Category: Corruption

When the ‘Investigation’ Is a Cover-Up

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First, the news:

In a dramatic shift, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss was being upgraded to a special counsel to investigate the Biden family finances.
The decision means the probe into Hunter Biden’s taxes and his father’s potential dealings with his foreign clients will carry into the 2024 election at the same time the president’s chief rival Donald Trump faces two federal indictments brought by the same department. The tax case is likely to be moved to Washington and Los Angeles, officials said.
Republicans, however, gave the announcement a cold reaction, saying Weiss was the wrong person for the job after offering Hunter Biden a prison-sparing plea deal that fell apart.
“This move by AG Garland is part of the Justice Department’s efforts to attempt a Biden family coverup in light of [House Oversight Committee’s] mounting evidence of President Biden’s role in his family’s schemes selling ‘the brand’ for millions of dollars to foreign nationals,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wrote.
Added House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan: “David Weiss can’t be trusted, and this is just a new way to whitewash the Biden family’s corruption. Weiss has already signed off on a sweetheart plea deal that was so awful and unfair that a federal judge rejected it.”
Garland said the appointment of Weiss to an independent prosecutor was in the “public interest,” required by department rules and requested earlier in the week by Weiss.

Ace of Spades points out that part of what’s going on here is that conferring Special Counsel status on Weiss is a way to block House investigators looking into the “sweetheart deal” plea bargain for Hunter Biden that Weiss himself orchestrated (likely under orders from, but certainly with the approval of, Attorney General Merrick Garland). More importantly, however, it’s a way for Garland to put a lid on the whole Biden family corruption saga until after next year’s election.

What Democrats are doing here, of course, is a variation of the Mueller “investigation,” altered to suit their new purposes. Remember what happened in 2017: Trump discovered after becoming president that the FBI had been doing surveillance on his campaign on the false pretext of “Russian collusion” (which pretext, of course, was manufactured by the Clinton campaign using the phony Steele dossier). So, Trump fires FBI Director James Comey and, when this provokes an outcry from Democrats, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions recuses himself from the matter, and appoints former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate. OK, but . . . investigate what?

The real scandal in this was the “Russian collusion” hoax perpetrated against Trump by the Clinton campaign, in which the FBI played a crucial role (“Operation Crossfire Hurricane”), which was why Trump fired Comey. Instead of investigating that, however, Mueller’s investigation instead focused on trying to confirm the existence of “Russian collusion” — which proved impossible because, of course, there was no “collusion” — and also trying to prove that Trump’s firing of Comey somehow constituted “obstruction of justice.” But Trump was not the perpetrator of wrongdoing, he was the victim of wrongdoing, and the purpose of Mueller’s investigation was to conceal this truth.

In other words, the “investigation” was really a cover-up, and months passed while talking heads on MSNBC and CNN kept up their wild-eyed speculation about how “the walls are closing in” on Trump — speculation fed by leaks from Mueller’s team — keeping alive the myth of “Russian collusion” until after the 2018 midterm elections.

Mission accomplished.

Then, in March 2019, with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer now in control of Congress, Mueller releases his report, which disappointed all the cable-news talking heads by failing to confirm “Russian collusion.” The walls had signally failed to “close in,” but the Mueller had achieved his political purpose, namely to promote suspicion of Trump as a Kremlin dupe while concealing the Democratic Party dirty campaign trick behind that suspicion (and the FBI’s own role in that campaign trick).

Fast-forward to the present, and now we have a Special Counsel appointed in the Hunter Biden case who has a similar mission, namely to obstruct the House Oversight Committee’s investigation and deflect attention from the very real scandal by which the Biden family collected $20 million from Hunter’s foreign “clients.” Biden and his administration now have an excuse not to comment on anything related to Hunter because it’s “under investigation” and, the reader may be assured, there will be no leaks from Weiss’s office to the media to give fuel to speculation about the “walls closing in” on Joe Biden.

Anyone with two eyes and a brain can see what’s happening, but the media won’t tell the truth. And they wonder why we don’t trust them.



 

First Person Plural Pronouns

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The corruption and decadence of the elite is a topic about which not enough has been written, and if I were to dwell on this topic, I’d have no time to write about anything else. Some people always snipe in the comments when I use the word “elite” to describe our society’s overclass, because they do not consider such people truly superior, as the word “elite” would seem to imply. Yet such are the socioeconomic realities that people enjoy elite status who are inferior — especially in a moral sense — and there is nothing We The People can do about it. The graduates of prestigious universities have access to wealth and influence without regard to their moral character, and so it is that MIT alumnus Sam Bankman-Fried will go unpunished for his crimes:

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) informed a federal judge late Wednesday it did “not intend to proceed” with a campaign finance charge against disgraced FTX founder and Democrat super donor Sam Bankman-Fried.
Consultation with the Bahamas on the campaign finance charges in Bankman-Fried’s original extradition document last year were behind the decision as part of an effort to adhere to the legal obligations therein, Forbes reports.
The campaign finance violation charge was among eight counts present in the DOJ’s original indictment—which also includes wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering—in December.

Dianna Deeley has further thoughts on the way the Democratic Party — which now controls the Department of Justice — is protecting Sam Bankman-Fried.

Meanwhile, take note of how David Brooks uses first-person plural pronouns — “we,” “us,” “our,” etc. — in speaking of the decadent elite.



 

Banana Republic, U.S.A.

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A D.C. grand jury on Tuesday indicted former President Trump on charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Meanwhile, murders in D.C. have increased 19% this year, and are on track for a 20-year high. But you see, our violence-plagued national capital is full of Democrats, who think that sending Republicans to federal prison is necessary, whereas carjackers and drug dealers are permitted to run free. So don’t worry about the dozens of people who get robbed, raped, stabbed or shot every month in D.C. No, you should worry about “election deniers,” who don’t believe Joe Biden actually got 81 million votes.

The Criminal Class now effectively controls our government.



 

Judge Wrecks Hunter’s Sweetheart Deal

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A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Hunter Biden pled not guilty on Wednesday to gun and tax charges, refusing to accept a new plea deal laid out by prosecutors.
The original plea deal fell apart after the judge questioned if it covered future potential charges of the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation. The prosecution reportedly said the deal did not include any alleged Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) violations.
MSNBC reported the court took a ten-minute recess to determine if the two parties could quickly come to an agreement. When the deal got back on track, reports indicated it would “be more limited in scope,” only including specific charges related to tax and gun wronging. “The two sides have agreed that this deal does not shield him from potential future charges,” CNN reported.
But the judge said she was not ready to accept the plea deal and asked both the prosecutor and Hunter Biden to submit additional briefs, according to reporters inside the courthouse. The parties will have to return to court in the future.
The hearing ended with Hunter Biden pleading not guilty.
Sen. Josh Hawley told CNN the high court drama shows the plea “sweetheart” deal was flawed, and additional charges could be brought:

It’s very telling that the judge intervened here and said basically, ‘No, I’m not going to approve some sweeping blanket deal.’ … I mean, that tells you the court has serious concerns about other potential charges here, and also the scope of the deal, which has seemed outrageous from the beginning.

“This, I think, signals that they’re [sic] still very much potential for prosecution forward,” he added.
U.S. prosecutor David Weiss admitted in July that the FBI informant form alleging the Biden family bribes is part of an ongoing investigation.

Will Scharf at The Federalist has more:

Hunter Biden arrived in a Delaware federal court on Wednesday morning expecting that, in a few short hours, he would walk out a free man with full immunity from prosecution for an exceedingly wide range of alleged criminal conduct, ranging from gun and drug charges to foreign influence peddling. His expectation was that his deal would be insulated from challenges from the presiding judge, or from a prosecutorial change of heart under a future administration. His expectation was that his legal ordeals were coming to a close.
Instead, U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika picked apart his plea deal with surgical precision, exposing its legal contradictions, and upbraiding both defense counsel and the Department of Justice for structuring an unprecedented deal that in her view — and mine — was illegal and unconstitutional. . . .

Read the whole thing.

Need a bonus? Guess who appointed the judge?

After all these years, still #winning!



 

‘Smoking Gun’ on Biden Bribery Scandal

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Press release from Senator Grassley:

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today released an unclassified FBI-generated record describing an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a Ukrainian business executive. Grassley acquired the record, an FD-1023, via legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers.
“For the better part of a year, I’ve been pushing the Justice Department and FBI to provide details on its handling of very significant allegations from a trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme. While the FBI sought to obfuscate and redact, the American people can now read this document for themselves, without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats, thanks to brave and heroic whistleblowers. What did the Justice Department and FBI do with the detailed information in the document? And why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long? The Justice Department and FBI have failed to come clean, but Chairman Comer and I intend to find out,” Grassley said.
“The FBI’s Biden Bribery Record tracks closely with the evidence uncovered by the Oversight Committee’s Biden family influence peddling investigation. In the FBI’s record, the Burisma executive claims that he didn’t pay the ‘big guy’ directly but that he used several bank accounts to conceal the money. That sounds an awful lot like how the Bidens conduct business: using multiple bank accounts to hide the source and total amount of the money,” House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer said. “At our hearing with IRS whistleblowers, they testified that they had never seen or heard of this record during the Biden criminal investigation, despite having potentially corroborating evidence. Given the misconduct and politicization at the Department of Justice, the American people must be able to read this record for themselves. I thank Senator Grassley for providing much needed transparency to the American people. We must hold the Department of Justice accountable for seeking to bury this record to protect the Bidens.”
Grassley first disclosed the FBI’s possession of significant and voluminous evidence of potential criminality involving the Biden family last year. He has since worked to unearth the FBI record, eventually partnering with Comer on a subpoena to compel its public disclosure. After delays, the FBI provided a highly redacted version of the document to select members of the House of Representatives, but it remained shielded from the public and omitted key details, including references to recordings. Following the FBI’s failure to fully comply with the congressional subpoena, Grassley received the legally protected disclosure with limited redactions to protect a trusted FBI source, handling agents, department whistleblowers and identifiers related to other ongoing investigations.



 

CBS Evening News — !!! — Reports About Hunter Biden Influence Scandal Cover-Up

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“What was Hunter selling? What skill or expertise did this crack-addicted loser possess that might be worth $5 million to a Chinese ‘business partner’? The only thing Hunter Biden had to sell — his only marketable value — was his father’s political influence. Period, end of sentence.”
— what I said on Saturday

Excuse me for quoting myself, but it’s important to keep our eyes on the ball here. This scandal is not really about Hunter Biden, it’s about Joe, because without Joe’s influence, Hunter had nothing to sell to the Chinese or Ukrainians or any other of his shady foreign clients.

This fact has been blindingly obvious to anyone with two eyes and a brain for so long that it’s not exactly bombshell investigative journalism, but the media were so intent on getting rid of Trump — Orange Man Bad! — that they were willing to pretend they didn’t see the same facts the rest of us saw. So now, with the Republicans controlling the House Oversight Committee, and the documentation of this scandal steadily drip, drip, dripping into public view, the media have belatedly decided, “Hey, you know what? Maybe this is a real story after all.”

Color us surprised aka damn near gobsmacked, when reporter Jim Axelrod earnestly and respectfully (!) interviewed IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, allowing him to fully answer really good questions.
They gave the piece almost 3 whole minutes on the CBS Evening News broadcast [Tuesday] night…

The fact of the matter — again, obvious to everybody — is that Merrick Garland perjured himself when he testified to Congress that he didn’t interfere in this investigation, because of course he did. Probably what has stirred the media hornet’s nest, is that slap-on-the-wrist sweetheart plea deal Hunter got in his tax-and-gun case. Blatant favoritism like that simply can’t be ignored if, like the media is always telling us, they’re fighting to save Our Democracy. Hundreds of Trump supporters are languishing in federal prison because of the J6 riot, and the DOJ is just going to let Hunter Biden walk free? Really?

So finally this story is gaining traction with Big Media, and even the New York Times is doing some real reporting about this stinking pile of corruption otherwise known as the Biden administration.

Prediction: After Labor Day, House Republicans will vote to begin impeachment proceedings against Merrick Garland, and then . . . Well, we don’t know where it will end, but things are rolling along now.

As William Jacobson said on Dec. 18, 2019: “Democrats will rue the day they forced this impeachment through the House.”



 

 

Undertakers of Democracy: How the Washington Post Is Deliberately Burying the Hunter Biden Influence Scandal

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When I first joined the staff of The Washington Times in 1997, a senior editor explained to me that the difference between how they covered the news and how the hated crosstown rival Washington Post covered the news was very simple: “selection and emphasis.” During more than a decade at the conservative Times, I observed (and was a direct participant in) the process of “selection and emphasis” by which our newsroom distinguished itself as a vital alternative to the dominant liberal media machinery. That experience taught me to focus on something crucial that most people never think much about: “Who decides what the ‘news’ is? How and why are these choices made?”

Every day at The Washington Times, there were two meetings — one shortly before noon, and one about 5 p.m. — where the editors at various desks (national, foreign, metro, sports, etc.) presented their top stories to the editor-in-chief, Wes Pruden or his deputy, acting as surrogate in the boss’s absence. From among these offerings (“touted,” as we said), Pruden would select those stories that would go on the front page, A1, and in what priority. The No. 1 story of the day was usually at the top right position, or “bannered” across the top, and everything else proceeded as a consequence of those choices. If the national desk “touted” a story for the front page that didn’t make the cut, it would be placed on A3, and trust me, the reporters resented such snubs. The difference between a byline on A1 and A3 was night and day in a reporter’s mind, and when they had a story they believed was worthy of the front page, they were deeply hurt when they didn’t make the cut.

HUMAN BEINGS MAKE THESE DECISIONS.

This is my point. The answer to the question of what constitutes “news” — what is worthy of coverage, and which stories are most important — is by no means always self-evident, and it is a mistake to believe that whatever is on the front page of the Washington Post (or leading the hour on CNN) is indisputably more important than other stories, including stories that these organizations ignore altogether. Cable-TV news viewers were subjected to endless hours of “lost submarine” coverage, as if the fate of the crew of the OceanGate Titan was, without question, the most important thing in the world. But what about DeAndre Hopkins?

The reader asks, “DeAndre who?”

All-Pro wide receiver, a/k/a DHop, recently cut by the Arizona Cardinals, now a free agent. Where will he sign? Can the New England Patriots get DHop, or will they be outbid by one of their NFL rivals?

Unless you’re a Patriots fan, you probably think this is trivial nonsense, but speaking on behalf of legions of Patriots fans, let me assure you the DHop drama is infinitely more important than five chumps on a sunken sub. Were I the editor of the Boston Herald, there’s no question which story would get more coverage, especially on the front page.

Like the man said, “selection and emphasis” is what it’s about, especially when it comes to the matter of political bias in journalism. As Professor Reynolds likes to say, most journalists nowadays are merely “Democratic operatives with bylines,” and evidence of that bias is everywhere.

Friday morning, I was browsing headlines at Memeorandum on my phone while having a smoke outside the local convenience store.

“Wow,” I said to myself. “This story’s getting covered in both the Washington Post and the New York Times?” Finally this scandal is breaking through the wall of partisan propaganda, I surmised. For the record, here’s the top of the Washington Post story:

An IRS agent who supervised the investigation into President Biden’s son Hunter told lawmakers that Justice Department officials slowed and stymied the investigation, whittling away the most serious evidence of alleged tax crimes, according to a transcript of his account released Thursday.
The agent, Gary Shapley, offered a detailed and potentially damning account of prosecutors who were either timid or uninterested when it came to examining the financial misdeeds of Hunter Biden, which Shapley said included instances in which the president’s son treated prostitutes and their travel costs as his business expenses.
The agent’s account to the House Ways and Means Committee also directly challenged congressional testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland, in which he said that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss — a holdover from the Trump administration — had full authority to lead the investigation into Hunter Biden and could do whatever he wanted in the case.
A Justice Department spokesman stood by Garland’s previous comments, and the lead Democrat on the House committee said the allegations should not have been released publicly while lawmakers are still vetting them.
The transcript almost certainly will fuel criticism of the Justice Department’s five-year investigation of Hunter Biden, which this week led to a proposed plea agreement on two misdemeanor charges that will probably allow him to avoid jail time. Biden is due in federal court in Wilmington, Del., on July 26 to enter his guilty plea, which must be approved by a judge.
The criminal probe of Biden was given the code name Sportsman, Shapley told lawmakers, and it was “an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.”
His account offers a host of new allegations, including a text message that Biden allegedly sent on July 30, 2017, that invoked his father — at that time a former vice president — as he tried to get a business partner to fulfill some expected promise.
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” the younger Biden allegedly told businessman Henry Zhao. “And Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

This is an absolute bombshell, and within 10 days of Hunter sending that text to Zhao, a payment of about $5 million was sent.

What was Hunter selling? What skill or expertise did this crack-addicted loser possess that might be worth $5 million to a Chinese “business partner”? The only thing Hunter Biden had to sell — his only marketable value — was his father’s political influence. Period, end of sentence.

The authenticity of that threatening text message is not disputed. It is clearly the smoking gun of this scandal, and so it was with a sense of eager anticipation that I went back inside the convenience story Friday morning, walked to the newspaper rack, and looked at the front page of the Washington Post. Not on the top of Page A1? Hmmm.

Flipped the paper over to look at the bottom half of the front page and there, in tiny type, in a box at the bottom left of the page:

DAMN YOUR SOULS TO HELL,
YOU MISERABLE LYING BASTARDS!

Probably I muttered a few other obscenities, so offended was I by this blatant malfeasance of editorial authority. After five years of federal investigation, the controversy over the “laptop from hell,” and everything else we’ve seen in this scandal, an IRS whistleblower delivers the smoking gun in testimony to the House Oversight Committee, and you’re going to BURY THE STORY ON PAGE A15? You deserve contempt.



 

 

Slap on the Wrist for Hunter Biden

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Because it’s different when Democrats do it:

The court papers indicate the younger Biden has tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018. The combined tax liability is roughly $1.2 million over those years, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe details of the agreement that are not yet public. . . .Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of probation for those counts, these people said. Biden’s representatives have said he previously paid back the IRS what he owed. Additionally, Biden plans to admit to illegally possessing a weapon following his 2018 purchase of a handgun. As part of that admission, he expects to be entered in a diversion program, a less punitive form of sentence typically applied to people with substance abuse problems. In all, prosecutors would recommend two years of probation and diversion conditions. If Biden successfully meets the conditions of the diversion program, the gun charge would be removed from his record at the end of that period, the people said.

(Hat-tips: Stephen Green at Instapundit; Matt Margolis at PJMedia.)