What is the fucking crime?
Who did what for whom that was illegal when they did it? Names and times.
You need evidence that a crime was committed, not evidence that people owned laptops, or had dinner, or said “Hi, what’s the weather like over there?” on a speakerphone.
Don’t let Sam know this, because it might actually cause his brain to explode, but an impeachment isn’t an investigation, it’s a charge of misconduct. What misconduct? Why that’s what they’re having the impeachment to find out! It’s the Mobius strip of MAGA impeachment logic.
The issue (in part) is in what is and isn’t debate.
For instance, the fact that you refuse to acknowledge when someone provides factual evidence refuting your position, or pointing out the falsehood in something you have said (either of your own make, or gleaned from other sources). You don’t.
An example is just up there, post 1308, where someone provided a clear and factual response to your claim that was false. Do you acknowledge that, and show you are willing to have these discussions in good faith, that you can acknowledge when you are either wrong, or have been lied to and accepted it without verification?
But, if your history holds true, you will NOT acknowledge that you were wrong, you will NOT acknowledge the post, nor this one, and you will be found posting the same lie about the plea deal that you stated here.
Which is WHY people have such a problem with you. You are smart, and you have been on this board as long or longer than I have, but you have this giant, gaping blind spot much like Der Trihs does/did about how he interacts with people and why folks respond the way they do that is highly resistant to being corrected (I suspect due to sunk cost fallacy).
I can’t believe I actually believed his story about his son creating an account on his machine. There is now 10,000 times more “evidence” that he’s a trock than there is that Joe Biden has done anything remotely resembling an offense.
Good thing the mods are 100,000 time more fair minded than the shitstain.
As I asked in the other thread,
because I don’t see how if you don’t have evidence that they discussed business then what crime are you investigating?
I’ll take “Questions that will be ignored and never answered” for $100, Alex.
You owe me a new irony meter.
Being the father of a person the magatoflatearthers don’t like.
That, too.
Not to mention some of the magatoflatearthers GOP types in the legislature, IIRC, have admitted there’s no there there for impeaching President Biden.
Let’s call that Rittenhouse Rule.
I’m going with: “It’s the Klein Bottle of MAGA impeachment logic”. After all, *Möbius strip" is a real thing. MAGA logic isn’t.
There’s a disconnect in understanding for many people between “evidence” and “proof”.
Evidence is something that you can ask a judge to allow you to present in a court room, on which you can base some argument. Proof is a piece of evidence that so strongly backs an argument or a combination of evidence that does so, that there’s no reasonable doubt that the argument is the right one.
I might have a piece of evidence - a video that demonstrates that Bob was in town on the same day that the police station burned down. It is not proof that Bob is the arsonist, but it is evidence. Likewise, the defense can use that same evidence to show that Bob was too far away from the fire at a particular moment in time, to have been the one who set it, regardless that he was in town.
In popular parlance we would say that evidence is “for” something if someone is using the evidence for that argument. And if we say that it’s evidence for something, that does not mean that it proves that thing. It means only and merely that someone has been able to make the argument. The same item of evidence can be - and most often is - evidence for both sides in court, or at least it’s a lawyer’s job to frame every piece of evidence in that way.
But so let’s imagine that we’re in court and the prosecution shows the video and claims that it’s evidence that Bob set the fire. Does the defense get to stand up, declare that the video isn’t evidence of that, that it’s a lie, and that the Judge needs to kick the prosecution out of the court? No. That would be ridiculous. The prosecution did not lie. There is a video, it does factually demonstrate that Bob was in town on the day of the fire, and that does bump up Bob’s likelihood of being the arsonist versus some random guy living in Tanzania by some margin. That the defense doesn’t find the video to be a smoking gun, irrefutable item of proof, doesn’t turn the evidence into a lie.
Now, if the prosecution claims that they have a video of Bob actually setting the fire, but it turns out that the video was staged by prosecution, paying homeless people to dress up and play the part - well, then, yeah, now the defense can call “lie”. The prosecution is just inventing stuff out of thin air. But if they’re presenting the evidence in a light counter to how you want it presented, that’s not lying. If the evidence is somewhere in the middle territory between “hogwash” and “a smoking gun”, that’s also not lying. That evidence can be submitted into the discussion and it’s fair to discuss it on its relative merit as “evidence”, not proof.
@Sam_Stone is not lying by saying that there’s evidence that Joe Biden is involved in his son’s business. There is evidence, people have made an argument using it. That evidence isn’t convincing to you, but no one claimed that it was a smoking gun, no one claimed that it was proof.
You don’t find it convincing. Great. Good for you. So long as @Sam_Stone is factually attesting what’s in the testimony - no more and no less - then he’s being truthful. If you’re worried that he thinks that it’s smoking gun proof, then you should ask him how he ranks it because maybe you’re wrong and reading too much into what he wrote.
Hey @Sam_Stone, how much weight do you give the evidence? On a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is “the evidence adds negligible weight to the argument” and 100 is “a smoking gun for the argument”, where does Hunter’s question, framed as his father’s question, about whether the Chinese business man had followed through on that thing count as evidence that Joe Biden is a sell-out to China?
I might put it down as a 5. It’s not strongly meaningful. But it’s more in the direction of a connection to Chinese business than the average Tanzanian has and so it’s fair to call it evidence.
What evidence?
Evidence that Donald Trump rapes children,
(That’s how this works right?)
That is, indeed, evidence that Trump is a child rapist. Your average person hasn’t formed a friendship with someone who (by all appearances) was a sexual predator that wasn’t too fussed by age limits.
Better evidence is that Epstein isn’t Trump’s only acquaintance in that realm.
None of that is proof, though.
Jeeze, the evidence that the impeachment is being done to collect. How many times does this MAGA talking point inversion of logic need to be repeated before people accept it as fact. It’s almost as hard as explaining that the 2020 election was stolen. Just say it enough times, and it becomes true.
The specific evidence would be a reference to “setting money aside for the Big Guy” and a second message where Hunter claimed that his dad was asking a businessman in China whether he’d “fulfilled his commitment”. Or, at least, I take that to be what the discussion was about minus better links into the topic.
And even if they did discuss business, I don’t see a crime. People are allowed to discuss business. (although it would be evidence that Joe lied about that fact)
The first is about equivalent to “some guy said he heard that Biden is corrupt”. The second demonstrates Hunter is a bullshitter, which I accept.
I’ll note that Sam’s claims were almost all about a bunch of debunked bullshit (like the shell companies lie).
How was the shell company ‘lie’ debunked? Where? If you mean someone saying, “hey, people set up a shell company for legitimate purposes all the time”, that’s not a ‘debunking’. It’s an argument to be used against the other side’s arguments, but it’s not by itself ‘debunking’. A debunking would be when you provide strong evidence that no shell companies were set up, or you can provide a fiduciary reason for them that’s not just picked out of the air.
The evidence I’ve listed so far? I’d say it’s enough to warrant an investigation (obvously, since Hunter has already been subject to multiple investigations over this), but in terms of Joe? Enough for an inquiry, but nowhere near enough to convict, even in a non-criminal impeachment trial. If we’re going 0-100 in terms of is there enough evidence to warrant an investigation, and the threshold for that is 50, I’d say 75.
The specific evidence in question is also not enough to convict. It’s circumstantial. IMO, to impeach and remove a President needs some kind of smoking gun. A witness to actual quid pro quos, a video of Biden making a demand for money from a foreign national, something like that. But “A guy saw Biden talking with a Chinese official” doesn’t cut it.
In terms of ‘guilt’, I’m not sure a number works there, but I’d say it’s well below 50 still and there needs to be more damning evidence before impeachment is on the table.
Even the example of the WhatsApp message where Hunter basically threatens CEFC by saying Dad was there with him, and if they don’t pay up Dad and his friends will make their lives miserable. I find it completely possible that Joe Biden had no knowledge of this, wasn’t there, and Hunter said it because he’s an addict and needed the money badly and has no judgment so he’d say whatever he had to. I also find it possible that Joe WAS there, and telling his son exactly what his son said. But the message in question doesn’t resolve that, so it’s not strong enough to convict someone on, or even to charge them with a crime. But investigate? Hell yeah.
So, enough to warrant an invesigation, but if this is all they have at the end of that investigation, they should not impeach Biden.
As a political case, though, it’s a slam-dunk that Joe Biden lied to the AAmerican people many times, during the campaign right up to today. It’s up to the voters to decide if they care. My guess is that they don’t - at least not the 37% that still approve of Joe Biden, since we’re in a poliical phase now where it’s simply tribal.
For the same reason, religious conservatives don’t seem to care that Trump is a serial scumbag who violates most Christian ethics, and the MAGA anti-Vaxx/anti-lockdown people don’t seem to care that the Vax program got started under Trump, he took credit for it, and his administration supported the lockdowns. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to matter with Trump.
By the way, it’s comments like that which get me the same treatment on right-wing boards.
The right hates the left, the left hates the right, and they don’t care how godawful their orn candidates are so long as they ‘fight’.
Also, thanks for helping make my point. I didn’t know that the word ‘evidence’ was so misunderstood.
Didn’t all of this – again – allegedly happen in July of 2017, when Joe Biden was a private citizen?
In a different world, I’d be willing to make this point to you ad infinitum.
But this world ain’t that one, and this shit makes you look as bad as the most anti-Sam Doper says you are.
Why? What’s in it for you?
Let me explain how “My dad just talked about the weather” is not necessarily innocuous. Joe Biden doesn’t have to talk about business at all on the phone to engage in influence peddling. And if he has any brains, he wouldn’t.
Rob Walker said that they were selling “The Appearance of Access”. Let’s say that’s all it was. How do you give the appearance of access? You get Dad on the phone.
“Look, my Dad can get that energy deal through for you. Trust me.”
“How do we know you even have access to your dad? Or that your dad will help?”
“Okay, I’ll call him. We have this set up. He can’t say anything incriminating on the phone, obviously. But he’ll answer, say hi, chat a bit about the weather, and hang up. Okay? By the way, did you see that I arrived in China on Air Force Two? My Dad is a full partner in this.”
That could all be Hunter, and Joe might know nothing. He gets a call from Hunter, is confused about why he’s calling from a business meeting, so he says some inanities and hangs up. That’s possible. But a plain reading of the transcript would suggest that Joe is involved in some way. That’s why you do an investigation.
But Joe Biden does have to talk about business to support your claim that he lied when he said he didn’t talk about business.
That willfully ignores a lot of other explanations, the point remains, there is no evidence that Joe Biden was involved.
The memos are written in a partisan manner — ignoring or playing down contrary information — but an interesting pattern has emerged. The memos themselves have careful language that is often hedged. Then Comer and other GOP lawmakers, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), go on Twitter or speak to conservative media using hyperbolic language that goes well beyond what the memos say. Over time, the reporting on the memos in conservative media becomes untethered from the documentation in the reports.
For instance, the second staff memo never says that Hunter Biden used “shell” companies — a term often associated with shady or illegal activity, even though a shell company is a legitimate entity. Comer once described such an entity as “a fake company … they don’t make anything. They don’t produce anything. They don’t provide a good or service.” He is not wrong about many shell companies, but the memo lists real companies, with active websites and real business functions. (The third staff memo refers to just one “shell” company, which we will describe later.)
As for the $20 million in payments**,** Comer and other Republicans invoke this figure often. A close reading of the memos, however, finds that only about $7 million can be directly attributed to Biden family members, mostly Hunter, while the rest went to “associates,” according to the memos. Yet Comer and other lawmakers misleadingly suggest all of the money went to the Biden family or, as some label it, “the Biden crime family.” No evidence has emerged that any of these funds can be traced to Joe Biden himself.
Comer often suggests that the Biden family used these so-called shell companies to launder money; in his telling, such companies served no legitimate function. But that claim is undercut by the list of 21 companies that appear in the second staff memo.
Virtually all of the companies (many of which now are defunct) had legitimate business interests. Others had clearly identified business investments.
The Pinocchio Test
Hunter Biden’s decision to pursue business deals that at the time overlapped with his father’s policy brief as vice president was ill-advised and has caused political headaches for his father. Republicans are pursuing the case with vigor, but Comer undercuts the findings of his investigation by hyping what has been found. He claims there were more than 20 “shell companies,” but upon inspection most of the companies named had legitimate business transactions or investments. He claims the Bidens received more than $20 million from foreign sources, leaving off the caveat in the staff reports that two-thirds of the payments went to Hunter Biden’s business partners.
Comer would have more credibility if he stuck to documented facts — such as saying precisely that Hunter Biden received $7 million from foreign sources. He earns Three Pinocchios.