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So the Republican speaker of the house has decided to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden’s business dealings with hunter. I have serious doubts that this will go very far as democrats still control the senate. This looks like an attempt to stir up the base for re-election season.
I personally see this as a big distraction as we have a lot of very serious problems that need to be addressed. BRICs, Taiwan, Ukraine, inflation, and
This is just grandstanding via toxoplasma. "The Dems impeached Trump so we've got to impeach Biden!" In the conversations I've had with people on this site who think there's a huge scandal here, I've never heard of any solid evidence about direct bribery other than the wishy-washy "money for the big guy" statement. On the point of "meetings for money", nothing Hunter did was worse than what Kushner flagrantly did during Trump's admin, and nobody even really questioned that. House Repubs haven't been able to get any better evidence after months of searching. There's basically 0 chance that they can convince 18 dem Senators to flip.
How is that wishy washy? You have to contort yourself into a pretzel to come to any other conclusion.
Because Republicans haven't been able to find any evidence to verify it despite looking very hard for years now.
This is just an incorrect statement.
They have found plenty of evidence. They haven’t found a smoking gun. But they also haven’t had complete access to bank records.
They've found evidence that Joe has taken meetings/calls with people at the request of his son, but not that anything ever came of these, or that Joe ever benefitted monetarily. Republicans have had subpoena power for years and have had a full investigation going for at least several months, and still haven't found the bribery part of the whole "bribery scandal."
Let’s start by removing the partisan valance, going back to first principles, and just thinking about how people try to corrupt government officials. You start off thinking, “Man, it’d be really nice if I could get this government official to do things that are favorable to me. In order to accomplish that, I could give him something that he wants. Then, either implicitly or explicitly, he’ll take official acts that are favorable to me.” If the expected monetary outlay required to push these officials is less than the expected gain of favorable action, you try to do it. This is Crony Capitalism 101.
Your first idea is, “Everybody likes money. I bet that government official would like it if I gave him a bag of money.” And early/unsophisticated bribery schemes do this. Naturally, the public decided, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION!” and decided to outlaw such behavior, raising the cost of trying to do something so brazen. Ok, you respond, “Let’s go back to the drawing board. What are my options?” You can probably come up with a variety of possible schemes to get around the law.
One option could be, say, giving campaign contributions. It’s a totally legal and totally cool way to give the government official a bag of money! This money has slightly less value to the government official than a bag of personal money, so you’re going to need to give a little bit more in terms of campaign money than you would have had to give personal money, but so long as the expected cost is still less than the expected reward, you still do it. Naturally, the public decided, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION!” and decided to put limits on campaign contributions.
You go back to your list of options. “Well, this government official is kind of old, and he’s got lots of money already. Probably more than he can realistically spend. Even if I could have given him money directly, that’s not ideal for him. Not only does he have to worry about it being illegal, he then is probably going to want to just give the money to his kids in the form of inheritance, and that brings taxes and public knowledge of the gains, and it’s complicated, risky, and more expensive. I know! What if I give bags of money directly to his kids! This isn’t illegal, and it’s a cheaper way of doing what he really wants to do with the money anyway! It’s a win-win!” Or maybe you think, “What if I set up a political fund that I can use to mirror the politician’s talking points, giving him a boost that is kinda like giving campaign contributions, but isn’t directly violating the law?” Sure, again, that’s a little more expensive again, but expected value yadda yadda.
Naturally, the public wants to say, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION!” They want to outlaw it. I think the public is still having debates over the latter activity because it comes so close to the core of our free speech values, but it’s a little easier for them to outlaw the former scheme. Both of these schemes are quite difficult to prove in detail. That (combined with the free speech concerns) is why the Court decided to adopt a position requiring some amount of proof of a quid pro quo in Citizens United. It’s why when we see enforcement of FCPA that maybe you end up with gigantic settlements rather than criminal charges. It’s tough to get the requisite proof. And yes, when you enforce it, it’s probably easier to enforce it against the guy giving the money than the guy taking the money. Do you need to show that the guy “taking” the money in a campaign finance case like CU had knowledge of the scheme? Maybe, because of the speech interests. Do you need to show that the guy “taking” the money in a pay-the-kids case like JPMorgan had knowledge of the scheme? Wellll... maybe not. Maybe the best you can do is go after the guy giving the money. If you can find evidence that the guy taking the money had knowledge of the scheme, too, then maybe you can try to go after him. But that’s going to be hard to do.
Ok, maybe back to some political valence. Maybe the best outcome you can get is that the guy taking the money ends up with a political hit. This would not be irrational behavior from the public. If the children of a politician, say Donald Trump, continually show up within arms’ reach of these corruption cases (say, JPMorgan paid a settlement in a case that involved one of Trump’s kids, HSBC paid a settlement in a case that involved another one, Company X... and so on, as the list builds), then it’s potentially rational behavior for the voting public to say, “BUT THAT’S CORRUPTION... and I want to punish corruption. There are impediments to doing it with criminal law, but I can at least vote against politicians like that.” This raises the costs of engaging in such a scheme and at least theoretically reduces the likelihood of future politicians doing likewise. This is basically how things worked for the left. They thought (and trumpeted to the public as loudly as possible) that Trump's kids were getting benefits, even though there wasn't a "smoking gun". You're just not really going to get one; it'll just be labeled something that is just ambiguous enough. Not ambiguous enough that we wouldn't go after international companies like HSBC when they give money to kids of Chinese politicians, but ambiguous enough that we're probably not going to go after many domestic politicians. Different reasons why here could be believed by different people. "The elite will protect their own." "No use running the risk of turning these investigations into a constant partisan shitfest or becoming a banana republic."
Obviously, there are third party costs to this method (Donald Trump’s kids and companies who may want to legitimately hire them have to avoid the appearance of corruption and so may not want to engage in trade that might otherwise be totally legal and totally cool), but pretty much all schemes to punish corruption have third party costs. It’s probably up to the voting public to determine where to draw the lines (if it goes so far as to make all kids of politicians totally unhireable, that disincentivizes potentially good politicians from seeking office). “Appearance of corruption” is an even harder-to-define standard, so voters have to wade through potential hit pieces and skewed defenses in pursuit of this goal. I think that so far, we’re not close to making kids of politicians totally unhireable, especially if they just take sorta ‘normal’ jobs, but trying to balance these factors are necessarily going to reduce the options of those kids at least somewhat.
So, in a sense, you’re right. We’re almost certainly not going to hold Joe Biden (or Hunter Biden) criminally accountable for any corruption (or impeach him and remove him from office). But there’s no reason why his political career can’t take a hit in service of the public’s goal to root out the appearance of corruption IF it’s the case that his kids keep popping up in cases that very strongly appear to be corrupt (I want to give even more emphasis on the “if”; I’ve seen the hit pieces that try to show an appearance of corruption; I haven’t really seen many defenses of the core situations besides, “There’s no way to criminally prosecute these guys anyway, so stop talking about it,” (basically how I read your defense) so I really strongly believe that the level of uncertainty is high).
Of course, at the end of all this is that we now have a right who has seen exactly how much respect the left has for these sorts of long-standing détentes. They've seen that it doesn't matter how ambiguous, how novel, how theoretically problematic the prosecution/impeachment is; it's going to be pursued to "get Trump". So, frankly, it's not surprising to see them also abandon the détente. They need to demand, "If we're going to be setting new rules for how various superweapons can be used against political opponents, we're going to make sure you agree to the rules when they're threatening your politicians. If we can't trust that this whole domain will remain benign, we need to set some precedent, and it's better to get you on the record when you're sympathetic to the 'defendent'."
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There is lots of evidence of complicated payment schemes that the IRS whistleblowers have stated they need more resources to investigate than were allocated, and some avenues were explicitly blocked (like GPS queries on Joe Biden).
They already have the Quid (payments to family members count, as does tipping them off in insider trading) and the Quo, the only thing lacking is the quo, which is the hardest element in any bribery case, because few people write checks with a "Bribe for XX" written on it. This case is already dozens of times more compelling than the Bob McDonnell case that eventually SCOTUS threw out.
If you are objecting that he didn't get all, or most, of the money, why is that relevant? If you were 70 and could get money for free, or have your kids get money wouldn't you prefer your kids? I am 35 and, over basic expenses, prefer my kids get the money.
The fact that some avenues of investigation were blocked isn't evidence of much. This happens all the time. Trump famously refused to even interview with the Mueller investigation while it was ongoing.
There's a big difference between crimes committed by the son, Hunter, and those by Joe. It's clear that Hunter is a fuckup and tried to parlay his father's status into connections and money. Going after Hunter is therefore justified, but the evidence against Joe is much more flimsy. That's why Republicans only make vague mentions of Joe's connection to this whole thing, before quickly trying to tie him to his son as much as possible as if they were functionally the same person, when it's clear their relationship has always been strained at best.
Also, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on whether Trump deserved to be impeached for all the corruption Kushner got up to, including some recent developments.
I reject the Jared-Hunter comparison. One was allowed to marry into a billionaire's family based on his personality, potential, etc. The other was borne into a politician's family. That they both make money at times is not the same. In fact, even the timing isn't similar. Hunter's payments were during the potential peak of Biden's power (few anticipated him ever being president) the other happened at the lowest of lows of Trump's influence.
Anyways. Hunter's crimes are Joe's crimes if Hunter and several other witnesses are not liars. Joe's lawyers are welcomed to impeach such witnesses at the hearings. You think they will be successful, I am not sure they will be.
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Isn’t what you described like the definition of bribery. Hunter gets paid and Joe talks to the business associates?
There’s a question of whether Joe did anything bad for the money like say fired the prosecutor at their request.
But it’s clearly been established that the Bidens were paid for access to Joe and Joe gave them access while he was the VP. That’s bribery.
That's lobbying. The professional lobbying industry is rife with legal-but-sleazy cash-for-access schemes. It is completely legal, and SOP in DC, for a government official to meet with people because they hired a lobbying firm that donates to their campaign/hires their failson for a cushy job/promises to hire them for a cushy job after they leave office/block-books a large number of rooms in their hotel at an above-market rate. A lot of this stuff can't be banned, because petitioning the government is 1st amendment protected activity.
The difference between selling influence and selling access is hard to prove, but it is critical to bribery law. It also matters to the situational ethics of the DC swamp - selling a policy change for cash is against the "Code" even if you manage to do it in a way which skirts bribery law.
It’s bribery when the VP personally financially benefits from the arrangement. It’s allowed for campaign contributions. Being that the VP did personally financially benefit its bribery. Also, first amendment doesn’t apply to Burisma.
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If they were a single person, perhaps. But considering they are in fact two different individuals, things are different. Is Hunter guilty of something? Almost certainly. Is Joe though? If he had knowledge of Hunter's deal and/or if he got payments himself, then yes. But that's critically where Republicans haven't been able to produce evidence despite years of trying.
There is no way he didn’t know about Hunters deal. Many in the state department were not happy with Hunter and thought it was causing them issues. Biden met with Burisma executives. And the White House official statements now is that Joe called Hunter everyday. Hunter flew on Air Force one with Joe to see clients.
In summary Joe was bribed.
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He did have knowledge!!! He set up Robert Peters email and reached out for a call with Burisma and CCed Hunter. He met with numerous Hunter business associates.
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Joe doesn’t personally need to benefit. If he directs payments to his family members that would be sufficient. And lo and behold his entire family got money — millions of dollars— for no apparent reason.
As late as October 2015 the state department sent emails stating it believed Ukraine under Shokin made significant anti corruption efforts. Indeed Nuland had sent Shokin a letter stating that then Secretary of State Kerry was impressed with Shokin personally.
The European Commission praised Shokin’s anti corruption progress nine days after Biden issued his ultimatum.
That is, both the Europeans and State believed Shokin was doing a good job. Yet Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.
Shokin was a problem for Burisma.
A credible FBI informant told the FBI Biden was paid to get Shokin fired.
Republicans entered the impeachment inquiry to grant incremental power to obtain bank records. If they can corroborate the amounts paid with what the informant told the FBI, then it seems Biden is dead to rights.
PS what are you talking about with years? They have had 9 months.
Here’s your source
https://nypost.com/2023/09/08/despite-bidens-claim-europeans-werent-trying-to-oust-ukraine-prosecutor-targeting-hunters-firm/
I’ve been hearing on Reddit for years that Shokin was corrupt and everyone wanted him fired. Turns out that was just Bidens team invention after they fired him.
Yep. To me this is the equivalent of the smoking gun. State loved Shokin. The Europeans loved Shokin. Then Biden got him fired and after that tunes changed.
Why did Joe get involved with the firing of an AG that was at worst not hindering anti corruption efforts? Well we have a witness claiming it was because he got paid millions.
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Who's the big guy? Can you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt it's Biden, and not some other person Hunter meant? Hunter is about as credible as a fox in a henhouse with the feathers sticking to his mouth claiming that he's a vegetarian.
Any halfway decent lawyer should be able to throw enough doubt on that statement.
This is silly. If you think this, you would never convict on basically anything. Hypothetical:
John is married to Jill. Joe pork's Jill in John's bed. John sees this. John writes reddit post about how he saw this porking. He then berates Jill repeatedly causing her to make several reddit posts about the issue, as well as to call friends about it.
2 Days later John reports a boating accident where all his guns were lost.
10 Days later Joe is dead, gunshot to the head.
Various guns are found on the bottom of the lake. One matches the ballistics of the murder of Joe.
Fingerprints of John are found in Joe's death room, but, he's been there before. Joe met Jill because Joe and John were friendly (pre-adultery).
So, in most jurisdictions, John is dead to rights here. And his case is less compelling than the case against Joe (Biden). You just don't like to admit what is actually happening. Circumstantial evidence convicts thousands of people a day. Particularly on the portion of the charge that everyone tries to claim is not "proven" in this case: Motive. Motive is almost always entirely circumstantial evidence. Do people honestly think lots of murderers have direct evidence of "malice aforethought"? Hell no. Even the dumbest murder defendants rarely say, "I killed that man because I hated him and had for a long time" to the police.
Ballistics matching is pseudoscientific nonsense.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-field-of-firearms-forensics-is-flawed/%3famp=true
Ok. There is one gun. It matches John's serial # and has the same bullets as were used to kill Joe. In fact, the magazine is missing the exact number of shots that were taken at the scene. And this particular bullet company stamps batches, and its the same batch as those that killed Joe.
He's still guilty. He probably is without the gun for most juries.
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Fucking what?! We've been putting people in jail based on this shit?
PS if you want to link the article without Google's amp nonsense, click the share icon at the very top of the page on the right (you might have to scroll down a bit to get it to drop down, but it's designed to be at the top of the page no matter where you are in the article.)
I'm aware, I was just in a rush combined from "Someone's being wrong on the internet" and "there's 10 patients I need to see after I leave the shitter" haha. Amp is cancer.
Lol I figured you would know, but I was compelled to respond by the slight chance you didn't and my loathing of amp.
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Burn pattern and bite mark analysis are similarly bullshit. Ditto psychological profiling, but no points for that one. Given the pattern, it's likely that other aspects of forensic science are bunk as well.
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Wow, here's my daily redpill. You're saying all those cop shows don't accurately predict the process of law enforcement? :'(
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From what I gathered from this article, they didn't show ballistic matching was "nonsense", only that it doesn't have the rigor expected of the scientific method.
They provide an example of forensics not classifying "inconclusive" reports as errors. However, I agree with the forensics here. If you look at ballistic data and say "I can't tell for sure Joe was shot from this gun", that's not an error, that's working exactly as intended.
Justice isn't an exact science, in general.
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Theres corroborating testimony grom one of his business partners, plus other statements by Hunter from the laptop complaining that Joe took half of what other family members made, including Hunter.
Additionally, we know from Hunter's Chateau Marmont prostitute binge that he and Joe shared a joint bank account - Hunter overpaid the prostitute and then started getting frantic calls from the Secret Service about why VPOTUS's bank accounts were transferring tens of thousands of dollars to shady escort services.
Further, we also know that Joe didn't disclose $5.2 million in income that cant be explained by known income sources (salaries, etc.).
Its all very suggestive.
All the pieces fit. You just don’t have the final cornerstone that connects it beyond any doubt.
Edit: there’s actually testimony from multiple business parties.
If all the pieces fit, it is because it is very easy to fit anything into the glaringly big voids this jigsaw leaves us. 'It totally could be Joe, see, see!' isn't enough in court and it shouldn't be enough for much else, either.
With due respect, I think there is a lot more specific evidence here compared to “it totally could be Joe.”
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We have three persons saying the big guy is Biden. No one has even proffered a suggestion it was someone else.
I don’t know why the standard here is “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” Until there is other evidence, it has been satisfied to the reasonable doubt standard.
When it comes to impeachment, there's no defined standard of evidence anyways. "Preponderance of the evidence" is as valid a standard as "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Indeed. My preferred standard is "smells kinda fishy". We passed that point a long time ago.
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It is wishy washy because Hunter Biden is a liar, and it was a statement he made at a time when he was motivated to lie - the foreign crooks he was dealing with wanted to bribe Joe (although paying Hunter for access would be 2nd best), and would be much more willing to pay off Hunter if they thought the money was reaching Joe.
The "10% for the big guy e-mail" is one crook sending a note to another saying he was going to put aside some money for the big guy, but no money was actually put aside for Joe Biden except, possibly, in Hunter's head (unless there is non-public information about a segregated account, but if the Republicans had that I suspect they would have leaked it by now).
The fundamental problem with making "Joe Biden personally was on the take via Hunter" stick based on a jigsaw of weak evidence is that normally a lifestyle that exceeds known clean income is a key piece of the jigsaw, and Joe's lifestyle between VP and President was entirely consistent with what he has always claimed to be in his financial disclosures, i.e. an old guy with a net worth in the low double figure millions.
This. Hunter is perfectly capable of thinking it'd be a great idea to squeeze more money out of the guys bribing him by saying "yeah but I need some vigorish for the big guy (wink wink nod nod)" and bumping up the take that way.
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How bout when he emailed his daughter saying “at least I don’t make you give 50% of your money to me like pop does?”
How bout the fact that everyone in the Biden family was getting paid (why was Hunter so generous and wasn’t everyone else a bit suspicious “hmm why am I getting all of this money for nothing”)
If I were Hunter's parents, I'd be taking 100% of his money because the guy is a spendthrift wastrel who thinks it's a brilliant idea to post dick pics and photos of himself taking drugs and fucking hookers online.
That line could be lies, or it could be true, but if it's true there's no reason to think the money is a bribe/passing on baksheesh, rather than the family trying to ensure Hunter doesn't spend every last dollar and there's something in reserve to pay bills for him.
Either of these could be correct ... so why are we having to guess here? The latter in particular sounded like a cool theory when I first heard it from an apologist, but the more time elapses the more suspicious it gets not to hear any clarification from the Bidens themselves. If the apologia are false, they still reduce public suspicion so there's an obvious reason to neither confirm (and risk getting caught in a lie) or deny (and risk the follow up question of "what was Hunter talking about then?") anything. But if an innocent theory is true, why not just confirm it by this point? Wouldn't either of these theories be an even more impressive exoneration if its source was "claimed as a fact by the Bidens" rather than "suggested as a hypothesis by some guys on the internet"?
Also Biden has already been caught in numerous lies on this topic. It is weird to me that so many people are trying to come up with innocent explanations that aren’t pretty complex to be true.
Also, these explanations always seem to work for some but not all of the evidence. The only explanation that fits all the know issues is the simplest — corruption.
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What leverage do they have over him to make him fork over 50% of his income? He isn’t 18. He doesn’t seem to like the situation. They have no control unless the reason he gets the money is because of them.
It also doesn’t explain why all of the other Biden’s were benefiting from Hunter’s largesse.
Simple, Hunter is selling what Joe produces. It's a partnership. Why would Joe continue to risk his political career making these moves for Hunter if Hunter didn't pay him his share of the proceeds?
This seems like a pretty tight knit family. It's completely plausible that Joe directed Hunter to include Jim and others.
Joe is clearly in charge here. At any point he could have informed Hunter's business partners that 0 favors or consideration would be given to anyone giving Hunter money and Hunter would have stopped receiving money. I'm positive that Joe made a decision to maintain at least ambiguity so the money keeps flowing even if Joe isn't getting any personally.
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On 1) failsons who get bailed out as often as hunter does have good reason to go along with parental requests of the sort.
How is his dad bailing him out? Be specific.
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