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https://apple.news/APEuOPHP2TWqeUTR_h8QypA
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.
The only evidence missing is Hunter flipping on dad - which won’t happen since his dad has pardon power or a taped phone call between Hunter/Joe which won’t happen because Hunter isn’t going to record calls with his dad.
Everything else is there. Laptop with Hunter saying dad got paid. Joe meeting many business partners. Insiders saying Joe was involved. Money changing hands.
None of it matters that it’s a strong case you will never convince partisans to turn on their only electable candidate.
There's no solid evidence that Joe got any money despite Republicans aggressively looking for it for years now.
Correct. Even if it was a slam-dunk case, it still probably wouldn't matter. "Impeachment" has become little more than a press conference with some adornments.
Honestly there isn’t a good reason for the money to directly go to Joe. Just more taxes when Joe eventually dies and the money becomes Hunters trust fund.
Just because impeachment isn’t much more than a press conference doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t hold him as accountable as they can for probably the largest bribery scandal in a century.
A quibble, but just under a century if you mean "since Teapot Dome", which was 1921-23.
More seriously, it is only the biggest bribery scandal because we don't know what Jared Kushner did for the $300 million or so the Saudis are bunging him ($300mm is my best guess of the management fee he will be getting on the $2 billion investment in his PE fund). The Jack Abramoff scandal is also bigger than Hunter in terms of dollar amount and had sympathetic victims, but it isn't clear it counts as a bribery scandal (Abramoff was prosecuted for bilking the Indian tribes who hired his lobbying firm).
My view is that the worst US bribery scandal in recent years would be the Clinton-era Chinese campaign contributions. Biden isn't accused of doing anything nearly as bad as turning a blind eye to Chinese nuclear espionage in exchange for the money.
I am positive Kush is getting 2&20. 2% mgmt fee and then carry of 20%. So if he got 2b in funds mgmt fee would be 40m. The real money is in the carry but that requires doing successful deals.
I estimated $300m based on $40m per year over the life of the fund, which is usually 5 or 7 years, plus a conservative estimate of the carry on the assumption that Kushner is a mediocre investor.
The carry is a free option (the fund manager gets paid if the fund beats the hurdle, but keeps the 2% fee if it doesn't) and if Kushner just invested in the S&P500 the Black-Scholes EV of the carry would be about $26 million. With some reasonable assumptions about using leverage to add volatility, I get numbers in the $100-150 million range.
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