James Comer Subpoenas Dick Picks While Rome Burns
As long expected, yesterday Jamie Comer subpoenaed Hunter Biden, his uncle James, and his former business partner Rob Walker; the Kentucky Congressman also sent voluntary interview requests to four more family members and Tony Bobulinksi.
By sending a voluntary interview request rather than a subpoena to Bobulinski, the Hunter accusar will be able to dodge questions about why, as Cassidy Hutchinson described, he wore a ski mask to a covert meeting with Mark Meadows in November 2020 and what the President’s Chief of Staff handed him at that meeting.
Comer even sent a request to Hunter’s current spouse, Melissa Cohen, rationalizing doing so — after having shut down an investigation into why the Saudis gave Jared Kushner $2 billion to invest — this way:
Evidence also shows that President Biden was at least aware of some of his family’s business ventures and sought to influence potential business deals that financially benefited his family. Indeed, a Biden business associate, Devon Archer, testified how the Biden “brand” was used in retaining business, and that Joe Biden met with some of the foreign nationals who paid his family. 5 The Committees have identified you as possessing information relevant to their investigation and seek your testimony regarding these and other related topics. This request is made pursuant to that inquiry.
In particular, the Committees have identified over $20 million in payments to Biden family members and their associates, the majority of which is attributable to Biden family members. 6 The Committees believe you have received proceeds derived from a foreign source in which the Biden family has held a substantial financial interest. This source is concerning to the Committees because of its significant ties to a foreign government. The Committees seek to understand the extent of the Biden family’s involvement in transferring money to each other, and therefore seek clarity regarding your role in the movement of money originating from certain foreign sources.
As part of their investigation, the Committees also seek to craft legislative solutions aimed at deficiencies they have identified in the current legal framework regarding ethics laws and the disclosure of financial interests related to the immediate family members of Vice Presidents and Presidents—deficiencies that may place American national security and interests at risk. Specifically, the Committees are concerned that foreign nationals appear to have sought access and influence by engaging in lucrative business relationships with high-profile political figures’ immediate family members.
The Committees are investigating the national security implications of a Vice President’s or President’s (and candidates for such offices) immediate family members receiving millions of dollars from foreign nationals, foreign companies, or foreign governments without any oversight. Current financial disclosure laws and regulations do not require non-dependent family members of senior elected officials to provide any information to the public. The Committees are seeking meaningful reforms to government ethics and disclosure laws that will provide necessary transparency into a Vice President’s or President’s immediate family members’ income, assets, and financial relationships.
Cohen didn’t even meet Hunter until May 2019, over two years after Biden left the Obama White House. Meanwhile, the degree to which Trump and his family have committed fraud using their family brand is literally on trial in New York as we speak.
To say nothing of Comer himself. The Daily Beast describes that not only has Comer serially swapped land with his brother, but has done so while directly overseeing the industry.
According to Kentucky property records, Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal—also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company—the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper.
In other words, not only has Comer not found anything against the Bidens. He is using his charade against the Bidens to hide his own corruption and that of the Trump’s.
And meanwhile, as Comer continues to waste taxpayer dollars subpoenaing dick pics, Republicans still can’t fund government.
Republicans continue to fail to do their most basic job. And they continue to fail even as they harass Joe Biden’s family for supporting other family members.
Insane, that looks awfully like weaponization of government.
I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you . . .
This is just an insane abuse of Government power to harass a series of private individuals, not to mention a collosal waste of money AND interference in an ongoing criminal case. In a rational world, Comer would be booted off the committee and censured.
If Hunter Biden is guilty of crimes, the criminal justice system can work that out. Comer’s “help” is not required.
Meanwhile, and in the same puerile style, they’re playing “We’re going to reduce your salary to $1, nah, nah, nah!” in bills and amendments targeting half a dozen Biden admin Secretaries and other Cabinet officials — behavior as performative, mean and futile as their dick-pic-orgies in their hearing rooms.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/9/2204670/-House-Republicans-have-a-new-favorite-joke-but-still-no-plan-for-funding-government
The targeting of Pete Buttegieg, to reduce his federal salary to zero can’t be legal can it, without some sort of due process? It’s kinda like a bill of attainder which targets individuals or groups specifically, instead of applying to everyone?
Meanwhile Gym Jordan has been dodging his J6 subpoena for 18 months.
Never mind Jared’s $2 billion; Comer’s going after the BIG MONEY: Biden’s $40,000 family loan.
On Tuesday I smiled as I put my Dominion ballot of all Dem votes in the Dominion machine. For some reason I thought of $787 million.
[Moderator’s note: your comment was held up in moderation by a typo in your email address. A future version of the comment system will not accept comments with such an error and will instead kick it back for editing. I’ve corrected it this once; use the Edit feature to do it yourself on the next typo. /~Rayne]
Rayne, I saw the email typo too late and hit Edit but the edit function goes to the comment text, not to the email address. Sorry.
There is also a series of transactions with Chad Comer about 200 k$, and let’s not forget the missing bank accounts of the new Speaker.
“Missing bank accounts” assumes vanilla money laundering. He gives off creepy vibes that really make me think it’s not that easy. I feel like it’s true that there are no bank accounts, and the “real story” is even more unsettling. Someone mentioned “sovereign citizen” on another thread, while I haven’t given up my thoughts about a communal church account.
‘Follow the money’ was a key lesson from Watergate, and actually was a standard procedure before that.
I can see no good reason to hide the finances of someone who appears to be very wealthy indeed. I see plenty of bad reasons. I also have to question just how ‘Christian’ he is to have to hide the finances like this because it’s usually done to hide bad behavior or some kind of ‘false witness’.
The ‘sovereign citizen’ question should be put to Johnson directly, and there are the typical tenets like ‘admiralty courts’ that are in the SovCit milieu. If he does buy into that dreck (and the admiralty courts they mention aren’t what they say they are) I can see no way he can support the US Constitution which means he’s made a false oath on a Bible. He needs to be hammered on that if true.
A reporter for the Daily Beast said Johnson has a checking account, just not an interest-bearing one, which are the only type that are reportable. However, there was also some discussion of “loss-sharing arrangements” and Christian health insurance, so he may have some highly unusual personal financial arrangements.
A bank account with no interest; “loss-sharing arrangements.” That sounds akin to Sharia financing. Bank accounts are OK, but interest is forbidden. However, one can invest in specific projects. If they succeed, the investors share proportionally in the profits. If they fail, they share proportionally in the losses. (At face value, it is somewhat saner than western stock markets?)
But what other, more dangerous, religious ideology underlies Johnson’s thinking?
A bank account that doesn’t pay interest sounds like the two checking accounts I have at two different banks (one business, one personal). For some reason no one can fathom, banks seem to have been very slow to return to paying interest on checking accounts. /s
Not saying this is necessarily the case for Johnson, about whom there have been many excellent questions and details provided in this (abidingly enlightening) space. But I will say that for many of us, there was no compelling reason to wonder how much interest you might be missing out on until relatively recently.
The estimable (and funny!) Matt Levine at Bloomberg has pointed out the extent to which non-high-net-worth retail bank customers tend to keep their no-interest bank accounts no matter what’s happening with rates. It’s the high-net-worth ones you have to watch out for (as Silicon Valley Bank could attest, if it still existed).
Yeah, but they said “millions” in their letter. Not “billions” or “hundreds of thousands.” So Kushner and the Comer family don’t count. Literally. The GOPers are going straight at the Bidens, and they think they found a super cute way to do it.
Hold on. You have to comply with a congressional subpoena? Let’s ask Gym.
Wow, the stuff that Comer did (described in the Daily Beast article) reminds me of Billy Sol Estes. I sure hope someone is digging into that mess because it sure sounds like there’s some “there” there.
Thanks for that blast from the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Sol_Estes). I was in my mid teens when the Estes scandal vis-a-vis Johnson were being bruited. Makes me remember some of the good old scandals like Profumo.
Thank you for not digging into it a little sooner – Ginny, Boesky, Nixon, Cohn, Stone, Millken, Leo, Trump, Epstein, Maxwell, Acosta, Madoff, Alito, Comer, SBF, Clarence, Holmes, Crow, Mitchell . . . . . .
Bebe Rebozo!
Bebe and his little yacht and his little windbreaker, on the choppy waters of Biscayne Bay!
For whom it wasn’t enough to be a bozo only once.
Hoist on his own petard would be a fitting epitaph for Mr. Comer.
According to CNN: Hunter Biden files defamation lawsuit against former Overstock CEO
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/09/politics/hunter-biden-files-defamation-lawsuit-against-overstock-com-ceo/index.html
As quoted in the Daily Beast: ” Hunter Biden has filed a defamation suit against Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock and former unofficial adviser to Donald Trump, claiming Byrne published false claims earlier this year that Biden “was reaching out to the Iranian government in the fall of 2021” to propagate a deal in which his father, President Joe Biden, would unfreeze $8 billion for Iran in exchange for $800 million that would be funneled in from Iran.”
I must read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass again soon. It’s a great allegory for Republican arguments like Comer accusing the Bidens of what Trump is and has been obviously doing—taking money from foreign governments and moving money around illegally.
What a farce.
It also appears that Comer has way far more exposure to using his public positions for private benefit than Biden, for whom Comer has no proof of any misconduct.
Slightly OT:
Came across this interview with Stuart Stevens, a political advisor for Mitt Romney’s campaign and member of The Lincoln Project. Starts a little slow, but its quite interesting, and hits a lot of the same themes Dr. Wheeler has been warning about recently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjrhMZCPBt0
Mike Johnson dismissed the House on Thursday. Which is inexplicable, considering how close to shutdown the country is.
This weekend, he was due to address the Worldwide Freedom Initiative in France. (The WFI is a group of US/European right-wing extremists.) However, Johnson’s spox Raj Shah denied that the Speaker was attending “any events in Paris or anywhere overseas this weekend.” Shah also said that the House schedule had already been set to dismiss on Thursday.
Heavens, let us not disturb a prearranged schedule of days off because the sky is falling and the govt is about to be shut down, because Congress won’t do its single most important job: passing a budget.
This isn’t the first time Johnson has adjourned, when he should be making congresscritters stay up late every night until they do they’re bloody job. But he’s not, presumably because he hasn’t enough Republican-only votes to do anything specific – beyond keeping Congress from doing anything constructive. And Raj Shah makes Karl Rove and Mark Meadows look like stand-up guys. He’s as trustworthy as a three dollar bill.
I share your angst and contempt for Mike Johnson’s laissez-faire attitude toward funding the federal government. Appropriation of funding for the wheels of the federal government is the House’s primary role and they are failing miserably at it! I think the anti-government zealots like Johnson have come to believe their own rhetoric so much that they really believe that government workers really aren’t necessary and that no one would miss them if they were gone. Or that federal money is just like pixie dust and just evaporates after you spend it. The cynicism of hard right media has so jaundiced their view of self-government that they honestly don’t know or don’t care if people’s personal lives are hurt, damaged or destroyed by not paying people what they are owed!