Last Sunday, Margaret Brennan interviewed GOP Chairman of the Intelligence Committee Mike Turner. This guy is smooth as whale shit, but his problem is that his principal accusation against Hunter Biden is based on a presumption of actions that do not exist, or at the very least do not appear to be provable. The accusation is that foreign nationals who were doing business with Hunter were buying influence with his father. Sounds reasonable, right? Influence pedaling is one of the most common crimes in the political world.
But what influence did these foreign nationals buy? According to Rep. James Comer, Chairman of the House Oversite Committee, they paid Hunter over $20 million? But an analysis by Glenn Kessler, the Fact Checker for the Washington Post, shows that number to be less than $7 million. When Comer talks about 20 plus shell companies, Kessler’s investigation reveals that only two of the twenty weren’t legitimate. And those two didn’t pay anything to Hunter. For the most part, the Biden payments were for regular exchanges during the normal course of doing business.
So, we find that this monster investigation led by GOP hatchet man Comer, and the ever fact free NY Post, is just a series of wild guesses and unfounded innuendo. Now where do you think they learned to do that?
If there was no payoff, and no actual influence use, under the circumstances of the accusation, there is no crime and Turner doesn’t even come close to being able to identify any kind of quid pro quo for the money that mostly Chinese companies paid Hunter. That’s after five years of investigations, which seems to indicate one of two answers to the big question. Either there was no payoff, or prosecuting attorney David Weiss, and his team are just unbelievably incompetent. If the latter is true, then why in the world did the justice department reward Weiss with an upgrade to Special Counsel?
And while we’re at it, do voters really give a shit? It’s hard to believe they do. I mean sure he’s the President’s son, and he might be a crook. But Trump himself is a crook, and was one before we elected him, yet his followers never seemed to care as long as he was their crook.
If the best the GOP can do at finding scandal in the Biden administration is Hunter’s pathetic non-crimes, compared to the massive scope of Trump’s indictments, they won’t stand much of a chance in 2024.
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And now that we’ve dealt with Hunter Biden’s follies for about the tenth time. How about taking a look at the other side of the coin and getting a glance at Jared Kushner’s financial dealings while he held the administrative post of Senior Advisor to the President.
It seems that Kushner, who has a history of poor real estate dealings, assumed that such a background would equip him to be a great investment counselor. So while his father-in-law was in the White House, he took a couple of trips overseas and put together a portfolio, not of investments but of investors. Hey, whatever floats your boat.
Now, here’s a guy with no history of investment counseling but obviously a hell of a sales pitch, and oh yeah, a father-in-law who’s the Prez, and in no time at all he’s put together a $3.1 billion investment bank. So where did all this money come from? Well, $2 billion, almost two thirds of the entire investment came from Saudi Arabia. You remember them. They’re the guys who bombed the World Trade Center. Another $400 million came from neighboring Arab strongholds, UAE, and Qatar, while about $600 million came from other foreign sources. So, was any US money involved? Yes! A whopping 1% of the funding came from American sources.
Which leaves 99% coming from foreign sources. And did these foreign sources expect to make big or any bucks from their investment? Probably not. What they did expect to get was a direct line to Donald Trump because unlike Joe Biden, here was a man who has never acknowledged the words honesty or responsibility, has no idea what they mean and thinks only in terms of what can he get and how little he can give in return.
This was glaringly illustrated before Jared’s venture when Trump filled his hotels in Washington and New York with favor seeking guests at sky- high prices while Eric and Don Jr. raked it in for the home team. *****
The first GOP debate is on the horizon for Wednesday night and the word is out that Donald Trump will not appear. Why not? Maybe because he is incredibly busy with all his indictments but also because he doesn’t need the debates at this stage. The other candidates, led by Chris Christie are all moaning and groaning, but as it turns out, this is very much to their advantage. With no Trump on the stage sucking up all the air they will each have an opportunity to show the American people what losers they really are. For most of them, this will be a bigger disaster than they realize, but it will, at least, give them a better opportunity than if the big blowhard were there, getting all the questions and making all the noise. There will be plenty of time ln later debates for the real candidates like Christie, DeSantis, Pence and maybe an outlier like Ramaswamy to get into it, with Trump but that’s just not necessary now.
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On another front completely. It has come to light that the Biden administration is negotiating with Iran to replace the nuclear agreement which the idiot Trump trashed. It appears that the deal, which would be, as of right now, informal, would involve five Americans who are being held by the Iranians.
When asked about the negotiation, Mike Turner, attacked it because it would only be informal at this stage. Well, Mike negotiations wouldn’t even be necessary if the criminal head of your party hadn’t broken an existing treaty that was working. So, now it’s up to the grownups to fix what the nasty little criminal you have been backing, broke.
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On Monday of last week Donald Trump was indicted on criminal charges for the 4th time. But this time it was different. This time he was one of 19 potential felons named in the indictment. This time we got a look at the range of criminal activity endemic to Trump’s actions in his unsuccessful attempt to retain power after losing the 2020 election. It came with a view into the criminal network that he and his associates constructed to bring this dream of illegal power to fruition.
The number and persona of Trump’s co-defendants points in only one direction. This was a widespread criminal activity aimed at keeping Trump in office after he lost the election.
Like the indictment that turned Mafia boss John Gotti from the “Teflon Don” into inmate number XXXXXXX, this was aimed at making Trumps co-conspirators look into the abyss of long prison terms, or of telling the truth on the stand, and putting an equally criminal Orange Don where he belongs.
The code of Omerta didn’t look so good to the mob punks then, just as staying loyal to the most dis-loyal man in the history of politics, isn’t going to look too good to the Trump punks now.