Got fixated on a peculiar detail of the government case against Alexander Smirnov, the main witness in the Republican complaint according to which Hunter Biden and Joe Biden took $5 million each in bribes from Hunter's Ukrainian employer, Mykola Zlochevsky, and nobody else seems to be paying attention to it.
Smirnov, a double agent working for Russian intelligence services and the FBI, gave the latter the story of the bribery, with advice as to how they could go about gathering evidence to back it up, and the Bureau gave it to Rep. James Comer and Senator Charles Grassley, who hoped to use it as a gigantic and appalling climax to their attempt to impeach the president, except, as we now know, when the special prosecutor found a moment to check the story out (34 months after receiving it), it turned out to be completely bogus, Smirnov's invention or that of his Russian handlers, and the Republicans' impeachment case, such as it was, is smashed to pieces, Smirnov is now under indictment for his deceit, and the prosecutor is trying to have him detained before trial, as a flight risk.
It's in that document, special counsel David Weiss's request to deny bail to Smirnov, that the story of his collaboration with Russians emerged publicly for the first time, in the context of Weiss's long-delayed investigation of Smirnov's allegation—a story of Russian intelligence services promulgating disinformation to help elect Donald Trump to the presidency, which is, as you know, one of my favorite kinds of stories to tell, and the first big one of the 2024 campaign—so of course I was looking at it, and noticed this narrativium-packed paragraph (where Public Official 1 is the president and Businessperson 1 is his son):
There's just so much news flooding in before I can absorb it, I'm thinking maybe I just have to resign myself to being a week or so behind on everything. I don't want to let go of the efforts of Mr. Musk's Kancelculture Kids to expose the woke leftist FBI's brutal censorship efforts at Twitter, where they succeeded in silencing the entire NewsCorp organization for [checks notes] a full day before Twitter changed its mind and its policy, in October 2020, nearly spoiling Rupert's special October Surprise revelations of Shirtless Hunter.
Installment #7 of "The Twitter Files", by noted plastic straw advocate Michael Shellenberger, showed up on Tuesday to defend the story he, Weiss, and Taibbi have been developing:
— Yas is at post.news/yastreblyansky but still here (@Yastreblyansky)
December 20, 2022
I mean, for one thing, the story of the blind computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac turning the laptop over to the FBI was dodgy enough, the way Mac Isaac told it:
The Republican noise machine, including this putz, a former reporter
who got fired from BuzzFeed in 2014 after 41 of his stories were busted for
plagiarism, now reinvented aa a podcaster for "God, Family, America", with gigs
on NewsMax, Parler, and Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA (coincidentally I just
removed him from my Twitter yesterday in my
#ProjectMute
program, which is why I know all this at the moment), is shocked! shocked! to
learn that Twitter's Trust and Safety officers were meeting regularly with the
FBI during the 2020 election campaign.
This from the #TwitterFiles "investigation" being carried out by famous
independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss ("investigation" in scare
quotes because the investigating seems to consist basically of reading the
stuff Mr. Musk gives them and trying to squeeze it into some kind of narrative
arc).
Pretty sinister, huh? And Twitter's deputy general counsel at the time, Jim
Baker, used to be
Catherine Herridge interviews Donald Trump July 14, 2020 for CBS—the one where she asked him why Black people are killed by police and he replied, "So are white people."
A couple of weeks or so ago, CBS News ran a story about the Hunter Biden
laptop that didn't get a lot of attention outside the rightwing outlets, by
Catherine Herridge, who joined CBS in April 2021 after two decades as a
correspondent for Fox News, because she wanted to be on "a team where facts
and storytelling will always matter," she said
at the time, but it quickly began to look as if it was because a better place to launder
the "exclusive"
propaganda material from dubious rightwing sources that has long been her stock in trade.
It's very appropriate that Catherine Herridge landed this interview after
misrepresenting so much of what Barr and Grenell were feeding her in recent
weeks.
So I had to take a look at the
Breitbart story, which reports:
A criminal IRS investigation into Hunter Biden — President Biden’s son —
appears to have convened a grand jury as far back as May 2019, a
confidential subpoena served to JPMorgan Chase bank reveals. The subpoena
also seeks bank records of James Biden, the president’s brother, which
appears to be the first time another Biden family member has surfaced in
connection with the investigation.
Actually, this isn't exactly news; it seems to be an investigation we could have known about for
quite a while, since December 2020, when Hunter Biden himself found out that
his taxes were under investigation, and immediately issued a statement.
According to CNN's reporting picked up by Wilmington TV,
That I have never believed. Huge financialized corporations--hospitals, insurers--have a very big stake in preserving it, and finding for Texas would cause serious chaos https://t.co/kdHUAkVLFi. The Court cares more about them than it does about Trump.
Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) hunting for vital information and not doing anything related to the Trump campaign in any way, shape, or form, of course, because that would be wrong. Via Tennessee Star.
As one of the first to lodge a complaint about young Hunter Biden failing
upward into the Ukrainian energy business and making the Obama government look
bad for no conceivable reason (May 2014, as soon as the news came out, and I don't know what Chuckles Grassley was
up to at the time—actually I do, he was all in a dither about an imaginary "secret hands-off list" that supposedly forced CBP agents to allow a Muslim Brotherhood member to
enter the US)—
As one of the original Hunter critics, I was saying, I feel I have a kind of
proprietary interest in the story and its second life as a shiny object in the
Quest for the Trumpy Grail of some kind of scandal associated with the name of
Joe Biden, including the
latest effort
from the Republicans of the Senate Homeland Security and Banking Committees,
which the chairman of the first, stupidest person in the Senate Ron Johnson,
has just released. But it's really pretty pallid stuff, as
Josh Kovensky/TPM says
The report — which purports to document the effect that Hunter Biden’s
position on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma had on U.S. foreign
policy — is a rehash of long-debunked allegations that served as the focus
of President Trump’s impeachment last year.
But Senate Republicans summed up the result of their probe as well as
anyone: “The extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected
U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear,” the report reads....
And the Wall Street Journal
.@WSJ: "Findings
don’t support Trump’s accusation that Joe Biden sought to remove a
prosecutor to protect gas firm whose board Hunter Biden served on"
https://t.co/ssqEmpco1z
Everybody knows the origin. An anonymous whistleblower, relying on the protection of the law, made a complaint addressed to the chairs of House and Senate intelligence committees and submitted it correctly to the ICIG, who agreed that it was serious and important...
We should all be glad that the rule of law obtained against Maguire and whoever was giving him orders to block this urgent complaint. Bringing it to light saved President Zelenskyy from the need to accept President Trump's extortion attempt and got Ukraine its funding. Period.
The only relevant thing is that the complaint arrived, after some illegal stonewalling attempts, at its destination and the American people have been informed and one of President Trump's illegal dealings has been stopped. It's all good.
If the whistleblower violated some article of White House protocol to get the document to the place IG Atkinson agreed it needed, urgently, to go, that's a good thing! If he hadn't done it, Zelenskyy would have gone on CNN on schedule, humiliated himself and disheartened his voters (and the rest of the world) by announcing his imaginary investigations of an imaginary crime (and Trump might have gone on holding the aid, as I suppose Putin asked him to do in the secret 31 July phone call, but you don't have to pay any attention to that). It was a win for the rule of law!
Or is somebody claiming that IG Atkinson was wrong about whether or not the complaint was credible and urgent? I don't hear Trump and his lawyers doing that. I hear Trump and his lawyers making fitful attempts to stop us from thinking about it altogether, kicking up the identity of the whistleblower like sand in our eyes. Which is kind of their only alternative, but please don't let yourself be affected by it.
While I'm up, a weird and distasteful thread on Biden and his press problems, beginning with the great Elizabeth Drew weighing in with her opinion:
One last word on Hunter Biden. It's clear that the case is irrelevant to the question of Trump's strong-arming the Ukrainian president and should be dismissed out of hand from the impeachment trial, but there's something else that just occurred to me, starting from two fairly simple questions:
Why do they want to call him, given that if he has done anything illegal he has a constitutional right not to testify?
Why don't they call somebody else who will testify as to what they think he's done?
The answer to the second being, I suddenly realize, though it's obvious, there isn't anybody. They don't have any witnesses to wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.
There were a couple, to be precise, ex-prosecutor Kostiantyn Kulyk, who was removed from his position in late November after failing to show up for an anti-corruption interview, and ex–prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, under criminal investigation in Ukraine since the beginning of October for abuse of power (conspiracy to to "provide cover" for illegal gambling businesses in Ukraine), both of whom played roles in providing President Trump's personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani and hack journalist John Solomon with materials accusing Biden, and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, of some kind of undefined misconduct, but they're not looking very helpful to the Republican cause, since not only are they apparently criminals, but everything they said about Yovanovitch has collapsed in the face of her sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, and everything Giuliani and Solomon has said has been dismissed in the testimony of the State Department's George Kent, who told the committee
that Solomon’s reporting, “if not entirely made up in full cloth,” was filled with “non-truths and non-sequiturs.
and Lutsenko (also under fire for his collaboration with Floridian rowdies and indicted Giuliani companions Lev Parnas and Ihor Fruman) has announced that the accusations against Hunter Biden were all false as well,
There are no witnesses at all to Hunter Biden's alleged misconduct, and the closest thing there was to a witness has withdrawn his accusation and it really looks like the simplest explanation is that there wasn't any misconduct.
(It's also clear that he was qualified for the position, which didn't require an energy expert, they had enough of those already, but an international lawyer, which he was, with a Yale law degree and plenty of board experience. I won't talk about the obscenity of the pay and the way it tends to go to celebrity names, since that's in no way Biden's fault but the system's, but the man paid off his dead brother's student loans!). Why do Republicans want to call a putative criminal to testify on a crime when there's no evidence that a crime took place?
Because that's the only avenue left for them to suggest there was a crime.
Not by getting him to testify about it, but in the hope of getting him to take the 5th over some detail or other. They can't get anybody to accuse him of a crime, but maybe they can get him to not deny it. That's why they want to call him, and the aim isn't to catch him in some skullduggery, which nobody would have cared about even if he had done it, but to provide a reason for thinking that Trump's not guilty. Because reasons for that are extremely scarce.
So my considered recommendation to the Democrats is that they should agree to subpoenas of Hunter and Joe Biden if and only if Republicans can provide testimony from a respectable source to back up the idea that there's some crime one of them committed. And articles by or citing the discredited John Solomon (fabricating these stories was one of the reasons The Hill fired him) need not apply. I'm pretty sure they can't.
Twitter is like an intellectual equivalent of the southeastern Australian coast right now, deadly brush fires everywhere you turn demanding your attention so you don't know where to focus.
Why are these Democrats complaining about lawyer lawsuits? We have lawyer lawsuits all the time! You can't FILE a lawsuit without a lawyer!
Trump doubling down on his belief that there were no US casualties in the Iranian raids on bases in Iraq, after the army announced that there were a number of cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI)
Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street (who seems to have quietly replaced David Brooks in the Tuesday slot—last time Brooks produced a Tuesday column was 2 September) writes a piece on "The Corruption Before Trump" with the sole purpose, as far as I can tell, of equating the fortune Dick Cheney earned running the war machine at Halliburton between his two stints as defense secretary (estimated between $19 million and $86 million) to "the extraordinary post-presidential buckraking of the Clinton family and their foundation’s global funding stream", meaning making a comparable amount of cash on the paid-speech circuit, writing best-selling books, and establishing a really pretty successful charitable organization with their earnings, in paragraph 5; and mentioning in paragraph 9 that "Hunter Biden’s sinecure at a Ukrainian energy conglomerate represents the crassest form of this mentality".
Adding in paragraph 11 that
the strongest defense of Trump’s possibly impeachable conduct vis-à-vis Hunter Biden and his father isn’t some sort of careful “no quid pro quo!” parsing of the president’s words. It’s the more straightforward argument that, as Dan McCarthy wrote for The National Interest over the weekend, this was what Trump was elected to do — to “use all legal means at his disposal to strike at business-as-usual among the political elite,” even if that requires trampling over norms that would normally prevent a U.S. president from encouraging a foreign investigation into his rival and his rival’s family.
Although young Biden is in fact the only business-as-usual practitioner Trump has actually attempted to strike at, and isn't even especially rich by today's Hypergilded Age standards, so I don't think that amounts to a lot of evidence that this is Trump's plan (shaking off the dew pooled in a water lily leaf on the surface of the swamp is not draining the latter).
Photoshop by the Brazilian artist PSHoudini via Tom Banwell, 2011.
This enchanting piece from the president's remarks at the the US Mission to the United Nations, last Thursday, on the release of the whistleblower report:
That Hat Wouldn't Work For Me
by Donald J. Trump
I say, “Steve, what happens when
you come off a vice presidential
plane, it’s called Air Force Two,
your father’s with you, you walk
into a room in China and they
give you a fund of $1.5 billion,
billion, you make hundreds of
thousands of dollars and millions
of dollars off that. And that’s probably
not all they gave him. They gave
him plenty more, I’m sure.
We might never find out."
This, via Euro-paranoid correspondent Oui at the Booman Tribune (he's the smartest and best informed paranoid you ever want to deal with, no snark), is very disheartening news as far as I'm concerned:
Joe Biden’s Son Appointed to Board of Directors of Ukraine’s Largest Gas Company
Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has been appointed to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a privately-owned natural gas company operating in the Ukraine since the year 2002. Burisma Holdings has become a considerable player within the Ukrainian natural gas and oil industry, with licences covering the Dnieper-Donets, Carpathian and Azov-Kuban basins. The production capability has reached over 10,500 barrels of oil equivalent per day (BOEPD) which has left the company with considerable reserves.
