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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...
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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