An editorial at National Review lays out in comprehensible fashion the sum total of what daily news reports have been dribbling out with lots of arcane details but little in the way of a coherent narrative. I'll be excerpting generously from it here.
The introductory paragraphs spell out the three conclusions we must unavoidably draw from what we know so far:
The compelling congressional testimony of two IRS whistleblower agents has established three things.
First, the investigation into Biden corruption — millions of dollars pouring into the family coffers from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes seeking to buy Joe Biden’s political influence — is real and has been thwarted by the Biden Justice Department. Second, the president’s son Hunter Biden received preferential treatment, and, next week, a federal judge should reject the sweetheart plea deal he was given by the Justice Department. Third, Attorney General Merrick Garland owes the country an explanation for why the Biden investigation has been sabotaged from within, even as he maintains publicly that it was conducted with independence and integrity.
The whistleblowers' frustration was palpable to the House committee they've been working with:
The two whistleblowers — supervisory agent Gary Shapley and the Biden investigation’s main case agent, Joseph Ziegler — began cooperating with the House Ways and Means Committee several weeks back. While Shapley went public in June, Ziegler was not publicly identified until Wednesday’s hearing. Their revelations have been jaw-dropping.
The agents recounted being blocked at every turn by Justice Department prosecutors as they tried to go about the routine steps investigators would take in any case — or, at least, any case not involving politically connected suspects. The investigation was slow-walked by prosecutors from the office of Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, to whom the case was assigned in 2018.
And let's head off at the pass any notion that Weiss being a Trump appointee bears any weight:
Garland and congressional Democrats never tire of branding Weiss a Trump-appointee — it’s Garland’s rationalization for not appointing a special counsel. Conveniently omitted from this story is the fact that Weiss could not have been confirmed absent the support of Delaware’s two Democratic senators, Biden allies Tom Carper and Chris Coons. More to the point, Weiss reports to Garland and, because the Hunter Biden matter is a tax case, DOJ rules dictate that any tax charges must be approved by the Tax Division at Main Justice — run by Biden appointees. Most obviously, Weiss’s appointment by Trump does nothing to eradicate the conflict of interest inherent in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of the president’s son over conduct in which the president himself is implicated.
Weiss and his underlings used the pendency of the 2020 presidential campaign as an excuse to instruct the IRS and FBI agents on the case not to take measures that might call attention to the investigation and thus influence the election. Note that, simultaneously, according to tech executives and Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, FBI agents were signaling that the pre-election emergence of derogatory information about the Bidens — e.g., the Hunter laptop and the influx of money from foreign sources — was likely the result of a Russian intelligence operation.
After Biden was elected, Shapley and Ziegler recalled being undermined in attempting to uncover evidence. The day before they planned to conduct interviews of Hunter Biden and other investigative subjects, the FBI alerted the Secret Service, which tipped off the Biden transition team. As a result, lawyers for Hunter and most other subjects refused to speak to the IRS. In connection with interviews that were later planned, the lead prosecutor from Weiss’s office, Lesley Wolf, forbade them from pursuing investigative leads that could potentially connect the president himself to the Biden family business — instructing them not to ask questions about Hunter’s “dad,” or about “the big guy” (as we now know several investigative subjects referred to the now-president).
Wolf told the agents that issuing a warrant based on the laptop evidence would be bad optics, doncha know:
In 2019, the FBI obtained Hunter’s laptop, teeming with data about the Bidens’ lucrative foreign transactions and Joe Biden’s potential connections to them; yet Weiss’s office denied the IRS agents access to this evidence. In early September 2020, Wolf agreed with the agents that there was more than enough probable cause to support a warrant to search a guest house at the Bidens’ Wilmington residence where Hunter was living; still, she is said to have declined to seek the warrant because “the optics” would be bad. After the election, the agents learned that Hunter had moved documents from his business office in Washington, D.C., to a commercial storage unit in northern Virginia. They convinced Weiss, over Wolf’s objection, to allow them to seek a search warrant if Hunter did not access the unit for 30 days. But, while the agents were preparing the warrant, Wolf precluded them by alerting Hunter’s defense lawyers about the existence of the storage unit, again putting the evidence out of the investigators’ reach.
Shapley and Ziegler are among the IRS’s most experienced and accomplished agents. Despite the strictures placed on them, they built a compelling tax case against Hunter Biden — even the limited evidence, according to Ziegler, showed that Hunter had evaded roughly $2.2 million in taxes on $8.3 million in foreign income between 2014 and 2019. The agents and the line lawyers in DOJ’s Tax Division and Weiss’s office all agreed that a felony prosecution was called for.
There was much evading about where charges could be filed, based on where the tax-evading occurred. Conveniently, it outlasted the statute of limitiations.
And the money being hidden from the IRS came from bribes:
The 2014 and 2015 tax years included Hunter’s lavish, undeclared income from his sinecure at the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. This period is crucial to the potential corruption scheme. According to information provided to the FBI by an informant with a reliable track record (and released yesterday by Senator Chuck Grassley), after speaking with then–Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky placed Hunter on the company’s board and paid him over $80,000 per month (a rate that, reportedly, was roughly halved once Joe Biden was no longer vice president). The informant added that Zlochevsky told him he’d paid then–Vice President Biden and his son a combined $10 million bribe to use Biden’s influence on Burisma’s behalf, and had made the payments through a byzantine array of companies and accounts that he bragged would take investigators a decade to trace to Joe Biden. This alleged scheme strongly resembles the pattern uncovered by House investigators showing foreign actors paying Biden family members (including grandchildren) millions of dollars through labyrinthine channels that included some 20 obscure business entities, most of which Hunter set up while Joe was vice president.
And consider the Attorney General's role in all this. I'd say this country dodged a bullet when Mitch McConnell took a pass on the Senate advising and consenting on this guy when Obama nominated him for the Supreme Court:
Garland’s story is a crock. He asserts that Weiss would have been given any necessary authority — he only needed to ask. But the U.S. attorneys for Washington and California work for Garland; they couldn’t have blocked Weiss without the attorney general’s support. And it’s not a district U.S. attorney’s job to ask the attorney general for special-counsel authority — which would be tantamount to asking to be fired since, by regulation, a special counsel must be a lawyer “from outside the United States Government.” Rather, it is the attorney general’s duty to appoint a special counsel if there is a conflict of interest that prevents the Justice Department from investigating in the normal course.
And funny business seems to follow Hunter Biden wherever he goes, even though he's supposed to be well along in his recovery and immersed in his painting activities. I still think it's damn odd that the Secret Service couldn't determine where the White House cocaine came from.
And what kind of guy safeguarding his precarious recovery hires a lawyer like this?
Hunter Biden visited his 'sugar brother' Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris – who was photographed appearing to smoke from a bong.
The First Son took a trip from his Malibu pad to the Pacific Palisades on Thursday to visit his attorney, after agreeing to plead guilty to federal tax crimes last month.
While Hunter was at the house, Morris was snapped on a balcony in plain view of the public street appearing to huff from a white bong, in photos exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com.
And who is the babe in the yellow floral dress Hunter is photographed hugging as he arrives?
The 60-year-old Hollywood attorney is known for his hard-driving tactics and high-profile cases, but appeared relaxed on the sunny balcony in a purple short-sleeved shirt.
Hunter arrived in the afternoon in a black SUV, escorted by Secret Service bodyguards and dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and aviator sunglasses favored by both him and his father. He was greeted at the Los Angeles home by a woman in a yellow floral dress.
Now, as is always necessary in 2023 post-America, LITD must addresses any questions of a whataboutism.
The Very Stable Genius has already been indicted twice and more indictments are coming, and they're all entirely justified.
Now, does anybody still want to get behind the look-it's-going-to-be-one-or-the-other-of-them argument at this late date?
True, the law-enforcement apparatus has done itself no favors, given the obvious corruption outlined above. But Donald Trump's unfitness for office is now unavoidably clear. Even those who began to drool uncontrollably and quake with adulation when he descended the escalator in 2015 have not even the flimsiest of reasons why we should usher this charlatan back in.
So what's to be done?
The first step is to ask how we as a country became so spiritually sick as to give ourselves this choice.
This will be the subject of a Precipice post I intend to write today.
