The Hunter Biden Investigation {thread started in 2019}, Hunter Pardoned on December 1, 2024

Personally, I think it’s likely that Hunter has already handed over a bunch of info on others to the DOJ, sat with the State department to tell them about different foreign, important people he met and schmoozed with, the same with the CIA, etc. As a result, we never saw nor heard of FARA but he is being charged with tax crimes even though it’s uncommon to be charged for tax crimes when he’s paid what he owes. That’s the realm that they landed on being appropriate given his crimes and his behind-the-scenes efforts to repay society.

There’s a huge variety of balancing that’s probably going on, based on the quality of the evidence, what Hunter has given, how likely they think they can win a case when he can be expected to argue “temporary insanity due to addiction”. But, at the end of the day, the person making all of these decisions was promoted to all of his positions by Republicans, has a case history of prosecuting people related to the Bidens, was appointed by Bill Barr, was told that he was allowed to become a Special Counsel if he ever thought that he needed it, and was in fact given that when he asked.

I’m not too worried.

There’s no reason to believe the State Department and especially the CIA are involved in any way. This is conspiracy theory thinking.

He’s being investigated/charged with tax crimes because they have him dead to rights on not paying his taxes.

The reason we haven’t saw nor heard of FARA is that there is zero reason to believe that this has anything to do with FARA.

First,

I appreciate your sense that the CIA is never the right answer for nearly every situation. And that is generally going to be correct.

But the CIA’s genuine and official job is to compile information on important foreign officials and business folk, to know their weaknesses, and to develop them as information sources. You and I pay taxes to hire people and tell them to do just that thing. It’s not a fictional thing. The CIA is not the illuminati, they’re a real organization who has a specific and explicit role in the government. If something would fall in their scope of interest then it’s reasonable to include them as an counterexample of how things could have played out, that’s entirely non-corrupt and good for all of us.

Hunter spent real time trying to make business deals with influential Ukrainians and Chinese figures. The usual way of running sales pitches is to use your connections to find out about people, learn what they like and then invite them to go out, party, get drunk, and have a good time. During that, you’re going to find it a variety of things about them - and how they like to party - and others in their circle.

Anyone who parties a little too hard, seems to be having money problems, maybe has some addiction issues, those are prime beef for the CIA. “State owned corporation” is a popular theme in Hunter’s business interests.

If I was CIA, I would chat him up. And if I didn’t, I can’t think of any good excuse for skipping it.

It’s like with Donald Trump. He’s a natural magnet for bad people and all the FBI had to do was Google everyone coming out of the Oval Office for four years to find leads on criminal activities. Some people, because of their natural inclinations and connections are just sort of inherently useful for certain national security purposes, even without any real connection to it.

Second,

But, to be clear, I am not saying that Hunter has met with the CIA, had anything for them, nor gained any favors from that. Your choice to believe otherwise and act like I said otherwise doesn’t follow from what was written, wastes both of our time, and throws the discussion off course for no reason.

I’m saying that any impression that there must be some evil and corrupt explanation for why certain things are or aren’t happening with Hunter Biden are based on men’s storytelling. You can just add easily conjure up positive and wondrous alternatives from the evidence. We could point out that it’s not unimaginable for him to have gotten drunk with important people, for him to have had financial documents implicating other people in financial crimes, or otherwise to have had things that he was able to trade to the US government. In all of these cases, the trade would be secret and would not be indicative of corrupt political pressure by the President, Joe Biden.

If it seems like something is strange in the case of Hunter’s prosecution, there’s plenty of non-corrupt alternatives that are equally as evidence driven. … Which is to say, there is no evidence. It is just making shit up as much to imagine that Joe is a mafia boss as it is to say that Hunter met a Chinese politician in a club, they snorted cocaine off some stripper’s belly, and now the USA knows about that guy’s dirty secret. And if both of those have equal evidentiary backing then we should all chill out and just look at who is running the investigation.

Third,

If Weiss seems like a good choice then we don’t need to worry about any irregularities. There’s lots of reasons both boring and bizarre that could explain it. We don’t have visibility into the process, we never will, and we’re just playing pretend to act otherwise. Probably, the end decision is reasonable if Weiss is reasonable.

Not really.

mccarthy calls for a formal impeachment inquiry into binden. blah, blah, biden crime family, blah, blah.

It sounds to me like this is not an inquiry into anything specific that they think Biden has actually done…

But rather an inquiry into trying to see what things they can find and/or make up to justify an impeachment vote.

It’s rather pathetic and very fucking obviously a bone thrown to Maga voters.

Which is exactly what MAGAts were told to believe about the Dem-led House in 2019 – just fish around until they can find something, anything to impeach Trump over. So they feel entitled to do the same.

Actually, I’m surprised it took them this long.

Same here. I think they may have been sidetracked by fighting each other.

My expectation is that this inquiry will find nothing and fizzle out and after a while we won’t hear anything about it (at least not from the Republicans). Just like when Trump made an investigation into vote fraud in the 2016 election (where he insisted that Democrats were importing illegal aliens by the busloads, and that was the only reason he lost the popular vote). It found nothing, and rather than report on its conclusions, he and the Republicans just pretended like there hadn’t even been an investigation; it just sort of faded away.

I predict the same thing will happen here, and if anyone on the right remembers anything, it was only that the Republicans tried to get to the bottom of this (and probably imagine that the lack of evidence or a resolution was due to stonewalling by Democrats, or some kind of conspiracy).

Probably the Deep State Reverse Vampire Lizard People.

Mine, on the other hand, is that they actually will impeach Biden over something completely stupid and baseless, because they know there’s a non-zero number of voters who will conclude that he must have done something wrong to be impeached, and therefore is every bit as corrupt as Trump.

That’s plausible, but such an impeachment would not hinge on this investigation at all. It would probably not even mention it, and they’d preferably try to keep them as separate as possible. You don’t want to base the impeachment on an investigation that doesn’t find anything.

To put it in other terms, if you’re calling the fire department, you’ll tell them that you see smoke a couple of blocks away. You don’t call them after you head to the smoke and find people having a BBQ cookout, and tell that to the fire department.

ETA: I see that the investigation has its own thread, probably best to continue this there:

hunter biden has been indicted on 3 gun related charges. false statement on form 4473, feloney. per msnbc.

Which he is guilty of, but i wonder what happened to the plea deal? I know the original deal fell apart because prosecution and defense had different ideas about what the terms of the deal they struck together actually meant, but they could have hammered out a new deal…

If Hunter wants to make it up to his dad (arguably being the cause of the majority of the criticism against President Biden) he should just plead guilty and deal with the consequences instead of forcing a trial that will keep this in the news for months or accept whatever deal the prosecution might offer him.

As you note, there doesn’t seem to be an available defense. He’ll strike the best deal he can, and there will be no trial.

Seems to me, he thought he’d already done that. I can’t see why he’d avoid another plea deal, but make sure that everyone actually understands the new deal.

3 identical charges, lying on a form to purchase a gun, not 3 guns, one gun one form. charged as 3 felonies. the limitations for these charges would have been up next month. i’m not sure why the indictment is done this way. seems problematic.

Well, now we can find out whether or not several of those are unConstitutional, as Legal Eagle and other legal scholars say.

This is something the ATf desperately didnt want to test.

So what do Republicans do now? Admit that gun laws like this are consistent with the 2nd Amendment? Or maybe argue that the 2nd Amendment only protects Republican gun buyers?

That does seem more than a bit unfair. I don’t think he should get a total pass because he’s a president’s son, but neither should he be over- prosecuted to prove a point. Whatever is the norm for similar acts for anyone else, that’s what he should be facing.