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Notes -
Slow morning, eh?
For some time now, we've been discussing the implications of Hunter Biden's laptop, and whether the information it contained was relevant to our political system. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we know that the FBI knew about the laptop's contents roughly a year in advance of the 2020 election, and used its official access with the major social media companies to prepare their censors to perceive the story as Russian disinformation. Then when the story actually broke in the press, the FBI successfully pushed the social media companies to censor it.
From the laptop information itself, we know that for quite a while now, Hunter Biden has been engaged in various grifts, selling purported access to his father in exchange for lucrative sinecures with various foreign corporations, selling "art" for amusingly inflated values, and so on. The supposition on the Red side has been that this grift implicated Biden as well, and Trump's attempts to have that theory investigated led directly to his first impeachment. The laptop emails backed this story with evidence, with Hunter referencing how "the big guy" was getting a significant cut of his grift money, and one of his associates confirming that "the big guy" was in fact Joe Biden.
Blues on the other hand claimed that there was no reason to suppose any corruption was happening. While Hunter was obviously a junkie fuckup grifter, and was obviously making his money claiming to peddle influence, there was no evidence of actual payments going to Joe, so this was all meaningless. My impression of the previous threads is that even those here who thought Hunter was paying Joe, assumed that there would be no formal exchange of money, but rather quid-pro-quo.
Now it appears that Hunter Biden has been paying rent to live in his father's residence in Delaware, to the tune of $49,901 per month. For completeness' sake, it must be mentioned that this is the same residence where Joe was found to be improperly storing classified documents, alongside his Corvette. While it seems doubtful that the files would be of interest to a junkie who prospers by peddling influence for foreign corporations, it's a detail that does add a touch of piquancy to the overall narrative.
So this appears to me to be pretty open-and-shut. Joe Biden is corrupt, selling influence to foreign corporations in China and Eastern Europe through his son Hunter. Hunter collects the money, then kicks a large slice back to Joe through rent, and quite possibly other, yet undiscovered "repayments". Trump was impeached when he attempted to have these activities investigated, while the FBI sat on the information they were given, and engaged in a protracted disinformation and censorship campaign to keep that information from leaking elsewhere. That information does in fact lead to provable direct payments from Hunter to Biden.
Impeachment when?
[EDIT] - ...Or perhaps not! @firmamenti points out that while Hunter is apparently living in the residence and renting an office space for 50k, the office space is not specified to be in the residence, and very well could be an entirely separate location entirely unconnected to Biden. The hunt continues...
Do we know that Hunter did in reality pay this rent, or is it him fucking up claiming that it was a mortgage payment (I see by the linked story he also claimed to own the house) or that he was trying to pull some tax dodge (e.g. claiming an expense against income)?
I mean, it's Hunter, the guy might not even remember how to put his socks on let alone fill out a form correctly depending on how drunk/high/shagged-out he was on any particular day, and that's not including his tendency to be massively dishonest anyway.
To be frank, this seems like simple prudence. The family knows he's a fuck-up and will only blow his money on (literally) hookers and blow, so to have any money at all for general expenses of life, someone needs to take it off him. That's Joe, it would appear. Maybe that is what the "rent" payment really is; they just call it 'rent' to put the best face on it, when really it's "Joe taking half Hunter's money to put it away for him, because Hunter can't be trusted with it".
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This is like comparing a handsome lady's man with many conquest to a dopey homely schlub with a wife who tolerates him, and thinking of the second man "He's never seemed to have a particular interest in hot women."
You are confusing Joe Biden being terrible at corruption to not being interested. And, hypothetically, it's not hard to understand why this might be the case. Biden's entire career has been defined by telling obvious stupid lies, and saying the quiet part out loud. No matter how corrupt Obama, Clinton or Bush may be, no matter how absurdly obvious to all observers it might be, they still make the correct deflecting mouth sounds. Mouth sounds about process and bureaucracy and partisan critics. Any prospective lobbyist attempting to corrupt Biden through the usual Washington means risks Joe just openly bragging about it in much the same way he bragged about getting the prosecutor investigating the company that hired his son fired.
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The only thing I have to add here is that Matt Taibbi mentioned something on his premium podcast that I haven’t heard elsewhere.
He said he believe this is a DNC opp to sideline Biden in ‘24. He implied that he believes this is the case based on certain unreported facts about the source of this brouhaha. He didn’t elaborate. More of a passing comment to his cohost.
But surely Biden wouldn't even contemplate running in 2024? Everyone was saying that Trump was too old in 2020, and Biden is 80 now, he'll be 82 in 2024 and already there are health (and cognitive decline) queries around him.
I can't see any reason for him to go for a second term other than vanity, and that would be stupid. The Democrats must have a better way of telling him he can't run than working up a scandal?
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Sideline Biden in favor of who, though?
The left does seem to have a weak bench because their national candidates come from very liberal places and they’ve struggled to gain any traction in a lot of regions but they still have a few options especially when Biden isn’t all that desirable.
Newsom - good looking big state governor
Pritzker - think he’s very age and not charismatic but I would think he can be the not a GOP candidate as well as Biden
AOC - I know some Guiliani people who say they would prefer her over Biden because there is no fear she’s compromised. Charismatic/good looking/social media game. Seems to be moving somewhat more to mainstream Dem and away from squad leader
There’s no real rising star I can see but between these candidates and a few others there are generic Dem candidate who aren’t much worse than Biden at turning off moderates
Polis could be the move.
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This makes me uncomfortable because it reminds me so much of those times that the Democrats would push narratives about Russia and Trump. I remember making arguments at length that regardless of whether or not Trump was 'polite' the office of the presidency should still command respect; I thought these were strong arguments and maybe I still do. When are we going to try to be a more uniting force instead of continuing to hunt down scandals involving relatives?
Kushner being sent to build peace in the middle east was unorthodox in the appearance of nepotism, but in unorthodox times we need unorthodox solutions. I dare call this preoccupation on Biden's spawn obsessive. You're trying to hold 'the system' to a consistency it never had. Trump did things that angered the left and that made me glad, but as I think about a divided country I feel some shame for embracing that power, for now I see in you someone who is angered, much as the left was, over trivial, irrelevant, and imagined corruption.
Do you need to be told that Trump lost, get over it? Do you need to be told to look to the future and not the past? What are you looking for? What are you hoping to find?
You can't tolerate corruption like that.
... you think it's normal that Biden bragged about having Ukrainian prosecuted fired for investigating Burisma, the company that was paying off Hunter Biden ?
This is just corruption. In any western European country, that'd cause the government to resign. Ministers there resign over some piddly plagiarism nonsense, or minor oversights. Even in eastern Europe it'd be a major scandal and probably require new elections.
Can't you?
I remember a bit in the 90's that Lewis Black did about how bad government corruption had gotten. That when he was a kid, you knew it was happening. It was like being in a hotel, and you don't know which room, but you know somewhere, someone is fucking. "Now" in the 90's government corruption is like two dogs stuck together in the alleyway, and you just can't stop them. You spray water on them and it does nothing.
In the 2020's, we're how many generations into open obvious corruption being all American's have ever known? As much as I hate it, it's hard for me not to treat politicians like I do auto mechanics. I know they are going to fleece me, the question is, will they at least keep my car, or the country, running while they do it?
Of course, my charge is that the current neoliberal successor ideology isn't even doing that. But it's probably an orthogonal issue to their blatant corruption.
We have a rather different take on this in eastern Europe. Corruption needs to be fought. They'll keep doing that shit anyway, but as long as you're trying, the graft doesn't exceed 15-20%.
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The US government exerting influence like that over foreign countries is part and parcel of post-war foreign policy. Relatives of important officials getting cushy jobs in the hope that it buys favorable treatment isn't good, but that's about the level of corruption that I've always assumed to be present anyways.
Well, maybe, if US is so corrupt and so crazy it needs to stop telling other countries how to mind their business or conduct their foreign policy.
And other countries should not listen to it. Especially not countries that aspire to some level of good government!
If America has a corrupt and inefficient federal government, of a kind that'd not be tolerated in Europe, 100k dead per year from overdoses, people looting shops in major cities and a homicide rate a nice third world country might be mildly ashamed of, **why do we care about them **?
Europeans need to have their noses rubbed in American dysfunction till they stop giving America attention or caring about it.
**If Americans can't even run their own country, why are we listening to them ? ** Their governance is even more catastrophic than in Europe.
Their army is falling apart due to low retention and recruitment, their defence contractors can't even produce enough ammo, etc.
Europe is big enough and rich enough to deal with Russia...
Europe 'needs' the US same way NY delis used to need the Italian guy in a nice suit who came around from time to time and asked if everything was okay and got some money.
If Europe pitched in with some resources, it could have a perfectly good strategic deterrent in Force de dissuasion.
As much as I dislike French state, the French are orders of magnitude less nuts and hubristic than D.C.
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But you've been tolerating corruption like this the entire time. The system is so corrupt that picking any one portion of it to get angry about is missing the point and falling into partisanship. Do you really want to debate the Democrat talking point of Trump's Ukraine phone call? It's a losing game.
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Probably Bundestag MPs also had their children employed by Burisma.
https://www.uawire.org/news/german-deputies-advise-poroshenko-to-consider-changing-of-the-prosecutor-general
And some guy from SBU who accused Shokin of corruption and demanded his resignation also had dealing with Burisma.
https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2015/11/12/7088525/
And members of Kharkiv Human Rights Group...
https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2016/01/7/7094715/
And dozens of Ukrainian MPs...
https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2015/12/22/7093387/
... and that proves what? That Biden jr. being paid off is okay ?
No, that disproves your assertion that Shokin was fired on behest of Biden Sr because the latter wanted Shokin not to investigate his son. Of course, you could say that it WAS the real reason, and Biden just used reputation of Shokin being a corrupt prosecutor for plausible deniability in getting him fired. But then argue accordingly, not just put it as an undeniable fact.
Also Hunter Biden didn't commit any crime according to Ukrainian law by working there. Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma, most likely did - but then it was during presidential term of Yanukovich, a figure very much beloved by some on American far right and far left, deposed by the evil CIA.
Yeah, it looks like Shokin was fired because he wasn't investigating the 'right' people.
**It still doesn't explain to me why you think politicians getting paid off by through their family getting cushy sinecures in foreign countries is remotely okay. **
It's okay in Ukraine. We get that, it's why Ukraine is that way.
In any normal county, a politician whose junkie son gets $50k a month from a sinecure in a famously corrupt country overseas would instantly be embroiled in a huge scandal.
No, this is business as usual in the UK, France, the USA and more. You usually don't hear about it it because of how accepted it is. And that is because compared to corruption in Pakistan, China and yes Ukraine and so on it is tiny. There is no non-corrupt country but most of the wealthy Western ones have fairly minimal levels like said Hunter Biden issues. The amount of effort it would require to eradicate is just not worth it. And of course it's not like elites whose families benefit from it would want to. Even if they are temporarily on the other side of it for short term political gain. Trump does it even more directly with Jared and Ivanka and so on. It isn't exceptional, it is the norm.
Putting relatives of people with power on boards and in cushy executive positions is endemic almost everywhere. That might not make it ok, but please do not underestimate how common it is in "normal" countries.
As an eastern European, we used to look up to Germany when it came to political culture, and they seem fairly intolerant with corruption.
Do they do this too ? Or is e.g. Schröder involvement in Gazprom only a scandal because it's politically advantageous to bash Russians ?
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Says a person from Slovakia 😩
Our graft is these days mostly limited to 15-20% cost inflation on government contracts. Your president is a an actor whose show was funded by an oligarch, who among other things,stole how many billion $ from Ukrainians by running a bank and giving out loans to friendly companies.. Was it 2 or 5 billion ? They still haven't bothered to wipe that shit off the internet. We had shit like this in mid to late 1990s. That was .. quite some time ago.
If these days Ukraine was as corrupt as Slovakia, you'd probably be as prosperous as Poland what with the better climate, natural resources and sea access.
Now, Slovakia isn't a normal country, but at least half of the parties wouldn't tolerate something like this, and it definitely wouldn't fly anywhere in western Europe.
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Some of these points might be true but everything changed when they impeached Trump the first time. The right still needs to fight for getting to play by the same rules. Otherwise you would lose every elections and never project power.
While I have come to a conclusion we should respect the presidency and ignore small crimes the rights fighting culture war right now which means using power.
The right just lost elections because they can't let go of Trump. Trump doesn't project power he projects weakness. He used to be able to do it but his time is done. DeSantis has some strong points but I'm still hoping for someone a little better at silencing wokeness without feeding division.
I think RD can. You don’t win by that many points in Florida without getting some dem voters.
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Im not saying run trump. I’m saying we should be fighting back and one of the steps is impeachment of Biden.
I don’t think not being divisive is a choice. The war is here and the woke won’t quiet down because you asks them nicely.
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I guess the question is what is an acceptable level of corruption taking into account the cost of trying to stamp it out.
If Biden corruption is worse than acceptable level, then trying to make an issue of it is part of looking forward. Of course, the IF is playing a large role there.
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I think pet of the issue here is that the prior on Joe Biden being corrupt is low, so you need more than circumstantial evidence to make people who are not already anti-Biden partisans care.
The theory that the MAGA crowd are pushing is that Joe Biden decided to run a large scale influence peddling operation, employed his junkie failson as a key fixer in it when he could have hired a professional, and then didn’t spend the money. That is possible, but it is not likely compared to a junkie failson ripping off clueless foreigners by selling influence with Dad he didn’t have and spending the money on blow and hookers.
We have no reason to believe that's the case. And that Biden went after the Ukrainian prosecution suggests he was involved in the corruption, if it was just his son doing stupid shit, he'd not have lifted a finger. Biden bragged on video about having the prosecutor fired!
This is precisely what was in issue in the performative criminal investigation that Trump asked Zelenskyy to launch, and therefore in the first Trump impeachment. He probably didn't.
If Biden went after the prosecutor for other reasons, then it was stupid (because you shouldn't act where a conflict of interest exists, even if it is just for appearance's sake) but not corrupt. And there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that this is what happened - notably that the EU, the IMF, and the Ukrainian opposition all agreed that the prosecutor should be fired for slow-walking corruption prosecutions.
Rarely is it mentioned that Shokin was then replaced with a prosecutor who dropped those prosecutions entirely.
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But there are a lot of corrupt politicians. Does tying aid to firing happen all of the time? Maybe — but it seems no one made that argument or at least no one that I’m aware of
Tying aid to progress in anti-corruption investigations happens all the time. According to a wide range of western-aligned institutions, the main way to speed up anti-corruption investigations was to fire the prosecutor who was slow-walking them.
Do you have sources on that? I know IMF ties funding to certain things, but wasn’t area of the US doing so (I thought it was military aid but could be mistaken).
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Biden seems to say whatever is most convenient at the time, whether that be flip-flopping on policies or just making up stories about his own life. My prior is that Biden can't stay bought. So some interest might funnel him some money and get a meeting, but as soon as they are out of the room Biden will be playing to whoever is in front of him next. It's also just generally difficult for a President to have that much discretionary power to personally significantly damage the realm by selling out to some pecuniary interest. The worst things his administration has done seems to involve selling out the realm to some activist/ideological interest. Although if Ukrainian money getting to Joe Biden is the reason USG is involving itself in the Ukraine war, that would be big deal and potentially catastrophically bad. But I'm not sure that is the case, Biden might actually be more of a voice of sanity in his own administration, with the meddling in the Ukraine really being driven by the overall Zeitgeist.
There are many influential groups in and around Washington strongly in favor of supporting Ukraine and opposing Russia. Foreign service lifers like the Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland wing who are neoliberal interventionists, and folks working for the military industrial complex that had to delay buying a second vacation home or remodeling their mansion in northern Virginia when the Afghanistan tap got cut off, to name two of the more powerful. The likelihood that Biden is the primary advocate for the U.S.’s involvement seems slim.
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I thought the prior on Joe being corrupt was quite high. And basically assumed (along with most career politician earning thru some kind of grift). I also assume McConnell is probably corrupt. Nancy has likely traded on inside information.
The question on Joe i feel is whether he was being corrupt in ways that everyone does their corruption. Hunter Biden getting 300k a year to to work for the Delaware teachers union is corruption that we all accept and tolerate. Hunter working for a ukranian oligarchs energy firm was in my view past the line for acceptable or legal corruption.
Also been noticing on oline message boards a shift in tone of Joes corruption. People use to deny he was “the big guy” and that he did the bad kind of corruption. Now it seems like arguments run to sure he’s corrupt but you can’t “prove it”.
The prior is low because actual corrupt people who have served as a US Senator for 40 years make a lot more income than he did. And, yes, the relevant source of information is indeed the person's tax return, since that is the point of becoming a politician if you are corrupt: to earn lots of legal, or at least apparently legal, income.
Hunter seems to pay for a lot of his dad’s expenses. This would be a way to funnel money to his dad without reporting it. Of course, that means Joe also committed tax fraud. So perhaps another thing to impeach him over if true.
The recipient of a gift does not have to report the gift as income. The giver reports the gift and pays any applicable gift tax.
Read my response to Rov Scam? There is a lot of caselaw (see what I cited) distinguishing between a gift and payment for services that results in taxable income. Assuming Joe is being paid as part of the influence peddling scheme, then the transferor (ie Hunter) isn’t giving Joe the money just because Joe is his dad but is giving him the money due to the business arrangement. Accordingly that means the payment is not a gift but is actually income.
Well, that is a pretty big assumption. And, I said: "The prior is low because actual corrupt people who have served as a US Senator for 40 years make a lot more income than he did." Your response is "well, if you assume he was part of a influence peddling scheme, his true income was higher." But whether he is corrupt is the question at hand; that assumption assumes the conclusion. So, yes, if you already "know" the answer, all evidence to the contrary is supposedly false or actually supports your conclusion. But you don't know the answer.
You said we shouldn’t expect Joe Biden to be corrupt because he has a low amount of income. My retort was you are basing low amount of income because of what Biden reported. If Joe Biden’s expenses are paid by Hunter (consistent with what Hunter claims in the email) then of course Joe’s low amount of reported income is not predictive at all of whether Biden is corrupt. That is, what you are basing your prior off of is questionable because of the known arrangement. Neither of us can prove it either way right now but it isn’t fair to use a highly questionable prior to make a Bayesian judgement here.
My comment about tax fraud is to say that it’s possible Biden has committed more crime than merely influence peddling.
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No, it doesn't. Gift income isn't taxable. You may have heard of gift tax but that's something entirely different—the purpose behind it is to prevent people from ducking the estate tax by giving all their money away before they die. As such, the burden of paying the tax is on the donor, not the recipient. In other words, if Hunter giving his dad large sums of money causes any tax issue's, they're Hunter's tax issues.
No. If I am performing services and are paid for said services, but instead of receiving compensation directly the party receiving the services pays my expenses, then that is disguised compensation and is certainly taxable income I failed to report. Key case here is Commissioner v. Duberstein.
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We had corrupt politicians in Slovakia who owned literally nothing on paper and were regularly seen inhabiting multiple small palaces in various countries, sailing on yachts, riding in expensive cars owned by other people and so on. You must have a legal term for this - not owning but using property as if you owned it.
Are we supposed to believe this sort of trickery isn't possible in the US ?
EDIT:
Okay, well, this is an alternate explanation:
https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/54089?context=8#context
Yes, of course it is possible. The question is whether it is likely in this case, given the evidence we have. And, it is pretty common knowledge that Biden was vastly less wealthy than was the norm for Senators. So, are we to believe that he engaged in Slovakia-esque "trickery," but no on else did.
And, remember, the issue here is ONLY what our prior should be. That is all.
Of course that is a bit question begging if the source of the info doesn’t contain the undisclosed payments.
As I said, "So, are we to believe that he engaged in Slovakia-esque "trickery," but no on else did." And again, this is about establishing a prior, nothing more.
Well it seems others did engage in corruption in different ways. For example, it seems obvious that Pelosi engaged in legal insider trading. Others do the “pay me outrageous sums for speaking fees.” These things are technically legal and therefore outside of political embarrassment need not be kept on the downlow.
Biden’s purported influence peddling is arguably illegal and therefore would need to be kept on the downlow. The question would be why he didn’t do the legal methods. My view is Biden isn’t particularly intelligent.
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That link estimates his net worth in 2008 as $24,000. That doesn't sound reasonable to me. Even the $360k for total investments it has below that sounds preposterously low given that he'd sold his mansion for over a million back in the 90s.
Given the performance of the stock market in 2008, the 360K is not surprising. Had he had it all in the SP500, it would have been 586,000 at the beginning of the year.
As for the house, if I buy a house for 500K and put 20% down, then sell it for 1 million, I walk away with $600,000. (And that does not count the apparently extensive renovations that were done on the house, which can easily run to the hundreds of thousands). But if I then buy a slightly nicer house for $1,100,000, my net worth, looking only at the house, is -100,000. And, depending on timing, given the housing market in 2008, it might be a lot less: If I bought in 2006, the house I paid $1,100.000 for might be worth only $900,000. It is completely believable that, because 2008 was such an outlier, his net worth would be unusually low that year. And note that the subsequent numbers are what you would expect from the recovery of the stock and housing markets.
And, don't underestimate the cost of putting three kids through private school, college, and in two cases, law school (and I guess in one case, rehab).
More to the point, as I said, the chart indicates that he was vastly less wealthy than the norm for Senators. Unless you think that he is somehow much, much better at hiding assets than are other Senators.
The chart only indicates anything if it's accurate. It looks auto generated to me, maybe scraped from public data. It's conceivable that a 65 year old lifelong senator had less savings than your average boomer but I'm gonna go with that unsourced website being bullshit. If it's not then he's certainly done well since then, Forbes put him at $9 million in 2018, so almost 400x as wealthy as he had been a decade before according to your numbers.
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I agree - I meant that my prior on Joe Biden being corrupt in ways that are unusual for Washington is low, not that my prior on his being corrupt at all is low. Hunter's early career at MBNA and Amtrak board seat stink to high heaven and would not be allowed in sane world, but that sort of crap is common in the US (and most other countries). I don't buy the claim that Joe was running an influence peddling operation with Hunter as fixer which brought in tens of million dollars, mostly because Joe Biden does not appear to have tens of millions of dollars.
At this point it seems true that Joe was in fact attempting to run an international influence peddling scheme.
Not sure where your getting he doesn’t have 10’s of millions. This looks like a proper mansion.
https://www.housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/a34430021/joe-biden-mansion-greenville-wilmington-delaware-dupont-nemours/
Did you even click the link? Biden bought it as a fixer-upper for $185k, and sold it for $1.2 million in 1996 (no publically available information as to how large the mortgage was). Mansions in the sticks (and an exurb of Wilmington is the sticks) are upper middle class purchases - the rich buy in prime locations. At modern prices that looks like a 3 million dollar home.
Based on his published tax returns, Biden made about $15 million before taxes legally from book royalties and speaking fees between his terms as VP and President. His lifestyle at the time was entirely consistent with that level of wealth.
Think you framed “10 million”. Price would depend on location and was owned by the DuPonts. It still screams mansion and fits the demands of someone with 10 million. Could be more.
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I don’t see how that is true.
Biden had a cheating scandal at university.
Biden had a plagiarism scandal in the 80s.
Biden has had questionable dealings with his brother and certain banks.
Biden doesn’t come off as squeaky clean. He comes across at least to me as a cheat.
Remember when the Democrats had Biden look at the camera, break the fourth wall, and say "do I look like an extreme leftist to you?"
They know that as long as Biden has the looks and mannerisms of an upper-middle-class grandpa with a touch of dementia, most people will map him to "harmless and with good intentions".
In reality, Biden is a lifelong politician who has likely never worked an honest day in his life. All the things you cited reinforce that. The fact that his son Hunter is all sorts of fucked up to me also reinforces that (although only as part of a constellation of data points; it is far from conclusive by itself).
Yep. Perception rules.
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Ben Schreckinger’s book, The Bidens, builds a pretty strong case that both Hunter and Joe’s brother, Jim, have tried to cash in on Joe’s name with varying degrees of success and failure over the years, and when people close to Joe have raised the issue, Biden has repeatedly chosen to plug his ears, out of familial loyalty, and the belief that if he doesn’t know about it, he is in the clear. But also, that links actually connecting Biden to any corruption have not been uncovered.
Yes, Biden has ignored conflicts of interest and in a better world he would have been disqualified from holding office. But in terms of Washington, he’s sadly rather benign.
The darkly funny thing is the Bidens are so small-time when it comes to money, and a savvier man than Joe could have cashed in far more than Biden did, at least in his senate years when representing a state with only a million people and two-thirds of America’s Fortune 500 companies registered, there. But Joe was always far more interested in holding office, with a personal dream of becoming president. In one sense, hats off to the senile old mick — privately, Obama was never bullish on his prospects — but he did it.
Impeachment when?
This is a culture war section, so one joke of an impeachment needs to be met with one that also appears to be built on flimsy ground, because the other tribe did it? I’d rather wait until some substantial proof is uncovered. Let’s say a benchmark of something worse than Jared Kushner getting $2,000,000,000 from the Saudis six months after his father-in-law left office.
But that just raises further questions! Like if you were a politician with presidential aspirations, would you let family members repeatedly cash in on your good name in shady ways for decades? Or would you try to distance yourself from them as much as possible? Imagine your brother or son just got caught for the third time doing corrupt shit and linking it to you, but they swear they did nothing wrong. Do you believe them?
What about if your boss did that at work, just let his family run around embroiling him in scandals and doing things that made him look corrupt - would you believe him when he said he believed they did nothing wrong? If you did believe him, would you trust his judgement or would you think he had an obvious blindspot rendering him easy to manipulate?
Biden is savvier than some give him credit for, and I think playing dumb is the right move here. If he gets himself actively involved in his brother and son's shady dealings, well, that raises the risk of being dragged down if they're caught. If you speak against them loudly and distance yourself as much as possible, as you say, you will have convinced approximately nobody that you're clean and have attracted approximately five million sharks who smell blood in the water.
Or you play dumb, do your own thing, and don't begrudge your family some cash paid by shady parties who think giving your relatives cushy jobs will buy them influence.
I mean - really, think about it. Suppose Biden came out tomorrow, and spoke out against his family. Suppose he condemned their influence-seeking and money-grubbing ways, coasting by on their surnames. That he'd swear up and down he had nothing to do with it, honest, fingers crossed.
Do you see that as a good move? Do you think that'll convince any single one of the people currently in doubt? Do you think it'll put the matter to rest even slightly?
I don't think it would. And in doing so he'd get people he loves and cherishes thoroughly incensed with him while just getting his opponents more ammunition: 'He knew all along! What isn't he telling us?!'
Better to play dumb. It is what it is.
The point of Joe denouncing Hunter's influence peddling operation isn't to make him look cleaner - as you point out, this wouldn't work. Never apologise, never explain is the right way to handle a scandal that isn't bad enough to concern people who are not political news junkies or enemy partisans.
The point of Joe denouncing Hunter's operation would be to let foreign crooks know that Hunter doesn't have the influence he is selling, because that would make Hunter stop. I will admit that I don't know if that would work either - I suspect the average corrupt Ukrainian businessman would assume that Joe's denunciation is performative and of course Hunter has the influence he is selling despite it.
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100% Joe needs to be impeached by the House. Retaliatory strikes are necessary in war. GOP can’t let the first impeachment stand unpunished.
This is what Trump should've taught the Republicans, but didn't really: you must fight.
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A tangent on Jim Biden — the seedier folks involved with Dickie Scruggs were tossing Jim’s name around as part of a new lobbying firm they were going to open in D.C. before the feds came down on them.
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Also, there is a new motion in the FBI Seth Rich FOIA case from the plaintiff that seems to make the claim that the FBI covered up Seth Rich's involvement in the email leak.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txed.197917/gov.uscourts.txed.197917.92.0.pdf
Previously from the FBI:
https://twitter.com/Ty_Clevenger/status/1601780110117703680
https://lawflog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/2022.12.09-FBI-reply.pdf
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I don’t think that’s what that document is implying.
The document appears to say that Hunter was claiming Bidens Delaware house as his own residence, and that also the business listed on the document was paying $50k of rent, presumably for an office space. That office space could also be Joes house, but that doesn’t seem to be indicated by the document.
There should be an investigation into this, and it should be public. I want these people in front of congress or a adversarial lawyer, and I want them questioned, including Joe.
Impeachment for Joe is a dead end, but his son needs to answer some tough questions, and if he doesn’t have the correct answers he should probably be in prison.
What's the over / under on whether (conditional on actually being guilty), Hunter Biden is actually investigated, convicted, and serves a sentence comparable to what a "regular Joe" would serve?
I would give something like 1:1000 -- or about the likelihood that the true "alt-right" has some sort of overwhelming awakening and victory (if a Mitt Romney or even Ron DeSantis-type Republican were magic-wanded into the Presidency tomorrow, I do not think he or she would push for much beyond some media noise).
On a related note, what would other people give as the odds ratio of the "alt-right" gaining some sort of overwhelming victory in the next 10 years? To me it seems like this would require some extreme sequence of events, for example DJT is assassinated by the FBI [1] and an overwhelming evidence trail comes to light.
[1] Dear Secret Service, I am not advocating for this to happen, it is a purely hypothetical scenario.
Didn’t the ALT right by the biggest media property in the world and has an owner followed by nearly everyone who spouts ALT-Right constantly.
That seems like a large victory.
Are you talking about Elon Musk and Twitter? Because I'm going to need some good evidence that Elon is an Alt-Righter, or some sort of White Nationalist.
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Agreed. The form was far from clear. I think there is a “there” there but this form doesn’t really move the needle.
Best case for Joe is that Hunter have the impression Joe was involved and all other evidence can be explained. But there is a lot of smoke here.
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