A blurb that’s almost certainly going to be oft-discussed so I may as well post it.
Who is “we” in the above paste?
“…we got the results back…”
The speaker describes himself as so:
And “we” is him and his investigative team in the IRS (it’s unclear because of redactions whether the various references to Special Agent X is one person or many who work for him).
(From Sage Rat’s link…)
An outstanding. Got it. I believe I’ve sat next to him in a few bars. He tells me all about his wife, Morgan Fairchild. And how he used to play for the Blackhawks.
I have a few questions, assuming that this is actually a real WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden.
First, what was Hunter Biden’s father’s position on July 30th, 2017? How much pull did he have in the Trump administration?
Second, was Hunter’s threats in anyway corroborated? Sounds like a “my dad can beat up your dad” brag to me.
Finally, what exactly were they wanting to search for in the Biden residence?
He was a private citizen. He had no influence at all on the Trump administration.
No. There is no corroboration that Joe Biden was sitting next to his son that day.
I’m not sure but I assume they would be looking for the evidence to prove that there is a massive left wing conspiracy to turn everyone into a gay trans Mexican immigrant through wokeness. It’s just a guess, I could be wrong.
This article says Hunter was an active drug addict at the time. Assuming the texts are real, Hunter was almost certainly lying, as active drug addicts tend to do.
That whole message sounds a lot more like Donny Jr. than Hunter, actually.
Well, that and according to this person, the messages were from 2017.
What position of authority did Joe Biden have in 2017 again? And what influence did he have with any administration officials?
And for similar reasons, cocaine is a hell of a drug.
I had to break off, last night. To continue:
The testimony continues on to allege a variety of questionable activities by AUSA Lesley Wolf, denying warrants, requiring them to avoid certain topics, etc. The accusations are too numerous to summarize. Most significant of these are some calls to the Biden family to give advance notice to them of impending search warrants and interview requests. The whistleblower alleges that (in one instance) they had a dozen or half dozen or so people that they intended to interview and were only able to accomplish one because of this advance notice.
He alleges that, while the investigation was supposed to be under the control of David Weiss, a Biden appointee (Matthew Graves) was able to block two particular tax years from being charged before the statute of limitations would pass. He says that Biden was able to avoid charges for a failure to pay taxes on funds from Burisma. (I would need to double-check whether he explicitly says that Hunter has not paid back his taxes for 2014 and 2015.)
He alleges that Weiss requested, to Garland’s DOJ, to be converted into a Special Counsel so that he would have power to override people like Matthew Graves, and had the request denied.
Still reading…
Oh, right where I stopped reading last night:
On the other hand:
That seems to be the end of his factual assertions on (his perceived) mis-proprieties in the investigation. I’ll try to skim through the Q&A section to see if anyone brings up any interesting points, among the majority or minority participants.
I got tired of reading, and then tired of skimming so I’m gonna way for summaries of all this stuff. He’s pretty much saying he thinks they could have put the screws to Hunter. I consider the quality of the Hunter Biden investigation and plea deal open to question but I will say that all of the active IRS agents I have dealt with except one were lying scumbags. The one guy who didn’t lie to me did help me out in the end. He knew I was getting screwed while the rest joined in the conspiracy to cover up crimes by other IRS agents, but I don’t know anything else about him. So don’t take anything this guy says about the investigation at face value.
Similar. Most of the follow-up is basically going over the details of Hunter’s finances and accounting shenanigans, and the fine details of everything stated in the intro. I’m not seeing any bonus revelations.
In general, I’d classify things under two categories that would be of importance to the general public:
- Whether a reasonable process was followed, while investigating Hunter Biden.
- Whether Joe Biden - the President of our country - is implicated in anything.
For the first, my sense is that for as many complaints as the whistleblower might have, most of them are probably the product of boring answers.
- The DOJ was taking lead and the IRS investigation was just in the way, and this guy wouldn’t take the message.
- Fear of making any mistakes made people too cautious, so anything short of a slam dunk went from being a “yellow light” to a “no go”, where usually it would be synonymous with a “green light”. And, while that’s arguably wrong, it’s not surprising.
- Elections and midterms forced them to stop for months at a time.
- Without appointees in office, for certain positions (e.g. California), the people who could approve stuff weren’t available and the temporary office holders might not have felt comfortable making those approvals (see #2).
- The Executive is off limits for investigation by the Executive Branch.
- Likewise, Barr made candidates off limits from investigation as well.
To take an example, with Matthew Graves declining to prosecute Hunter for his Burisma tax issues. If they have a large backlog, it’s an old case, the evidence is more in the “yellow light” territory than the “green light” territory, tax crimes aren’t generally charged, etc. then it might not have been worth his time.
That said, the activities of Lesley Wolf do feel a bit questionable - particularly in notifying the suspect of upcoming investigation actions. Most of everything she did would be explainable by the above, but not that.
I haven’t been able to find any significant information about Wolf. She seems to have been in her position under Bill Barr but I don’t know if she was raised into her position by him, Jeff Sessions, is a holdover from Obama’s time in office, or what. Without talking to her, there’s no good way to know if she’s strongly opposed to politically-charged investigations, a Liberal holdout, a brown-noser who was looking for a promotion after 2020, or what. Any conclusion, at the moment, would be based on air.
As to the question of whether Joe Biden has done anything corrupt, the only thing in this vein that I saw was Hunter’s message to Henry Zhao telling him to “fulfill his commitment”, saying that Joe Biden was sitting next to him and expected compliance.
What this implies, I have no idea. From a theoretical standpoint, any of the below are options:
- Hunter has been given a role of “corrupt son of the VP/President” by the CIA and secretly goes around, working with American assets abroad. The stress of this double identity may be some part of his plunge into alcoholism and drug addiction.
- Hunter is occasionally contacted by people who want him to pass messages between himself and his father. He does so, but it’s not anything regular, and he’s not a preferred conduit because of his habits and inclinations.
- Hunter pretends that his father is involved in his business activities, to attract interest and to increase his own influence.
- Joe Biden is covertly involved in his son’s business affairs.
The region around #2 and #3 is the most likely from an Occam’s Razor viewpoint. The boring answer is the right answer.
Likely, because of restrictions on investigating the Executive and candidates, none of this was investigated and so there’s really no information to use to narrow it down. If you want to go for item #1, then there’d be extra push to not investigate that territory. But, again, there’s no reason to go there, on the basis of the information that’s been provided.
Since the standard statute of limitations for tax offenses, such as underreporting income, is three years, I do not find anything suspicious in their failure to charge tax offenses committed in 2014 and 2015.
Such statutes of limitations are a good tool for the prevention of politically based prosecutions. The theory is that if the offense was that bad, they would’ve caught it when Hunter Biden was under a lesser degree of political scrutiny.
Now, there are some exceptions that extend that statute to six years. That exception is highly technical and dependent on the extent of the underreporting relative to the total income of the offender. Of course, even if that applied that would only extend it to 2020 and 2021, which might not have helped in the prosecution. And it’s likely that Hunter didn’t qualify for the exception, which is geared towards people that fail to report most or all of their income.
I’m not sure what to make of the statement that the defense voluntarily agreed to waive the statute of limitations. I’m skeptical because I can’t imagine a lawyer would be that incompetent. It may be possible that they agreed to let the feds examine older returns, possibly because they thought they would contain something exculpatory — BECAUSE they knew he couldn’t be charged with anything in those returns. But prosecutors typically don’t get to unilaterally suspend the statute of limitations without specific legal cause, because that would defeat the purpose.
As for the rest of the investigation, including the WhatsApp messages — I’m under the impression that the purpose of the DOJ and FBI is to investigate crimes, and I don’t see a crime or anything resembling a crime anywhere.
No one’s alleging that anyone made money off the deal. At worst, Hunter Biden vaguely implied - without making any specific representations - that his father - who was a private citizen at the time and perfectly free to legally engage in business - was involved in the deal. There’s no evidence that Joe Biden had any involvement and plenty of evidence he didn’t…….have you heard what Tony Bobulinski actually testified to?
He claims Joe Biden once stopped by during a business meeting for a few minutes, shook his hand and thanked him for his military service and wished them luck. I actually believe that, it sounds like Joe playing the supportive dad trying to help his son get back on his feet.
Bobulinski has a laughable narrative around that meeting in which he claims that Hunter and Jim Biden told them Joe was deeply involved in the deal but was going to come into the meeting and pretend he wasn’t, and Bobulinksi was under strict instruction not to mention any details of the business in Joe’s presence, because private citizen Joe Biden, a man perfectly free to engage in private business, had to pretend he wasn’t involved. LOL.
But anyway, where’s the crime in any of this?
And I don’t feel it’s fair to look at this in a vacuum without considering the motives of the actors promoting this narrative.
First, the infamous laptop. The people that control the information on the laptop have seen fit to only release the snippets that support their narrative and have constantly refused to release the entire contents to anyone that might look at them critically. This leads me to infer that there is probably exculpatory information on the laptop that runs counter to their narrative.
Secondly, there is the complete and total counterfactual dishonesty of the Ukraine narrative……basically accusing Biden of “firing a prosecutor that was investigating his son’s employer” without mentioning that the prosecutor was fired for being in cahoots with Burisma, which resulted in millions of ill-gotten gains that had been seized by Great Britain being returned to the owner of Burisma.
This is not hard to understand, and I’m 100% sure that the people reporting the counterfactual narrative that firing the prosecutor helped rather than hurt Burisma know this, too.
These are the same people that publicly released a highly personal voice mail message in which Joe Biden tearfully pleads with his son to get help with his drug problem and implied that there was something nefarious about that.
Given all that, they -and you- are hundreds of miles away from giving me any reason to believe that there was anything improper, much less criminal, going on with Joe regarding the failed business deal in 2017.
I will also add that I believe the entire “scandal” is just standard Trumpism “hit them 10 times harder” to punish Joe Biden for not only daring to run for President against their God, but for kicking his ass.
And I also believe one of their goals is to push Hunter into a relapse just so they can punish and embarrass his father, and I think that’s despicable, possibly even more despicable than the right wing implication that the vicious politically motivated home invasion assault of Nancy Pelosi’s husband was a sexual encounter gone wrong….an allegation based on one badly phrased sentence in one minor news outlet.
It’s not clear who “you” is but, just in case it’s me, I’ll note that I concur with your analysis. I’m just posting what the guy said, not endorsing it.
Excellent post. Well done!
In a tweet posted Thursday night, Newsmax correspondent Alex Salvi claimed that Hunter was invoking “then VP Biden.” What makes this especially strange is that Salvi actually included the date of the reported text message, both in his own tweet setup and in a screen grab from Shapley’s complaint.
:Nelson laugh:
The Onion must be feeling their market share slipping away, when “MSM” post headlines like that.