[USA Today] President Biden won't pardon son Hunter, White House says

The Bidens’ Influence Peddling Timeline

https://oversight.house.gov/the-bidens-influence-peddling-timeline/

 

lol

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunter...russia-twitter-4f2653e6?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Hunter Biden Is a Geopolitical Disaster
His Ukraine dealings corrupted our government, impeached a president, and may have prefigured a war.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
July 28, 2023 at 5:50 pm ET

It was a wild roll of the dice by Hunter Biden and government prosecutors to hope a judge wouldn’t ask if their plea agreement precluded further charges and therefore ended the investigation. But of course the judge had to ask. In announcing the deal in June, the Justice Department plainly stated the investigation was continuing while Hunter’s lawyer plainly insisted on an “understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.”

David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, arguably had to speak as he did at the time. If the investigation were over, he and his boss, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, couldn’t avoid questions from a Republican-controlled House about ignored evidence, etc. Add another question now: While saying something else to the public, did the Justice Department sotto voce promise Hunter that no more charges would be considered?

My view is that Joe Biden has been coldly ruthless in embracing and defending his son in his own interest, and will be just as ruthless in throwing Hunter under the bus if necessary.

Hunter is not less ruthless in dealing with his dad. When Hunter’s lawyer threatened to walk away from a plea deal that didn’t close the investigation, he was throwing down a gauntlet before Mr. Biden and his attorney general that Hunter has spent his life throwing down to his father. To state the obvious example, President Obama assigned Vice President Biden to be his point man on Ukrainian corruption. Hunter thereupon took a do-nothing job with a notorious Ukrainian oligarch and essentially dared his father to stop him. As public testimony and news reporting have established, not only did Mr. Biden decline to intervene when State Department officials brought the problem to him, he engaged in an emotional outburst that made them unwilling to bring it up again.

Joe’s ridiculous peril may yet push him out of the presidential race. The bottomless self-abasement of his spokespeople is evident in their recent, studied language adjustment. From Joe “never discussed” Hunter’s international business dealings with him, they now claim Joe was never “in business” with Hunter.

This high-wire act has zero chance of success without a deliberate and voluntary decision of news organizations to pretend they don’t see what’s before their eyes. Don’t put it past them.

But this will only get Mr. Biden through November 2024 unless Democrats also win back the House and retain control of the Senate.

Mr. Biden was unlucky in his son, but he also allowed a family environment in which milking connection to Joe was de rigueur. Paralysis seizes our elite over what has ensued. Suppose a journalistic tick-tock were written today similar to 1969’s “On Borrowed Time,” Leonard Mosley’s microscopic account of events between the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Today’s version would include: Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, President Trump’s impeachment for asking about Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, the laptop episode in which Russia was framed as an imaginary culprit to change the subject from Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine.

What did Vladimir Putin make of these events? How might they have figured in his bet that the U.S. would let Kyiv fall into his pocket? Maybe one day he’ll tell us.

Mr. Biden ultimately summoned the NATO muscle memory to stand up to Russia’s invasion, and this column congratulated him. But Republicans in an election year can rightly ask what else exactly was an American president supposed to do? They can also ask what Mr. Biden failed to do. His surrender on Nord Stream 2, after Mr. Trump quashed the pipeline, sent a message of appeasement. In the war’s opening days, his administration seemed unduly eager to cede Kyiv to the Russian advance and spirit President Zelensky to safety.

At some point, questions should also be asked of Barack Obama. Why allow Mr. Biden to control the Ukraine portfolio when he wouldn’t restrain his son? Was Biden family corruption the reason you skipped over your veep and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016?

The story here is all the more remarkable for being untold. In short order, the Hunter mess has managed to taint our intelligence community, the FBI, IRS and now the Justice Department. If news sense is not completely dulled by neurotic compliance, some editors must also be starting to see the outlines of another approaching debacle, in which skeletons from the Biden closet elect Mr. Trump.

Appeared in the July 29, 2023, print edition as 'Hunter Biden Is a Geopolitical Disaster'.​

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related

Hunter Biden's former business partner was willing to go before a grand jury. He never got the chance.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-tony-bobulinski-former-business-partner-grand-jury/

excerpt:

A former business partner of Hunter and James Biden, who worked directly with them on a 2017 China energy deal, was never asked to testify to a Delaware grand jury investigating Hunter Biden, two sources familiar with the discussions tell CBS News.

Tony Bobulinski, the former business partner, was open to testifying, and his attorney reached out to the office of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss. Weiss did not return their calls, the sources said. Weiss' decision not to bring Bobulinski is the latest indication that prosecutors investigating Hunter Biden may have avoided investigating allegations about his father, President Joe Biden.

In October 2020, Bobulinski was invited by the Trump campaign to attend a presidential debate after he released business records about his dealings with Hunter and James Biden. At a press conference before the debate, he claimed to have met with Joe Biden in May 2017, as part of discussions over a potential business deal with a Chinese energy firm, CEFC.

"I've heard Joe Biden say that he's never discussed business with Hunter. That is false. I have firsthand knowledge about this because I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden," Bobulinski said at the press conference. Contacted this week by CBS News, Bobulinski said he stands behind those statements.
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more at the link

 

if you say so

 

again, if you say so. But if he's done nothing wrong he certainly mustn't have any problem with the investigation continuing

 

plus I would think Democrats would love to have the big guy vindicated and see the Republicans on the Oversight Committee wiping all that egg off their faces.

so when you think about it, the investigation is a win-win for everybody

 

can I pull out my "so you're saying" card

so far they've confirmed some $17 million in bank transfers from foreign sources, and they've also confirmed that U.S. banks filed 170+ suspicious activity reports on those transfers and transfers that directly followed.

So you're saying investigating those transactions shouldn't happen????

 

lol

 

not sure what your point is . . . you know Trump at the moment is every bit as much of a "private citizen" as is Hunter

anyway. On the "stubborn" circumstantial evidence front:

Joe Biden stated on October 16, 2019 in answering questions from reporters:
"I entered as one of the poorest men in Congress, left one of the poorest men in government, in Congress and as vice president."
Fact-checking Joe Biden's claim that he was among the poorest in government

https://www.politifact.com/factchec...hecking-joe-bidens-claim-hes-among-poorest-g/

excerpt:

We looked for the latest rankings by the Center for Responsive Politics to get a sense of where his wealth ranked when he left the White House.

In the latest data that include Biden, Biden again ranked near the bottom: 577 of 581 officials in 2014.

His estimated net worth was -$947,987, based on official reports filed in 2015.

Since leaving the White House, Biden has reaped millions.

CNBC reported in June 2019 that Biden and his wife, Jill, made more than $15 million combined in 2017 and 2018. And the same month, the Washington Post reported that Biden has made millions of dollars largely from book deals and speaking fees for as much as $200,000 per speech.

The Center for Responsive Politics estimates Biden’s net worth, as of July 2019, at between $2.14 million and $7.92 million.
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more at the link

$15 million between 2017 and 2018 is a lot, but then again Joe Biden is of course an incredible public speaker