This particular dude on the other board seems to be convinced that if a Democrat makes money, they are guilty of something. It’s OK If A Republican Does It. He’ll say this with no sense of irony whatsoever.
I’m still taking the position that it doesn’t matter at all what Hunter Biden did or didn’t do.
If Trump suspected that an American citizen was committing financial crimes abroad, the appropriate action would’ve been to go to the FBI. They operate all over the world and jointly investigate crimes involving both countries.
The FBI has a legat in Ukraine. So, please don’t get sidetracked. Even if Biden was the next Bernie Madoff what Trump did was still completely and totally wrong. We HAVE a system, via these joint investigations, where a citizen can be prosecuted for overseas crimes while still receiving at least some of the protections accorded to him by American law. So don’t kid yourself that Trump was only delivering justice.
Unfortunately, what the American public doesn’t understand is that the Ukraine and Russia are completely and totally corrupt. It can never be “cleaned up” because if you stripped away the corruption there would be nothing left.
It’s baked into the oligarch system, where a few lucky and loyal cronies were rewarded with formerly state run assets like gas and electric companies, shipping fleets, mining and industrial production , making them rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Then, whether via election or coup, there is regime change. Now, all those oligarchs will be deemed corrupt and papers and documents will show up proving that the didn’t really own those companies at all. Some will flee the country, maybe with assets. The unlucky ones get to stick around as they are tried and convicted. This is done in the name of “cleaning up corruption”. Then their stuff will be given back to “the people”, in actuality the people that the new government picked to be oligarchs.
Sometimes foreign businesspeople are caught up in it, especially if the ruling oligarchs smell money. That’s what happened to American investor Bill Browder. The Russian companies he managed for private investors were stolen out from under him in a far reaching plot involving all levels of government and judicial corruption. One of his local employees, Serge Magnitsky, was murdered in prison. The individuals sanctioned in the Magnitsky Act were the participants in this crime.
I became interested in corruption in the former USSR after reading Browder’s book Red Notice, which I highly recommend. Now I know Hunter Biden is in Ukraine but it’s just as bad as Russia. Maybe worse, because they have lots of regime flips while Putin has held power for a long time, even if by proxy.
But when you’re talking about Ukraine, they’re really no corrupt guys and good guys, they’re all corrupt. Now one thing in Hunter’s defense is that both the guy that owned the gas company and the prosecutor that got fired were on the same side of the chessboard, as it were. So that firing would’ve hurt Biden’s guy, not helped him. But I’m sure I’m like the millionth person to point this out.
But if Trump felt he had a case, he should’ve taken it through the FBI. I wonder if it will come out that he tried. But there is absolutely no non-nefarious reason for Trump to do what he did.
By the way, does anyone have a good source for the origin of the claim that Hunter made “up to $50,000 per month”? If so I would really like to see it. All of the right wing pols are using the exact same phrasing which reeks of weaselly, technically correct, deception. I’m guessing that either there was one month that Hunter made $50,000 while most months he made much less, or else its one of those disclosure questions of the form “Made between $200,000 and $600,000 a year” and they fixated on the high end.
:smack:
"In December, 2015, as Joe Biden prepared to return to Ukraine, his aides braced for renewed scrutiny of Hunter’s relationship with Burisma. Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy, raised the matter with Biden, but did not go so far as to recommend that Hunter leave the board. As Hunter recalled, his father discussed Burisma with him just once: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’ ”
It’s really kind of gross no matter how many people do it. In fact it’s worse if “everybody does it”.
The person behind that claim appears to be the same person who wrote [Clinton Cash](Peter Schweizer)
Welcome to capitalism.
But there are different kinds of capitalism. This is rent seeking, crony capitalism of the worst kind. Just because it’s a legal, if seamy, characteristic of late capitalism doesn’t mean any individual has to participate in it. Especially not a scion of such a prominent Democratic family. How does this fit in with the blue-collar Biden brand? Does Hunter not care about that at all?
And please, I don’t want to hear about Eric or Don Jr. Yes, stipulated. They are sleazy douchebags of the highest order. We are supposed to be way better than that.
The general trajectory of his life over the last few years does not indicate that he places a high value on the needs of his family.
You weren’t discussing it so why not let it die? Why let people perpetuate the smear, as you’ve been doing with Ilhan Omar?
The L.A. Times has an interview with Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko, who says he saw no signs of wrong doing by Biden.
Maybe he was fired because he wouldn’t “play ball” with the Trump administration on this.
Only the now desperate Trump apologists are falling for this thing.
The media is really dropping the ball by not fact checking this claim.
As I understand it, we have two categories of questions here:
- What, if anything, has any member of the Biden family ever done wrong?
- What, if anything, has President Trump done wrong in the matter of asking foreign governments to work with his personal lawyer AND with the US Attorney General to investigate US citizens, as a favor, in the context of the foreign government seeking both the release of congressionally-mandated aid and also a meeting with the president?
The answer to question 1 may be that Joe Biden shot JFK, and Hunter Biden personally started ISIS and also talks loudly on his cell phone at the opera.
That doesn’t have anything to do with question 2.
As long as there’s no disagreement on this subject, question 2 can be some idle fun. But given the president’s attempt to muddy the waters, we almost need to repeat this “no linkage” thing every ten posts to make sure folks haven’t forgotten.
I assume you mean question 1 can be some idle fun. I don’t think questions about the conduct of the sitting President of the United States are quite so much fun!
I’m not personally thrilled that the son of a front-runner candidate for President of the United States was serving on the board of directors of a Ukrainian natural gas company. (I mean, given that AFAIK Hunter Biden didn’t major in hydrocarbon chemistry or petroleum geology in college, doesn’t seem to have anything in his background that would give him any particular expertise in either the business of oil and natural gas production or in Ukrainian corporate law, and so forth.) Regardless of the “No laws were broken!” mantra, I really wish the Democrats would knock it off with this sort of thing. One party of corrupt plutocrats is enough (really, more than enough), thank you very much.
But, again, I totally agree that this pales into insignificance compared to the shocking incompetence, cruelty, demagoguery, and very likely massive corruption of the sitting President of the United States. We should certainly oppose crony-capitalism as practiced by Democrats simply because it’s wrong. But another reason to do so is that it fosters the corrosive cynicism that now pervades American politics (“Well, he’s a politician, what do you expect? They’re all looking out for Number One; ain’t none of them looking out for you and me”) which has greatly empowered Trump (for all that it’s deeply paradoxical and kind of stupid for people disgusted by political corruption to have so empowered the worst grifter and con-man to have ever held the office of President of the United States).
Uh, yeah, question 1 is the idle fun one. Thanks!
It is such a playground conversation, one I have weekly:
LOL! (As in literal out-loud laughter.)
Well, obviously. But that’s not really the issue.
The only reason to point out that it wasn’t illegal is because the fig leaf they’re hold up for Trump’s defense was that he wanted something illegal investigated. They had already told him it wasn’t illegal, but he was insisting as a way of saying, “Make something up if you have to.”
Trump’s defense isn’t saying that he’s on some kind of quest to rid the world of cronyism. This is purely an issue of making a solid case against his actions.
That would be like the Pope being on some kind of quest to rid the world of Catholicism.
I have "made up to 50k per month", too. OK, that was MX not US$, and the dollar-peso exchange rate slipped from 1:12 to 1:20, but that still qualifies. Another month I made “up to” a million US bucks. But my printer smeared the ink :smack: so I sacrificed the blurry BenFranks for garden mulch. Such a loss.
“Up to X amount” leaves much leeway. Tramp received “up to” an overwhelming popular vote majority. That means he didn’t. Hunter Biden may have “made up to” whatever number a skuzball wants to claim. That, too, means he did not.
Commercial US media made Tramp, continue to enable him, and he’s been their gold mine for years - still is. Should we expect change?
RC conservatives think so. SCHISM
Pope Could Soon Say ‘I Do’ to Married Priests–and Open a Schism
Is the Pope Catholic? Is Hunter Biden? (Both say yes.) Now several Bidens are targeted in the overall power-culture wars. They’re worse than Billy Carter!
Does it really matter? All that matters is the water is muddy enough where Trump supporters and Republicans have some answer for why Trump asked a political favor of a foreign leader. The truth actually does affect these people, but if you obfuscate the situation enough, people will give up and stick to a simple explanation. The conservatives, at this point, don’t have coherence on a simple explanation/mantra, but they will. “Lock her up!”, “No obstruction!”, “Perfect conversation!”… they give supporters a backstop. I don’t know what the hell “Perfect conversation!” means, but it really doesn’t matter. They are really pushing the envelope on these kinds of things.