdue not only Muslims but also pagans and other unbelievers and to seize their goods and territories, transferring them to his own possession,” the book notes.

In its Latin text, Romanus Pontifex encourages “Catholic kings and princes” to “not only repress the ferocity of the Saracens [Muslims] and the other infidel enemies of the Christians but also conquer their kingdoms and places, even if they exist in very distant and unknown parts from us, for the defense and increase of the Faith.”

The bull Inter Caetera is a historic remnant with no juridical, moral or doctrinal value.

The bull condemns “the perfidious enemies of the Cross, especially the Saracens and all the other infidels” and orders the excommunication of those who send the Muslims “weapons and other things prohibited by the law.”

It authorized King Alfonso of Portugal to “invade, conquer, defeat and subjugate all Saracens and pagans and other enemies of Christ” and to “enslave their persons perpetually” and seize their possessions for profit.

Pope Nicholas V ends the bull with a warning that no one may “infringe or rashly contradict his decree. … But if anyone does attempt this, let him know that he will incur the indignation of almighty God and His blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.”

In Dum Diversas, Nicholas V commends Alfonso for intending “to subjugate the enemies of Christ, i.e. the Saracens, and bring them back to the faith of Christ with a mighty hand,” noting that “the authority of the Apostolic See supports you in this.”

Dum Diversas ends with a similar proscription:

It is therefore permissible for no man to diminish this page of our concession, reparation, will, indult and decree, or oppose it with rash initiative. If anyone dares to attack her, let him know that he is about to incur the wrath of Almighty God and the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.

Inter Caetera both “confirmed the terms” of Romanus Pontifex and “specified that the spiritual jurisdiction of the regions conquered was to lie with the Order of Christ, the successors to the Knights Templar in Portugal,” the Brill book explains.

The Holy See confirms that Inter Caetera has already been abrogated.

“These bulls, with their statements about how important it is to resist the efforts of Islam to conquer and subjugate Christians, embarrass Pope Francis and today’s Vatican,” Spencer said, lamenting how the pope “is wholeheartedly committed to the fond and false notion that ‘dialogue’ with Islam will blunt, and possibly even extinguish, the jihad imperative.”

“The recent histories of Nigeria, Iraq and elsewhere show how false and damaging that idea really is,” Spencer warned.

In July 2022, two protestors with a large banner confronted the pontiff during Mass at the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré Basilica outside Quebec City and asked him to rescind the “doctrine of discovery.”

However, in a statement to the United Nations Ninth Session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in April 2010, the Vatican argued it had abrogated the doctrine as early as 1494.

“The bull Inter Caetera is a historic remnant with no juridical, moral or doctrinal value,” the statement said. “The Holy See confirms that Inter Caetera has already been abrogated and considers it without any legal or doctrinal value.”

President Trump Responds to Arraignment in Historic Mar-a-Lago Speech

President Trump Responds to Arraignment in Historic Mar-a-Lago Speech

FULL BUT SHORTER VIDEO:

VIDEO LEADING UP TO SPEECH

SEE: https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-ag-letitia-james-files-250m-lawsuit-trump/story?id=90240332

'Trump makes us energized': supporters outside Mar-a-Lago react to Donald Trump's speech

Trump Felony Charges Explained By Former Trump Attorney

LEGAL ANALYSIS BY ALAN DERSHOWITZ

BY MATT MARGOLIS

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/04/04/president-trump-gives-historic-speech-at-mar-a-lago-after-arraignment-n1684433;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

On Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump was formally arraigned on 34 charges in what many believe to be a politically motivated prosecution by a George Soros-funded district attorney who campaigned on the promise that he would get Trump.

Though he was expected to speak to the media at the courthouse, Trump entered and exited quietly, saving his first public comments for an address at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday evening. During his speech, which included elements of his standard campaign stump speech, he discussed the events that led up to his arraignment.

“I never thought anything like this could happen in America,” he began. “I never thought it could happen. The only crime that I’ve committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”

He then recalled how Democrats spied on his campaign and launched fraudulent investigations against him, including the Russian collusion investigation and two partisan impeachment trials. He also accused the FBI and DOJ of relentlessly pursuing Republicans, while protecting Hunter Biden.

“And now this massive election interference at a scale never seen before in our country,” he continued. “Beginning with the radical left to George Soros-backed prosecutor Alvin Bragg of New York, who campaigned on the fact that he would get President Trump, ‘I gotta get him. I’m gonna get him.'”

Trump noted how experts on both sides of the aisle “say there is no crime and that [the indictment] should never have been brought.”

“Everybody—even people that aren’t big fans—have said that this is not the right thing to do. It’s an insult to our country as the world is already laughing at us.”

Related: Why the Trump Indictment Is Worse Than We Thought

He’s right. We’ve covered this many times here at PJ Media, and we’ll continue to do so with your help. You can support us by becoming a PJ Media VIP member and helping us uncover the left’s abuse of the justice system to target Trump. Use the promo code WITCHHUNT to take advantage of a 50% discount on your membership.

Trump also spoke of the other efforts by Democrats to target him, including the “racist Democrat district attorney” in Atlanta [Fani Willis], who he said is “doing everything in her power to indict me over an absolutely perfect phone call—even more perfect than the one I made with the president of Ukraine.”

He also spoke of the ongoing case regarding the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, noting that “there is no criminality under the Presidential Records Act.” Yet Biden took classified documents as vice president when he had no power to declassify them.

Biden “doesn’t come under the non-criminal Presidential Records Act,” Trump pointed out. “He comes under the very criminal Federal Records Act, unfortunately for him. But it’s not going to matter because they don’t follow the law, which has very severe penalties. He had classified documents that he took while he was a senator, which is absolutely inexcusable, and other senators, including Democrats, are outraged.”

“But he’s not being harassed and hounded like the people who work for me are,” Trump pointed out. “In fact, they seem to have forgotten about his documents entirely.”

When he pivoted back to Bragg’s case, he noted the many experts who agree there is no case. “They kept saying there’s no case—virtually everyone, but it’s far worse than that because he knew there was no case. That’s why last week he delayed for a month and then immediately took that back and threw this ridiculous indictment together, which came out today. Everybody said this is not really an indictment. There’s nothing here. I learned this came to me and they said, ‘There’s nothing here. They’re not even saying what you did.’ The criminal is the district attorney because he illegally leaked massive amounts of grand jury information for which he should be prosecuted, or at a minimum, he should resign.”

Toward the end of the speech, Trump spoke of how the United States is declining rapidly under Joe Biden.

“If you took the five worst presidents in the history of the United States and added them up, they would not have done near the destruction to our country as Joe Biden and the Biden administration have done.”

Related: Are You Ready for the Knock on Your Door?

“Incredibly, we are now a failing nation. We are a nation in decline. And now these radical-left lunatics want to interfere with our elections by using law enforcement. We can’t let that happen. With all of this being said, and with a very dark cloud over our beloved country, I have no doubt, nevertheless, that we will make America great again.”

However you feel about Trump, this is a historic time and a watershed moment in our country. The radical left, thanks to Bragg, is now further emboldened to use the justice system to target political enemies. The witch hunt against Republicans will not stop with Trump. If they can go after him, they can go after you.

China Controls Your Medications

BY

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/china-controls-your-meds/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Democrats and Republicans battered TikTok’s CEO at a House of Representatives hearing on Thursday — for good reason. The Chinese app poses a national security risk, accumulating troves of data on its American users. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s slithery comment that “I don’t think spying is the right way to describe it,” only heightened concerns.

Too bad another Chinese threat — bigger and more immediate — isn’t getting the same attention. China has a chokehold on our medication supply chain. Beijing controls many — in some cases, all — active ingredients for the remedies in our medicine chests, the drugs used in emergency rooms, and even antibiotics administered to soldiers on the battlefield.

The med bottles in your cabinet don’t say “Made in China,” but nearly all are, including 97% of U.S. antibiotics, by some estimates.

In a tense situation, Beijing could simply cut off shipments of antibiotics, cancer drugs, and other meds, forcing the U.S. to cede to its demands. Our survival hinges on their goodwill. Terrifying.

China cornered the market for drug ingredients fast. Until the mid-1990s, the West and Japan produced 90% of the world’s active pharmaceutical ingredients. By 2017, China was producing 40%. Now almost all drug pipelines start in China. Even India, the other drug-producing giant, relies on China for 70% of its active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Gary Peters warns that foreign dependence is “an unacceptable national security risk.” But talk is cheap.

As China’s grip tightens, the federal government is doing next to nothing, according to the Committee’s report released last week.

In 2019, Congress requested the Food and Drug Administration list the lifesaving drugs Americans rely on and which countries supply them. The FDA still hasn’t done it. FDA bureaucrats pathetically plead, in so many words, that it’s too much work to pore over the applicants filed by drug producers for the information.

It gets worse. In 2021, the Department of Defense inspector general issued a scathing report that DOD lacked strategies to circumvent reliance on foreign drug suppliers. Yet as of last week, DOD still hadn’t assembled data on where its drugs originate or what can be done to overcome chokeholds.

President Joe Biden’s Defense Department considers securing medicines for the military a lower priority than woke goals such as pronoun lessons, sex change surgery for transgender personnel, and climate change.

Biden himself told Air Force personnel that global warming was the greatest threat facing America. Biden proposes spending “billions” converting every military vehicle to electric, but only $60 million — a tiny fraction of that sum — to incentivize domestic manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. That says it all.

Sorry, Mr. President, but China should not control access to medicines for our soldiers and citizens.

Even in peacetime, America’s dependence on far-away drug suppliers is a problem. Parents are frantically racing from one drug store to the next for amoxicillin for their child’s strep throat and meds for ADHD.

Reliance on China also means accepting drugs made in squalid factories that are seldom, or never, inspected by the FDA, according to a General Accountability Office report. In 2008, contaminated blood thinner from China, heparin, killed 81 American patients.

It’s time to bring drug manufacturing home. One obvious way is to restore Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, which Congress enacted in 1976 to attract industry to Puerto Rico. It gave companies a tax credit equal to what they would have to pay the federal government on their earnings there. Pharmaceutical plants sprang up fast there, and by 1990, 17 of the 21 most prescribed drugs in the U.S. were made in Puerto Rico. When Congress ended the subsidy, drug manufacturing moved halfway around the world to China, but some factories still sit idle.

In ordinary times, Democrats would reject tax breaks for drug companies. But even oncologist Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a Democrat, and former Obama health adviser, has recommended this quick solution to a menacing situation.

For all the money Americans spend on medications, there’s no reason to settle for cheap, sometimes contaminated Chinese ingredients and the looming threat of a Chinese blockade. Tell Congress to act.

China Threatens Retaliation if Speaker McCarthy and Taiwan’s President Meet

Afraid to offend China, the Biden administration lays low

BY JOSEPH KLEIN

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/china-threatens-retaliation-if-speaker-mccarthy-and-taiwans-president-meet/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen is planning to meet with House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy during her upcoming stop in Los Angeles on April 5th, following her earlier stopovers in New York and Central America. The Chinese regime is furious, claiming that such a meeting, even on U.S. soil, would somehow harm China’s own sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Communist dictatorship is threatening grave consequences if the meeting proceeds.

Zhu Fenglian, the spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, warned that if a meeting between President Tsai and Speaker McCarthy takes place, China would “definitely take measures to resolutely fight back.” 

Xu Xueyuan, charge d’affaires at China’s embassy in Washington, delivered a similar threat, telling reporters that a meeting between President Tsai and Speaker McCarthy “could lead to another serious confrontation in the China-U.S. relationship.” She added, “We have made solemn representations to the U.S. side on many occasions and clearly told them that all consequences should be borne by the U.S. side.”

China certainly means business as it demonstrated last August when former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. China’s response was a blunt show of force, including launching missiles over Taiwan and conducting live-fire military drills in the waters surrounding Taiwan. 

Nevertheless, Taiwan’s President Tsai is unbowed. “We are calm and confident, will neither yield nor provoke. Taiwan will soundly walk along the path of freedom and democracy and go global,” she declared. 

As for President Biden, despite his bluster about defending Taiwan with U.S. military forces if the Chinese regime invades Taiwan, which his aides had to walk back to several times, the cat has got his tongue this time.

The Biden administration should be objecting vociferously to China’s brazen attempt to veto whom U.S. government officials are permitted to meet with, especially within the sovereign territory of the United States. But instead of standing up for Speaker McCarthy’s decision to meet with President Tsai in Los Angeles, the administration’s response to China’s threats has been milquetoast so far.

Aggressive dictatorships respect strength and exploit any sign of weakness. The only way to deal effectively with China’s bullying is to push back even harder. But that is not what the Biden administration has done. 

At a March 29th White House press briefing, the Biden administration’s National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, John Kirby, said that the Chinese should not “react harshly or overreact in any way” to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with Speaker McCarthy during her “transit” in the United States. “This transit is consistent with our longstanding, unofficial relationship with Taiwan, and it is consistent with the United States’ One China policy, which remains unchanged,” Mr. Kirby added. “It is Taiwan’s decision to make these transits based on their own travel. Transits are not visits. They are private, and they’re unofficial.” (Emphasis added) 

John Kirby, speaking on behalf of the White House’s National Security Council, should have unambiguously backed Speaker McCarthy’s right to meet with President Tsai whenever and wherever he wishes. He should have told the Chinese regime in no uncertain terms to butt out.

But Kirby took the opposite approach. He failed to deliver even a tap on the wrist to the Chinese regime for using intimidation tactics to try and derail the meeting in Los Angeles between Speaker McCarthy and President Tsai. Fortunately, neither Speaker McCarthy nor President Tsai has given any indication of backing down from holding their meeting.

Mr. Kirby is correct that the United States has followed a One China policy for decades. Yes, this means that the U.S. does not have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan as an independent nation. And yes, the United States recognizes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the sole sovereign state representing China at the United Nations and other inter-governmental bodies. But the United States and Taiwan have strong commercial, economic, technological, defense, and people-to-people ties. Informal meetings between American and Taiwanese government officials are part of that unofficial relationship, whether the Chinese Communist regime likes it or not.

Walking on eggshells to avoid offending the PRC because of an informal, unofficial meeting between President Tsai and Speaker McCarthy is yet another sign of weakness that the Biden administration regularly displays to America’s adversaries.

The PRC has been engaging in carrot-and-stick policies to isolate Taiwan on the world stage for years. It has successfully used its economic prowess, including trade and major investments, to bring most nations to its side in asserting complete dominion over Taiwan. Thus, only a handful of countries still have diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

The latest county to sever its ties with Taiwan and switch its allegiance to the Chinese Communist regime is Honduras. That is why, in addition to her stopovers in the United States, President Tsai’s travel itinerary has included Guatemala and Belize, two Central American companies that so far have stuck with Taiwan. She is trying to stave off any more defections.

The Communist regime has also co-opted the United Nations bureaucracy in the service of treating Taiwan as a pariah and its people as personae non gratae.

Taiwanese, for example, have not been permitted to participate in U.N. activities, including attendance as observers at the World Health Organization’s annual forum at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Taiwanese reporters have not been allowed to attend U.N. press briefings to ask questions. Even Taiwanese tourists who lack an official government ID issued by a U.N. member state are prohibited from entering the U.N. premises to take a visitors’ tour. IDs issued by the Taiwanese government do not count although Taiwanese passports are good enough for entry into the U.N.’s host country, the United States.

The justification for the U.N.’s giving the cold shoulder to Taiwan is United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758, adopted in 1971. This resolution set forth the U.N. member states’ decision to recognize the representatives of the People’s Republic of China as “the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations.” The resolution also provided that “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek,” the leader of the Republic of China, would be expelled “from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it.”    

Nothing in the resolution, however, said anything about prohibiting Taiwanese citizens from participating in or observing U.N. proceedings or even taking a tour of U.N. facilities without the approval of the Chinese Communist regime. Nevertheless, in 2007, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, citing Resolution 2758, declared that “the United Nations considers Taiwan for all purposes to be an integral part of the People’s Republic of China.” (Emphasis added)

The United Nations system continues to this day to treat the Taiwanese people and their leaders as vassals of the Chinese Communist regime who must get the regime’s permission before having anything to do with the United Nations.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement in October 2021 encouraging the international community to join the United States in “supporting Taiwan’s robust, meaningful participation throughout the U.N. system.”  He noted that while people from all over the world regularly participate in a variety of activities at the U.N., the Taiwanese people are the exception. “Taiwan‘s scientists, technical experts, business persons, artists, educators, students, human rights advocates, and others are blocked from entry and participating in these activities simply because of the passports they hold,” Secretary of State Blinken said.

But the Biden administration as usual is all words and no action. Simply praising what Taiwan can do for the U.N. will not overcome the Chinese regime’s use of its considerable economic leverage to pressure U.N. member states and the U.N. itself into treating the Taiwanese people as unwelcome intruders.

The United States, as the largest contributor to the U.N. by far, should use its own leverage over U.N. financing to insist on “Taiwan’s robust, meaningful participation throughout the U.N. System.”

Moreover, it is not too late for a senior State Department official, if not Secretary of State Blinken himself, to join President Tsai’s meeting with Speaker McCarthy in Los Angeles. We all know, however, that with this weak-kneed administration, there is a ghost of a chance for that to happen.