patrick.net

“The statement that “Joe Biden wasn’t involved in Hunter Biden’s business,” is absurd in its face. Joe Biden was Hunter Biden’s business.” —Margot Cleveland

... There’s reason to be discouraged that the people we elect can bring the two great issues of the moment — the blob’s budget and the impeachment of “Joe Biden” — to satisfactory conclusions. They are arguably pseudopods of that very blob, whose very existence is being threatened now, and they have to worry about their shots at becoming multi-millionaires, too. The weeks ahead will inform us if there’s anything that can be salvaged of our federal government or whether we must make other arrangements.

I won’t bore you with the details of the democrats’ comedic shenanigans and the Republicans’ short opening presentation of evidence. It was more interesting to watch the narrative shifting in real time. Instead of parroting the original mantra of “no evidence,” NPR has moved on to Adjective City, now claiming Republicans haven’t presented “clear evidence” of bribery, or “impeachable evidence” of bribery, or “concrete evidence” of bribery.

In other words, they are admitting there’s evidence.

All of NPR’s weaselly adjectives modifying the word ‘evidence’ are just NPR’s opinion, not news. Either the Republicans presented evidence or they didn’t. And apparently, they did. The Republicans even admitted during the hearing that they are still seeking more evidence than the thousands of pages of emails, texts, and bank records they already have, which is what justified the impeachment inquiry in the first place.

NPR did accurately quote Constitutional expert and Professor Jonathan Turley:

“I do believe that the House has passed the threshold for an impeachment inquiry into the conduct of President Biden. In the current impeachment inquiry, the House has proceeded correctly, in my view, by taking this step only after months of preliminary investigations into the alleged corruption scandal involving the President and his family. Indeed, a majority of the public reportedly favor this impeachment inquiry on that very ground.”

NPR didn’t quote Committee Chairman James Comer’s cogent summary:

“We have established in the first phase of this investigation where this money has come from: Ukraine, Romania, Russia, Kazakhstan, China, it didn’t come from selling anything legitimate…it was funneled through shell companies and third parties to hide the Biden’s fingerprints. This deserves investigation, this deserves accountability, the American people expect this Committee to investigate public corruption…the witnesses today have all identified the evidence the Committee has uncovered as deserving further inquiry. And that is what this Committee will do, no matter where the evidence leads.”

It is a well-established legal principle that evidence of an attempt to conceal something is also evidence of consciousness of guilt. So.

During this first hearing, the Oversight Committee: presented evidence of more than 20 shady, unexplained shell companies created by the Bidens and their allies, presented direct evidence of Biden family members raking in over $24 million dollars from China, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, and other antagonistic foreign countries, identified nine different members of Biden’s extended family who have joined in or benefited from the various unorthodox business schemes, and confirmed that Joe Biden interacted with his family’s business associates in the deals at least two dozen times.

Under any standard, that is evidence. It’s a LOT of evidence. And this is only the beginning. Cue President Newsom, I mean Governor Newsom, to the rescue. The script writes itself: Now that Biden is no longer president, what’s the point?

Congressional scholar and legal impeachment expert Jonathan Turley wrote a great Substack, re-published in the Hill of all places, about the Biden Bribery case. It was headlined, The Biden Family Tree: How Investigations are Exposing the Bidens’ Influence-Peddling Dynasty

https://jonathanturley.org/2023/10/09/the-biden-family-tree-how-investigations-are-exposing-the-bidens-influence-peddling-dynasty/

Turley pointed out that newly released evidence from the House Ways and Means Committee reveals at least nine Biden family members benefitted from over $20 million dollars coming from 23 separate countries on four continents. It was a worldwide brand with only one product: Senator then Vice-President Joe Biden.

https://gop-waysandmeans.house.gov/icymi-new-documents-link-biden-family-influence-peddling-scheme-to-23-countries-four-continents/

The latest evidence gives the old saw about “having a rich uncle” a whole new dimension.

Read the whole thing.

US District Judge Maryellen Noreika on Wednesday agreed to formally drop a gun charge against Hunter Biden after a new indictment replaced his collapsed plea deal.
...
Prosecutors say the venue for Hunter Biden’s tax-related charges lies either in California or DC, not Delaware.

Hunter’s China Deal Associate Played Golf with Joe Biden Up to ‘Twelve Times,’ FBI Docs Show

Democrat President Joe Biden played golf up to “twelve times” with his son’s business association a shady deal with Chinese oligarchs, FBI documents have revealed.

Hunter Biden’s former business associate Rob Walker told agents about the close relationship in a December 2020 transcribed interview with the FBI.

As part of the business arrangement, Walker wired money from China to the bank accounts of Biden family members.

In a breathtaking story much more remarkable for where it was published than what it said, although that was pretty remarkable too, Politico ran a high-profile “Special Report” this weekend headlined, “Fresh revelations contradict Joe Biden’s sweeping denials on Hunter. Uh-oh! Not only that, but Politico’s “Special Report” about Biden’s lies published yesterday, Sunday, November 5th, 2023 — precisely one year to the day before next year’s Presidential election.

The sub-headline jammed the assassin’s dagger even deeper into Biden’s waning political fortunes: “The president hasn’t been shown to have committed wrongdoing, but a POLITICO review of recent developments casts doubts on several statements.”

image 2.png
The story was a big deal for Politico — a rare, ranging, long-form, magazine-style piece including dramatic non-stock photos, infographics, and custom artwork. Politico took its time recapping all the fundamentals of the Biden corruption story, slowly and carefully walking its audience through the unfamiliar details, and even slipping in a few brand-new arguments of its own.

Politico was not saying Joe Biden is corrupt. It was just saying.

The story’s first target was one of the best-documented of Joe’s lies, the one about not being involved in Hunter business deals. Politico began with a now-infamous April 2015 dinner meeting between Hunter’s group and some shady Ukrainian oligarchs. House Republicans found an email on Hunter’s laptop from one of the thuggish ‘executives’ who attended the dinner politely thanking Hunter “for introducing me to your father.”

It’s embarrassing that oligarchical Ukrainian thugs are more polite and use better-formed English than the chief executive’s own children. Hunter usually emails in all-caps and normally forgets to use punctuation. But I digress.

Anyway, Biden has consistently and vehemently denied attending any of Hunter’s business meetings. He’s protested that point a LOT. But his denials are usually cuddled in complicated locutions, liberally sprinkled with lawyer weasel words and conditional qualifications. So in October 2021, key White House ally Politico emailed its insider source and directly posed the question: was Biden there at the Cafe Milano dinner or not? Even if just informally?

POLITICO: “Does this rule out any informal encounter with Pozharskyi in April 2015?”

WHITE HOUSE: “Yes.”

Politico said it was revealing that now-obvious lie for the first time. Two years later. Shoring up the point, Politico then described Devon Archer’s testimony to Congress, where Devon swore under oath that Joe Biden did in fact chow down personally, himself, in the flesh, with the oligarchs that night at Cafe Milano, and Devon provided plenty of supporting background detail.

In other words, Politico volunteered its own internal, behind-the-scenes communications to help pile on the narrative that Biden and his whole crooked White House team are liars.

That seems pretty remarkable.

Politico’s extended-form article seemed like a solid reply to hapless, low-information democrat voters relying on Biden’s current stupid excuse, yeah, yeah, but they never proved Joe did anything wrong and Hunter’s not running for president.

Read these four sentences from the story and you’ll see what I mean:

The explicit White House denial of even an informal encounter, reported here for the first time, was not the only time that statements made by Biden and his camp about Hunter Biden’s dealings have been contradicted by others. Joe Biden and his representatives have repeatedly defended him from criticism related to his relatives, his son in particular, by issuing blanket denials of misconduct and disclaiming contact with their business affairs.
But, in recent months, as congressional Republicans have opened an impeachment inquiry and controversies related to Hunter Biden continue to be litigated in the courts and in the public square, a steady trickle of revelations have contradicted the president’s denials. A POLITICO review of recent congressional testimony and exhibits, along with court filings and media reports, casts doubt on several statements made by Biden and his representatives.
That right there is a meticulously-careful way of saying Joe lied about not doing anything wrong. The article briefly receded from this high accusatory point, back down into the “no evidence” briar patch, suggesting nobody’s claimed Joe Biden ever “took official action” to help his relatives’ “businesses.”

Later, the article reversed itself, and give several examples of exactly such evidence, although labeled as “uncorroborated” and other words like that, to help the red pills go down easier. Here was Politico’s first example of direct evidence of Biden corruption:

The (FBI’s) informant claimed that Burisma’s owner said privately that he was pressured by Joe and Hunter Biden into bribing them for help resolving Burisma’s legal issues, including Shokin’s firing. The informant first mentioned Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma in a 2017 conversation with the FBI, according to an agency form recording his allegations, which was obtained by congressional Republicans and made public in July. The bureau re-interviewed the informant, whose identity remains secret, in 2020, after the Trump Justice Department began scrutinizing claims about Shokin’s ouster.
Next, Politico shockingly but accurately recited the whole disgraceful timeline of drug-addled Hunter’s abandoned Macbook, and the FBI’s and the intelligence community’s subsequent outrageous lies about it being “Russian disinformation.” Then Politico informed its probably-astounded readers that it (Politico), The New York Times, and The Washington Post — the core corporate media team — had each independently verified thousands of Hunter emails from the so-called “fabricated” laptop.

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Without drawing attention to the fact’s significance, Politico also deliberately referred to Hunter’s lawsuit against the Mac Shop’s owner for “violation of privacy.” The lawsuit itself confirms the laptop’s authenticity. Obviously, Hunter wouldn’t sue over a fake laptop with fake emails on it. Not for “violation of privacy,” anyway.

Next up was Tony Bobulinski, another long-overlooked former Hunter business partner (overlooked by Establishment Media). In what constitutes even more “evidence” — at least by any legal definition of the word “evidence” — Bobulinski testified under oath and to the FBI that he personally had discussed Hunter’s Chinese business ventures with Joe Biden. For its readers’ benefit, Politico carefully noted that Bobulinski has always made political donations to democrats.

But that wasn’t the only way Politico shored up Bobolinski’s testimony. It fastidiously pointed out that Bobulinski has never been arrested for lying to the FBI:

In September, House Republicans released an FBI summary of an interview agents conducted with Bobulinski in the fall of 2020, showing that Bobulinski told investigators the same basic story: that he had discussed the China venture with Joe Biden. The summary gives extra heft to Boublinski’s public claims because lying to the FBI in order to influence an investigation can lead to criminal charges.
Well my goodness. At this point in the article, democrat readers with any remaining capacity for independent thought must have been wondering, what exactly is the standard for “no evidence”?

This is just the tip of the story’s corruption iceberg. The story goes on and on. It was a methodical tour de force of Biden family corruption, and completely reversed the normal course, taking the opposite approach from what Establishment Media has always taken to these facts. Normally, Establishment Media assiduously undermined witnesses like Devon Archer, Tony Bobulinski, and the unidentified FBI informants.

But in this article, Politico painstakingly boosted the anti-Biden witnesses’ credibility.

Conservative media is mainly designed to provide its readers with information. But liberal media is designed to give its readers permission to think certain thoughts. It’s not so much that the Politico article was informing democrats about certain uncomfortable Biden facts for the first time, although that is certainly true.

The article was more significant because it signaled to democrats that now acceptable to talk about Biden lying and about his being mixed up with all these sketchy characters.

If this Politico article wasn’t an outright hit piece aimed squarely at Joe’s key demographic, it was at least a barely-concealed political torpedo jetting directly towards the S.S. Bob Peters’ exposed port side. Friendly fire!

Do you think it was coincidental this carefully-written article published exactly one year before the election?

Finally, speaking of compromised elected officials, yesterday the Hill ran an encouraging story headlined, “House GOP subpoenas Hunter Biden alongside suite of Biden family members.”

Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee took the “remarkable step” of subpoenaing depositions from a half-dozen of Joe Biden’s family members, as part of its ongoing impeachment inquiry. Subpoenas were issued to: James Biden’s wife, Sarah Biden; Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen; Hallie Biden, Beau Biden’s widow; and her sister Elizabeth Secundy.

The Committee also asked for an interview with Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski, and House Oversight Chair James Comer’s (R-Ky.) press release said he “plans to send additional subpoenas and transcribed interview requests later this week.”

Democrats and the White House dismissed the subpoenas as a “sham,” and made the unlikely claim there is “no evidence” to support Republicans’ bribery allegations. For its part, the Hill’s article questioned, if not dismissed, all the Republicans’ evidence — in contrast with NBC’s report earlier this week. At least the Hill ran the story at all.

The democrats opened these floodgates with their January 6th investigations, multiple Trump impeachments, and their raft of process-crime lawsuits. Now the investigatory subpoena chickens are flocking home to roost.

“House GOP subpoenas Hunter Biden alongside suite of Biden family members.”

CBS' Catherine Herridge broke down a fascinating Biden bank record that the House Oversight Committee posted on Wednesday.

The bank record was a 2018 email purportedly written by a money laundering investigator who was raising questions about money flowing into accounts connected to Hunter Biden.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2023/11/30/catherine-herridge-posts-fascinating-bank-record-exposing-biden-biz-dealings-troubling-threat-from-china-n2166996

CBS' Catherine Herridge broke down a fascinating Biden bank record that the House Oversight Committee posted on Wednesday.

The bank record was a 2018 email purportedly written by a money laundering investigator who was raising questions about money flowing into accounts connected to Hunter Biden.

Biden Spoke with Hunter’s Business Associates Hundreds of Times While VP, Email Records Show

The House Ways and Means Committee, currently investigating the Biden Bribery Impeachment case, posted an informative update on its website yesterday headlined, “Newly Released Evidence Underscores Joe Biden’s Excessive Use of a Secret Email Address to Communicate with his Son’s Business Associates - House Committee on Ways and Means.” It’s a pretty big deal.

https://waysandmeans.house.gov/newly-released-evidence-underscores-joe-bidens-excessive-use-of-a-secret-email-address-to-communicate-with-his-sons-business-associates/

Red-faced democrats have pounded the table complaining about this outrageous impeachment investigation when there’s NO EVIDENCE!! that Joe and Hunter’s businesses had anything to do with each other. And Joe Biden has offered to arm-wrestle anybody who wants to take him and pounded the table many times shouting (32 decibels) that there’s NO EVIDENCE!!! he was ever involved in Hunter’s business dealings.

Not ever. Never ever. Never ever, ever. And you can’t prove it.

So the Committee sighed, said fine, and yesterday coughed up three hundred and twenty-seven emails between Joe Biden — not in his own name, but using dumb aliases that sound like some kind of inside joke — where the former Vice President communicated with various of Hunter’s sketchy business associates and unindicted co-conspirators.

Tellingly, fifty-four emails were exclusively — meaning only the two men were included on the email — Joe wasn’t just carbon-copied or anything — between only Joe Biden (as Robert L. Peters or Robin Ware) and one particular Hunter Biden business associate named Eric Schwerin.

Eric is particularly noteworthy in the sordid saga as being the genius in charge of structuring the Biden family’s various complicated, bribe-obscuring, worldwide spider network of shell companies laundering the Biden fortune. And somebody has to tell Eric what to do. You didn’t think Hunter was running the complicated maze of businesses, trusts, and bank accounts, did you?

If you believed that, you’ve been hitting Hunter’s crack pipe too hard.

Another email proved Joe Biden attended a “lunch” in D.C. with yet another unsavory character named Patrick Ho (if that’s his real name, and this time there remains considerable doubt over his identity). Weeks after that lunch, Ho was indicted by Trump’s DOJ as a top-level Chinese spy.

But one month before his arrest, Ho — get this — paid Hunter the princely sum of one million dollars as a legal services ‘retainer.’ Here’s the Committee Exhibit 608B:




Nobody knows what Hunter was supposed to do to earn that million. And, why were Joe and the Ho lunching in D.C., right before Ho paid Joe’s bagman, I mean son, a million dollars for nothing, and right at the time the DOJ was hot on Ho’s heels?

We can all agree that at minimum, it’s a bad look, and you can tack that bad look onto the giant, swelling list of Biden’s other ‘bad looks.’

(In one of my remarkable cases, opposing counsel admitted in an early hearing that “at first blush, the evidence looks bad” for his client. I got a copy of the transcript and turned that delightful phrase right back on them for the rest of the three-year lawsuit, mentioning it every chance I got, including in no fewer than twelve appellate briefs. Fun times.)

Anyway, let’s talk about that million-dollar retainer. I happen to know a lot about retainers. You sort of need to know, as an attorney. Mismanaging client retainers is the most common way for an attorney to get disbarred. And getting disbarred is the legal equivalent of being stripped of your medical license, or dishonorably discharged, except worse, because disbarment is a lifelong black mark. That’s Tom. He got disbarred. It hurts the former lawyer’s future employment prospects as badly as a felony record (except that it quixotically improves the disbarred lawyer’s chances of being hired by a drug cartel).

Even before I get to principle number one of retainers, here’s principle zero: don’t hire crackheads to be your attorney. Especially don’t give them a million dollars of your money in advance of services not yet rendered. (And that was a million in 2017 dollars, so.)

With that out of the way, here’s Retainers Principle Number One: a retainer legally remains the client’s money until the attorney does the work. Attorneys must escrow client retainers in a separate trust account. Commingling attorney money and client money is a giant no-no, a greased fast-track to disbarment.

Once, I held a substantial retainer for years for a client who went to prison for a half decade (for a bad DUI auto accident). I could not touch his money. It wasn’t my money. It was my client’s money. I kept it safely for him until he got out. In fact, while incarcerated, from time to time he would direct us to use some of the funds to pay things like his appellate attorney or some disputed bills, which we did, of course, because it was his money.

There is almost no way Hunter was entitled — as a lawyer — to keep Ho’s money, even if Ho was arrested or was a Chinese spy or whatever. But I would bet Klaus Schwab’s newest leather spacesuit that Ho’s money never touched an attorney’s trust account but rather vanished, poof!, within two business days, tentacled off into the Biden financial octopus.

And if, as I suppose, Hunter never returned Ho’s money, then he should be disbarred for stealing client funds. Hunter’s D.C. law license went ‘inactive’ in 2014. So he should also be disbarred for practicing law without a valid license — lawyers can’t go around holding themselves out as million-dollar superstars with an inactive license. The Committee should promptly refer Hunter’s case to the D.C. Bar Association.

It’s not just vindictiveness. I mean, Hunter’s still out there. If he’s not disbarred, who knows how many other gullible enemy spies Hunter might trick into giving him giant retainers for future legal services that he’ll never provide? The mind boggles.

The Committee could probably also think of a few other things to jam onto the bar referral, like Hunter’s hookers and crack habit and fake board positions and unpaid income taxes and million-dollar business advances to start energy companies that never actually start, but I digress.

Anyway, the Committee just gifted democrats with some more Biden Bribery evidence. But somehow I don’t think the democrats will be grateful to have their holiday evidence wishes answered.

As they say in China: Ho, Ho, Ho.

https://themessenger.com/opinion/joe-biden-bill-clinton-moment-lies-impeachment-hunter-influence-peddling-corruption

“The similarities between the late 1980s USSR and present day USA are uncanny — the endless lies, the corruption, the hollowing out of institutions, the censorship, and the decrepit leadership that is despised by the public.” — Dr Toby Rogers

The blob ran a clever third down lawfare play deep in its own territory Thursday night, a sort of double-reverse statue of liberty counter-switcheroo in its game-plan to “save our democracy,” as it calls its agenda of suppressions, persecutions, swindles, bad trips, and mind-fucks laid on the sore-beset people of this land. Blob special prosecutor David C. Weiss finally managed to indict Hunter Biden on tax evasion charges so flagrant and obvious that all the ham sandwiches convicted for the Jan 6 “insurrection” watched in awe from their prison cells.

You understand, this was months after Mr. Weiss concocted a cream puff plea deal for the president’s beloved son that blew up embarrassingly in the Delaware federal court when Judge Maryellen Noreika discerned a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free clause buried deep in the document, at about the same time that two IRS whistleblowers revealed the malfeasant incompetence of Mr. Weiss’s initial five-year-long dawdling investigation that, oops, let the statute of limitations run out on many of the pending charges.

That fiasco was followed by Mr. Weiss and AG Merrick Garland contradicting each other in House testimony about who had investigative authority where in the federal court matrix. And finally, the tax evasion matters landed in the Biden-friendly Los Angeles federal district, where Hunter officially lives (when not hiding out in the Lincoln bedroom), emerging from a grand jury Thursday night as a bill for three felonies and six misdemeanors.

The indictment, a public document, contains some interesting particulars, such as Hunter attempting to write off as business expenses $683,212 in fees for the unspecified services of “various women” (much as the services rendered by Hunter’s Owasco PC shell company were never specified in million-dollar legal retainer agreements made with Chinese “clients”). The curious can consult the website https://bidenreport.com,/ a.k.a. “Marco Polo” for a photographic record of Hunter B’s sex trafficking capers, such as:




Of course, buried in this hairball of sleaze is another cute dodge that will permit Hunter to take a pass on his subpoenaed closed-door deposition scheduled for December 13th with Rep. James Comer’s House Oversight Committee on the grounds that he is under indictment and would only repeat his 5th Amendment rights ad infinitum. Smooth move, DOJ. While it confers a short-term field advantage to the DC blob, few will misunderstand that behind all of this procedural stagecraft is the somewhat greater matter of Hunter’s dad, President “Joe Biden,” being a paid agent of the Chinese Communist Party (and several other entities not favorably disposed to the USA’s national interests). That is: hanging over all this is the question of treason, attending the question of bribery, both being gold-standard impeachable offenses, and one them a capital crime.

That is the place to which all this rigmarole is tending, and so the pretense that “Joe Biden” is actually running for reelection grows more preposterous by the day. But it is just one of a thousand other things that the DC blob — i.e., our government — lies about incessantly to the peril of the people suffering its governance. What’s actually happening is that “Joe Biden,” our Flying Dutchman president, is barely clinging to office long enough to pardon his son and accomplices in the influence-peddling racket he ran at the center of which was “Joe Biden’s” strangely fortuitous blobular selection as Democratic Party nominee and subsequent “victory” by blatant fraud in the 2020 election. Some people knew the fix was in.

The pathetic thing about the Biden family business is that for all that trouble and all those jet plane rides, and tedious dinners with men reeking of too much cologne, and all the cozying up to foreign poohbahs and kissing their hirsute asses, shlepping the family brand from one sad-sack national capital to the next: Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Romania, the Biden clan only grossed about $25-million, maximum, over many years — which is to say about equal to one year’s salary-and-bonus of a mid-level shlub at the commodities desk of a hedge fund. I mean, when you consider the billions accumulated by the likes of Larry Fink at BlackRock, or Bezos at Amazon, or the obscene fortunes of the wonder boys at Google and Facebook.

Side note: Senator John Kennedy, usually witty and agile, had a go at FBI Director Christopher Wray this week in a Judiciary Committee session. Mr. Kennedy asked Mr. Wray how come, in the fall of 2020, with the election on, and The New York Post’s scoop on the existence of a Hunter Biden laptop, and the subsequent psy-op by 51 former intel maestros saying the laptop story was Russian disinfo — Mr. Kennedy asked, “Why didn’t the FBI just come out and say, hey, the laptop’s real?” Mr. Wray gave a bullshit answer of course… “an ongoing investigation, blah, blah….”

I have a better question that Senator Kennedy might put to Christopher Wray about this matter. In fact, the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop hard-drive in its possession as early as December 2019, just as the first Trump impeachment trial commenced. Had they bothered at that time to examine its contents, and if not, why not? And if they had looked around inside and seen the multitudinous emails concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings with other countries, Ukraine especially, and in particular with Mykola Zlochevsky’s Burisma company, why did Mr. Wray not alert President Trump’s attorneys that he was in possession of possibly exculpatory evidence regarding the president’s supposedly nefarious phone call to newly elected Ukraine President Zelensky that kicked off the impeachment? Huh? Just wondering.