Tag: DOJ
Covering up the cover-up

Covering up the cover-up

By | | Comments 0 Comment

That’s a photo of Attorney General Merrick Garland. If he looks like a rabid weasel, that’s because he is exactly that. Ever embittered for being denied a place on the High Court in the dying days of the Obama administration, Merrick Garland now takes out his resentment on all the country not aligned with this ever-more-unpopular regime and the Democratic Party more generally. Any thought of maintaining a modicum of equal justice by the DOJ he heads has been long jettisoned, despite the AG’s high-sounding rhetoric. This was never more in evidence then when Garland made his bogus appointment Friday of David Weiss as a “special counsel” in investigating Hunter Biden’s various crimes.

If there is a more clear case of the fox — or in this case, the weasel’s minion — guarding the hen house, one would be hard-pressed to think of it. Here are the simple facts that illustrate the relationship:

  • Weiss is the same federal prosecutor who has been dragging his heels in his supposed “investigation” of Hunter Biden for nearly four years, ever since Hunter’s now infamous laptop came into the FBI’s possession in December 2019.
  • Weiss is the same federal prosecutor who allowed the statute of limitations to run on Biden’s failure to file taxes from 2014-2016 and then let him skate for years of not filing timely returns on millions of dollars of income by turning all that into two misdemeanor charges (try that stunt yourself and see what happens to you).
  • Weiss, again, turned a gun charge against Hunter — a charge that, in virtually 100% of other cases, results in jail time — into an agreement to let him go into a diversion program and exactly zero days behind bars. So much for this administration’s bleating about guns.
  • In an unprecedented move, Weiss also was willing to forego prosecution on other criminal matters still under investigation, such as Hunter’s violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Besides the obvious conflicts of interest, the first provision of the Special Counsel law states that the special counsel shall — not should, not could, not be preferred to, but shall — come from outside the government. Someone who supposedly doesn’t have any vested interest in the outcome of an investigation. Instead, Weasel Garland dug deep into the very guts of the beast he heads and pulled out Weiss. Weiss, who Garland — previously, under oath, and quite untruthfully — asserted already had the same powers as a special counsel.

But wait! you shout. The nation’s top law enforcement officer can’t be allowed to get away with violating the statute! Well, dear naive reader, the statute ends by stating there is no mechanism for remedying a violation. Don’t you just love how those in power write statutes that benefit them and no one else?

By the way, don’t be led astray by those who claim Weiss was a Trump appointee. Yes, technically speaking, he was. But he was put forth into nomination by Delaware’s two Democratic senators and its Democratic Party structure, all part of the First State’s political snake pit of which Joe Biden has been a leading member since God was a boy, and Trump simply rubber-stamped the appointment. Not his finest act.

Unraveling the sweetheart deal

That’s not a weasel in the photo above. It’s U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika who was expected to approve — but didn’t — the DOJ’s sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden. And that explains why now, after all this time, after making the sweetest of sweetheart deals in the history of sweetheart deals, with the President’s son, Merrick sees the need to officially give Weiss special counsel powers.

We need just go back a couple of weeks to when Noreika, also in Delaware, saw through all the holes in the deal offered Biden by the DOJ and sent it back to the drawing board. Judge Noreika was expected to just pass her blessing on the deal, as would be expected of one of the Delaware political morass dwellers. But much to everyone’s surprise and both sides’ dismay, the judge — to quote Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacre — “wasn’t going to look at the eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was,” and it was an (un)typical case of “American Blind Justice.” Noreika actually read the text of the deal and she picked out a paragraph in it giving Biden immunity from prosecution forever and ever. Aren’t there some things still under investigation, she had the utter temerity to ask? Wouldn’t this be unprecedented? Uh, yeah, well, yes, your honor, the government lawyers had to admit. So, of course, there’d be no immunity for them.

Biden’s and his attorneys didn’t like that idea, which they said they hadn’t agreed to, so they pulled out of the deal right there in the courtroom — even though they effectively were on the same side as the government on it — and Biden pleaded not guilty to the implied crimes alleged in the deal. The DOJ would have to take the charges to trial and Hunter would have a chance to defend himself against them. But you see, dear naive reader, that’s about the last thing the government, doing the bidding of Hunter’s daddy in the White House, wants. So now what was called for was covering up the cover-up represented by the sweetheart deal, and that is where Garland’s appointment of Weiss as special counsel comes in.

Covering up the cover-up

The photo above portrays two other weasels. They may look like Joe and Hunter Biden, but they’re weasels through and through. So, if you want to know the real objective of any of this chicanery, it’s to keep all the blow back of Hunter’s misdeeds from reaching his daddy, the “Big Guy” mentioned in Hunter’s own emails that were found on his laptop. The Big Guy, who increasingly can be, has to be, seen as the real head of the Biden crime family. So to understand how Garland and the administration think this will work, consider that:

  • There have been no indictments nor any charges filed against Hunter. The most critical violations expire with the statute of limitations in October, just two months off. If there are no indictments, no charges, Hunter is off the hook for them and he can walk away unscathed.
  • Weiss can take his case anywhere in the country, which means he can judge shop to have venue changed away from Delaware and from Judge Noreika and get a judge more amenable to the whole corrupt plan and who will approve a new but equally sweet sweetheart deal.
  • By avoiding a trial, the administration also avoids the discovery and testimony that can definitively tie Joe to Hunter’s illicit overseas business deals. Again, keep in mind that this concerns Hunter only to a trivial amount. The real objective is protecting the Big Guy, his father, the President.

Of course, in a country with a fair and unbiased media none of this would fly. It would be considered the biggest political scandal of half a century, if not forever. But those in power know we don’t have that kind of fair and unbiased media, and the official state media — compliant to the wishes of the Democratic Party — are doing their utmost to cover the whole affair up. In fact, some readers may be seeing some of this for the first time if the likes of NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, or the Washington Post, and some other reliably biased outlets, are the sources for what passes for their news. A democracy starved of truthful coverage of its alleged leaders cannot function nor survive. And that’s where we are at today.

But even as the state media does their best to bury this story, there are things underway in the (barely) Republican-controlled House of Representatives. This latest move by Garland, combined with the evidence being uncovered through banking records showing tens of millions of dollars funneled from overseas sources to the entire Biden family through a maze of 20 shell companies, as well as the revelations made by Hunter business associate Devon Archer to Congress that directly tie Joe to Hunter’s deals, are pushing things closer and closer to Speaker McCarthy declaring an impeachment inquiry against the President. And with that comes subpoena and discovery power that will bring the whole sordid matter into the limelight. Even the state media will find that hard to ignore.

Note: No weasels were harmed in the writing of this piece. Also, no insult was intended to the actual animals. It’s the human weasels we’re referring to derogatorily.

Featured Image: Omniverous, FotoEmotions, via Pixabay. Used with permission.

Judge Maryellen Noreika, U.S. District Courts. Public domain.

Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden. Photo by Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

 

 

 

 

 

Nancy and Donald
Waltzing Merrily Over a Cliff

Waltzing Merrily Over a Cliff

By | | Comments 4 comments

“I  don’t care whether you’re driving a hybrid or an SUV. If you’re headed for a cliff, you have to change direction.”

– Barack Obama

That might be a warning that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be advised to heed as the Democrats in Congress push relentlessly ahead in their quest to undo the election of President Donald Trump. On the flimsiest of charges, they appear intent to proceed with impeaching the President, a move born of their hatred for Trump and doomed to fail. As they waltz merrily over the cliff, they are bolstering Trump’s approval ratings and almost certainly aiding his reelection chances.

Depending on what media you pay attention to, you might either, a) think the case against Trump is ironclad and he is nothing short of a tyrant and reprobate, or b) that he’s been railroaded by political animus and blind prejudice. There is plenty of agida stirred up on both sides, largely fostered by selective picking and choosing of what to focus on by various media sources, not to mention plenty of outright lying (I say that having heard it with my own ears) and obfuscation by more than a few supposed journalists.

For instance, as just one example, if your source for news (I use the term advisedly) is CNN, you never would have heard the opening statement of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a Republican, at the committee’s Dec. 11 session with Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, nor would you have heard Horowitz’s mention of the 17 clear errors and omissions committed by the FBI in seeking the FISA court order that began the whole Russia affair that was scurrilously pinned on Trump. All you would have heard were statements by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein eliciting responses from Horowitz that seemed to indicate all was done properly, which – if you somehow heard the rest of what Horowitz had to say — it decidedly wasn’t. You also would have gotten the full opening statement of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat and one of the leaders of the anti-Trump mob, in the impeachment hearings his committee was conducting.

I’ll be doing a separate analysis of Horowitz’s findings and report in a future posting. For now, let’s just quote what Horowitz had to say about the claim by former FBI Director James Comey – who now has passed from unbridled arrogance to perhaps certifiable narcissism – that the IG’s report vindicates him in his role in initiating the investigations of Trump.

“The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this,” Horowitz said.

Another Big Swing, A Bigger Miss

At the risk of sounding redundant, the current episode is just the latest in the Dems’ ineffectual attempts to take out Trump. I laid out the basic game plan in my three-part series, “Another Swing, Another Miss.” In Part I I detailed how the Dems’ repeated efforts to unseat Trump amounted to one strike after another. In Part II I detailed how there is indeed a Ukraine scandal, being used as the pretext for the impeachment effort, but the scandal lies not with Trump but with former VP Joe Biden and his son Hunter. And in Part III I described the much bigger, but little reported on, scandal involving the Bidens and China. Now we’re going to see how three strikes aren’t enough for the Dems’ to give it up and how they are following their anti-Trump obsession right over the political cliff.

The process took a step closer to the cliff’s edge earlier on the day I am drafting this as the committee headed by Nadler, the Wiffer-in-Chief, voted entirely along party lines to move two articles of impeachment to the full House for a final vote, ostensibly in the coming week. This followed a contentious 14-hour committee debate that ended suddenly at Nadler’s order at 11 p.m. last night, prompting Republican members to call the process a “kangaroo court” and Nadler’s order “Stalinesque.”

After ridiculous Democrat charges of “bribery” and even “treason” as hearings were under way in the House Intelligence Committee, headed by the shifty Rep. Adam Shiff, the final two articles are nothing less than anti-climatic. The best they could come up with is “abuse of power” – based on the allegations that Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to seek an investigation of his presumed political rival, Joe Biden – and “obstruction of Congress” – based on the President’s refusal to cooperate with the House investigations, which he has termed a “witch hunt.” While the Constitution says a President can be removed for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” there is no federal or state statute against either charge.

Given further that the White House released the full transcript of the July 25 telephone conversation between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in which there was no indication of the quid pro quo Dems’ have insisted was present, and the right of a President to demand an investigation of suspected corruption in conduct of foreign affairs, the first article appears DOA. As for the second article, disputes between an Administration and Congress over executive privilege are legion throughout the life of the republic. This Administration’s refusal to turn over documents or permit members of the Administration to testify would not be the first stand-off between the two co-equal branches of government. Ultimately, the courts could rule on the matter, though the Supreme Court, the third co-equal branch, has been reluctant to wade into such matters.

Let’s not forget that former Attorney General Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress, too, and the total penalty for him, under the Obama Administration, was a big zero.

Speaker Pelosi, not known for coherent statements, was even more incoherent than usual in trying to defend the articles the committee came up with.

“I myself am not a lawyer,” babbled Pelosi. “Sometimes I act like one. Not as often as I act as a doctor. I practice medicine on the side without benefit of diploma, too.” Huh? But wait, she wasn’t done. “This is a decision that was recommended by our working together with our committee chairs, our attorneys and the rest.” Not done yet. “And they (the articles) are … uh … a continuation of a pattern of misbehavior on the part of the President. People are realizing, when they see what that was, they think, the public thinks, that they should be determining who the President of the United States is, not some foreign power.” Well, yeah, and that “public” is who elected Trump as President, isn’t it? The same “public” whose vote you’re trying to undo because you don’t like how it turned out? And finally, “It’s no use having the discussion here. This is a discussion we will take to the floor of the Senate.”

Going Over the Cliff

And that’s where the whole process goes over the cliff. Given that it takes 67 senators to vote in favor of removing the President from office, that there are 53 Republican, 45 Democratic, and 2 independent members of the Senate, and a vote will be almost entirely along party lines, there is no chance the President will be removed from office.

There has been some backing and forthing between Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over whether it will be a long trial with lots of the witnesses, like Hunter Biden and Adam Schiff, that Trump has said he’d like to call, or a quick process, that McConnell seemed to favor. In reality, it is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts who would actually preside over the trial and will have a lot to say about its conduct. Regardless, the end result is fait accompli. As McConnell has said, “The case is so darn weak, coming over from the House, we all know how it’s going to end. There is no chance the President is gonna be removed from office.”

Meanwhile, polls have been showing that a majority, albeit a slight majority, of Americans now are opposed to impeachment, and even more opposed to removing him from office, and Trump’s favorability ratings have been rising through all this. At least one major poll, Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll, as of Dec. 13 puts Trump’s approval at 49% (it recently was up to 51%), three points above where President Obama was at the same point in his first term.

None of this can inspire confidence among Dems given that the outlook for 2020 becomes ever more problematic for them. Some major polls are now showing Trump beating all or most of the Democrat presidential front runners in key battle ground states. Throw in the massive Conservative victory in the UK on Dec. 12, and there is plenty of grounds for Pelosi and the left-leaning Dems, to whom she seems to have capitulated, to take heed of Obama’s warning on what to do when they’re headed for a cliff.

Photo Credits: Nancy Pelosi: Unknown; Donald Trump: Reuters. Both used under Fair Use.