Special Counsel Weiss Demanding that Hunter Biden Show Up for Initial Appearance

/65 Comments/in , /by

David Weiss and Abbe Lowell are already having fights that suggest Weiss wants to give the GOP a bread and circus proxy fight with Trump’s perceived enemies.

Weiss is demanding that Hunter Biden appear in person for his initial appearance; Hunter believes that’s unnecessary, in significant part because he already did the things — like getting a mug shot and getting processed through probation — in this docket, before Judge Marylin Noreika, that he would otherwise do at an initial appearance for the gun charge.

Republicans will complain that one reason he cited — the Secret Service expenses — weren’t a consideration for Trump’s two federal arraignments.

Mr. Biden also seeks this procedure to minimize an unnecessary burden on government resources and the disruption to the courthouse and downtown areas when a person protected by the Secret Service flies across the country and then must be transported to and from a downtown location. Without getting into specifics, numerous agents and vehicles are required for what would have to be a two-day event (for a proceeding that may be very short in duration). This includes agents and vehicles in California and in Delaware, as well as agents who must travel with him on the plane. In addition, as the Court is aware of from the last appearance, security also requires shutting down local roadways in downtown Wilmington, advance coordination with local law enforcement and the U.S. Marshals Service, and several other logistical challenges.

As Hunter’s filing notes, though, the DE Court has already waived personal appearances this year.

arraignments by video when it is more efficient to do so.2 In this regard, the request by Mr. Biden is not out of the ordinary arraignments by video when it is more efficient to do so.2 In this regard, the request by Mr. Biden is not out of the ordinary.

[snip]

The government’s opposition to this common-sense request is puzzling because Mr. Biden is not asking for special treatment with this request, as individuals without the additional considerations described herein regularly make such appearances by video.

Note, these appearances would have taken place before Hunter’s father ended the federal COVID emergency — but it is true that people are still permitted to make initial appearances remotely.

It sounds like Weiss (and Leo Wise, who has insisted on public humiliation as part of this procedure), wants to argue for a change in release conditions, and do so while Hunter is there in public.

Since that proceeding, Mr. Biden has scrupulously complied with his conditions since returning home to California (D.E. 15), and it is his expectation that those conditions will remain in place until the Court orders otherwise. Moreover, should there be any discussion of revising Mr. Biden’s existing conditions of release, there is no reason why these discussions cannot take place with the Court and the government present by video conference.

That will be an interesting discussion, given that these charges were charged 59 months after the alleged crime, for something that Weiss already agreed merited a diversion. Perhaps Weiss will use his larded on charges and the felony punishment to make an argument that Hunter would be more likely to flee — but again, Weiss already agreed this merited diversion.

This may also be a tactical fight, in advance of the challenge Lowell has already promised about whether Weiss can indict Hunter for charges he already agreed to divert. As Hunter noted, it got put in the same docket, with the prior initial appearance noted, affirming that it is the same proceeding.

Things are going to get testy. They’re going to get testy in a way that will provide yet more evidence that Republicans are demanding — and Weiss is acceding — to treat this as a proxy prosecution for Trump’s opponent, even though it is, instead, the prosecution of a private citizen. They’re going to get testy in a way that will justify a stunt that was premature when Hunter’s attorneys threatened it last year — to put the President on the stand to lay out how this is a proxy fight designed to get to him.

Judge Noreika ordered Weiss to respond by tomorrow.

Share this entry

“My life’s on the line here:” Gary Shapley’s Direct Supervisor Believed His Claims Were Unsubstantiated

/56 Comments/in , /by

Ever since I read the email Gary Shapley sent to his IRS supervisors, Darrell Waldon and Mike Batdorf, on October 7, 2022 purportedly documenting David Weiss saying he was not the deciding authority on charing Hunter Biden, I have wondered whether Waldon was largely brushing off Shapley’s claims about the meeting when he said, “you have covered it all.”

In any case, unlike Shapley, Waldon’s focus was on the leak, not what Weiss said. As I’ve noted, Waldon’s primary response was to tell Shapley that he would take care of the leak referral, but in congressional testimony Shapley claimed to have been the one who did.

And testimony Waldon gave to House Ways and Means Committee might be consistent with such a brush-off: Waldon described that around this time, he recommended Shapley be removed from the case, apparently because Waldon believed the claims of bias Shapley was making — in things like this email — were unsubstantiated.

Waldon told the panel that he recommended to Batdorf that Shapley be removed from the case. Waldon said that Weiss told him after the October 2022 meeting that he would “not be talking with Mr. Shapley henceforth, as they were going through their deliberative process.”

“Before I left the special agent in charge position, in February, I recommended to Mr. Batdorf that Gary Shapley be removed as the [supervisory special agent] from the Hunter Biden investigation, primarily due to what I perceived to be unsubstantiated allegations about motive, intent, bias” Waldon said.

Waldon is also the person who, in December 2022, reviewed the emails that Shapley had turned over after eight months of stalling. Indeed, on December 13, 2022, as Waldon was reviewing the emails, Shapley emailed Waldon plaintitively asking for something he adamantly refused to give Hunter Biden: Advance notice of investigative concerns.

If you have questions about any emails I would ask you share it in advance so I can look at them and be prepared to put them into context. The USAO was so eager to got my emails (which they already had 95% of) … then surprise … they “might” have a problem with a few of them that memorialized their conduct. If the content of what I documented, in report or email is the cause of their consternation I would direct them to consider their actions instead of who documented them.

I have done nothing wrong. Instead of constant battles with the USAO/DOJ Tax, I chose to be politically savvy. I documented issues, that I would have normally addressed as they occurred, because of the USAO and DOJ Tax’s continued visceral reactions to any dissenting opinions or ideas. Every single day was a battle to do our job. I continually reported these issues up to IRS-CI leadership beginning in the summer of 2020. Now, because they realized I documented their conduct they separate me out, cease all communication and are not attempting to salvage their own conduct by attacking mind. This is an attempt by the USAO to tarnish my good standing and position within IRS-CI … and I expect IRS-CI leadership to understand that. As recent as the October 7 meeting, the Delaware USAO had nothing but good things to say about me/us. Then they finally read “discovery” items (provided 6 months previous — that are not discoverable) and they are beginning to defend their own unethical actions.

Consider the below:

  1. I am not a witness — therefor Jencks/impeachment is not an issue.
  2. I am not the receiver of original evidence nor engaged i any negative exculpatory language against the subject … My documentation only shows the USAO/DOJ Tax’s preferential treatment of this subject. [bold underline original, italics mine]

Waldon’s impression that Shapley was making unsubstantiated claims of bias, which Shapley presumably knew, makes these two documents even sketchier, because they were written at a time when his claims of bias were already suspect.

For example, in May, Shapley turned over his email making claims of bias, but not the presumably more accurate handwritten notes he wrote in the October 7 meeting itself. Those notes show that Shapley misrepresented what Weiss said about charging in CA; those notes that show Shapley recorded a detail — what outlet published the October 7 leak — about which he claimed to be ignorant in his Ways and Means deposition.

In other words, those notes show Shapely making unsupported claims of bias. And they show that when his own emails were reviewed, he panicked.

Thus far, the evidence support Waldon’s conclusion, not Shapley. Shapley was literally inventing conspiracy theories about the process required before David Weiss could seek Special Attorney status to charge in CA.

Which may explain why, in his original testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, he dramatically claimed, “My life’s on the line here.”

Meanwhile, the documents and testimony elicited as a result of Shapley’s effort to ruin Hunter Biden’s life to save his own (job or reputation, I guess), only give Abbe Lowell more ammunition to show that his charges are selective prosecution pushed by someone identified as a problem a year ago.

Update: This post has been edited for clarity.

Share this entry

Hunter Biden Sues the IRS

/135 Comments/in , /by

I can’t help but wonder whether the lawsuits Abbe Lowell is filing on behalf of Hunter Biden are preparation for an assault on the criminal charges against the President’s son.

Last week, for example, Lowell alleged that Garrett Ziegler had criminally hacked an iPhone encrypted on “the laptop” and had altered information on it. Whatever else the lawsuit will do, it will establish that DOJ chose to charge a non-violent recovering addict for owning a gun for 11 days in 2018, but has yet to do anything about the people who’ve serially compromised the digital life of the President’s son.

Lowell already has a bunch of other information to substantiate a selective prosecution case. But if he can demonstrate that DOJ ignored more serious felonies while still pursuing Hunter, it would only add to the evidence.

Today, Lowell sued the IRS for the media tour that Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler have conducted since April, enumerated as follows (note, this only includes live appearances; Tristan Leavitt has made obviously problematic claims to print journalists as well):

Attorney A’s public statements in a letter to the Committee on Ways and Means on April 19, 2023.

Attorney A’s public statements to Mr. Solomon of John Solomon Reports on April 19, 2023.

Attorney A’s public statements to Mr. Axelrod of CBS News on April 19, 2023.

Attorney A’s public statements to Mr. Baier of Fox News on April 20, 2023.

Mr. Shapley’s public statements to Mr. Axelrod of CBS News on May 24, 2023.

Mr. Shapley’s public statements to Mr. Baier of Fox News on June 28, 2023.

Mr. Shapley’s public statements to Mr. Axelrod of CBS News on June 28, 2023.

Mr. Shapley’s public statements to Mr. Solomon of John Solomon Reports on June 29, 2023.

Mr. Ziegler’s public statements to Jake Tapper of CNN on July 20, 2023.

Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler’s public statements to Megyn Kelly of the Megyn Kelly Show on July 20, 2023.

Attorney B’s public statements to Mr. Solomon of John Solomon Reports on July 21, 2023.

Mr. Ziegler’s public statements to John Solomon of John Solomon Reports on July 24, 2023.

Attorney A’s public statements to Martha MacCallum of Fox News on July 26, 2023.

Attorney A’s public statements on Fox News on July 31, 2023.

Mr. Shapley’s public statements to Kaitlan Collins of CNN on August 11, 2023.

While statute permits and Hunter Biden did ask for punitive damages, ultimately he only asked for attorneys fees and $1,000 per disclosure — just $15,000 for this listed disclosures, as well as a program to ensure that IRS uphold the Privacy Act.

He’s not going to get rich with this lawsuit.

But Lowell also asked for all information in the IRS’ possession relating to these disclosures.

Ordering Defendant to produce to Mr. Biden all documents in its possession, custody, or control regarding the inspection, transmittal, and/or disclosure of Mr. Biden’s confidential tax return information;

If successful, this request would generate a good deal of information about the IRS tracking of these leaks (and any earlier ones). It might provide proof, in the form of metadata, showing when the IRS agents accessed this information and under what circumstances, including Ziegler’s overt promise to go back and find more data in response to demands from members of Congress. It might obtain information on the IRS’ own investigation of this leaking.

If DOJ is going to charge Hunter with tax charges, they’re going to need to present the investigation as conducted by Shapley and Ziegler — a point Abbe Lowell made in a letter to David Weiss last month.

Among other ways, these agents, sill employed by the Government, would likely be witnesses should any tax charge you file ever be tried. It is unprecedented for Government officials who are the investigators or prosecutors in the case and would be witnesses and rial counsel to conduct themselves in this manner which seks to try the issues in the court of public opinion rather than properly in a court of law. That conduct itself (in addition to the various other infirmities with the Government attempting to bring charges against Mr. Biden26) would support dismissal of any charges you have fled or would try to so file in the future.27

26 To be clear, we do not believe the Government could validly bring charges against our client concerning these issues given the express language of he agreed-upon Diversion Agreement.

27 Courts recognize that the crime of leaking or disclosing such information by Government agents sworn to uphold the law is often more egregious than the crimes those agents are charged with investigating. See, e.g., United States v. Walters, No. 17. 2373 (2d Cir. Dec. 4, 2018) Jacobs, J. concurring) ([Tlhe leak of grand jury tesimony in some respects more egregious than anything [Defendant] did (insider wading) — the FB supervisor took an oath to uphold the law and was acting in a supervisory capacity to discharge an important public function.” (emphasis ddd).

Again, on top of all the other things Lowell could point to to substantiate a claim that Hunter was being selectively prosecuted, Lowell might ask why Hunter is being prosecuted but not Shapley and Ziegler.

For five years, the government has (apparently) chosen to relentlessly pursue pickayune charges against Hunter Biden while ignoring the crimes committed to try to set up those charges.

And Abbe Lowell may be preparing to make that case in the case of any trial.

Share this entry

After Threats Elicited by Gary Shapley’s Misleading Testimony, Hunter Biden Prosecutors Reneged on the Plea Deal

/109 Comments/in , , , /by

In the wake of two news reports on the communications leading up to the aborted Hunter Biden plea, Jim Jordan et al demanded the documents shared with the Politico and NYT from Hunter’s lawyers. In response, Lowell sent the following documents, which Betsy Woodruff Swan published here:

While the letters include a familiar catalog of the Shapley and Ziegler media tour, there are a few details worth noting.

First, the August 14 letter goes to great lengths to distinguish the topic of Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler’s purported whistleblowing — prosecutorial misconduct — from the materials released, which focus on investigative material implicating Hunter Biden. That distinction ought be a way for DOJ to rein in the two purported whistleblowers, as Merrick Garland quickly did in the case of Michael Sherwin.

The letter claims, as Abbe Lowell has in the past, that some of the statements Shapley and Ziegler have made are false.

[T]he “facts” disclosed and conclusions reached are either false, legally incorrect, or were otherwise addressed during the various meetings between defense counsel and your Office.

If that’s true, Lowell should ask for a criminal investigation for their false statements before Congress.

It also reveals something that should be obvious but I hadn’t realized: The iCloud warrant which produced a bunch of WhatsApp texts, which Shapley discussed at length in his original testimony, has never been disclosed to Hunter himself, so must be sealed.

On several occasions during their testimony, Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler discussed a sealed search warrant, and showed and discussed with the Committee certain fruits of that sealed search warrant. Because we have never been notified of any such “electronic search warrant for iCloud backup”— nor of any other warrant to search for and seize any property of our client 13—we must presume that Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler were discussing, in violation of a sealing order, a search warrant that has been sealed. Nevertheless, Mr. Shapley purportedly produced WhatsApp messages that are the: fruit of these warrants, and they have now been published.” Moreover, Mr. Ziegler offered to produce to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee additional and more fulsome grand jury materials concerning these messages, with the intent of making such materials public.

So it’s not just that Shapley was violating grand jury secrecy (he was authorized by Ways and Means Chief Counsel to share tax information, but not grand jury information), he was also almost certainly violating a sealing order that remained in effect almost two months after Hunter Biden received a summons in conjunction with the tax charges (conveniently so for the purported whistleblowers, because the warrant affidavit may rely on poisoned fruit from their mistreatment of “the laptop”). Whatever judge authorized that warrant and gag — presumably DE’s Chief Judge, Colm Connolly — might be interested that investigative agents are just blowing off the gag they themselves presumably asked for.

The most alarming thing in the August 14 letter, though, is a claim that Leo Wise — who has taken the lead role in the prosecution — claimed in a July 31 call to be unaware of any grand jury leaks in the investigation, at all!

On a July 31, 2023, call, Assistant United States Attorney Wise stated he was “not aware” of any leak of grand jury information by the Government during the course of the Government’s investigation of our client. Such a statement was surprising given that Mr. Biden’s counsel have discussed such leaks with the Goverment on multiple occasions over the past two years and addressed these leaks in at least four prior letters and countless telephone calls with your Office.

[snip]

Yet, given your Office’s inaction in the face of a torrent of illegal leaks about your investigation of Mr. Biden, and now your reinvented denial that leaks ever happened at all—your Offices assurances are being rendered false.

It’s as if the guy Weiss brought in to salvage the case believes he has to simply deny what everyone watching can plainly see, that Shapely and Ziegler have set off a torrent of prejudicial information that could make it impossible for Hunter to get a fair trial, much less be exonerated if not charged.

In both the August 14 letter and the one from yesterday, Lowell claims that the political pressure Jordan et al have put on Weiss led the newly minted Special Counsel to ratchet up his charges.

The change to a rare misdemeanor failure to file/pay and a felony diversion for possession of a firearm (and now the actual filing of those firearm charges) occurred only after a chain of events starting with the improper disclosures arranged by you and your Committees of the so-called “whistleblowers” claims of prosecutorial misconduct and your, and the right-wing media with whom you coordinate, taking up those claims.

But there’s something that Lowell didn’t mention.

It’s not just political pressure that this media blitz has created.

It’s credible threats of violence.

As Ken Dilanian first reported, after Shapley started representing Lesley Wolf’s adherence to DOJ and FBI guidelines as political interference, she was targeted with credible threats. Thomas Sobicinski told the House Judiciary Committee how Shapley’s testimony had led to the harassment of employees, employees whose parents got calls and children got followed. He specifically agreed that Wolf “has concerns for her own safety.”

It’s not just that Shapley’s testimony has led to political pressure. It has led directly to credible threats of violence against the prosecutor who crafted the original plea deal.

And in the wake of those credible threats of violence, David Weiss decided to ratchet up the charges against the President’s son.

The threats of violence may not have caused Weiss’ subsequent decision to renege on the plea deal (though that is one thing that is likely to be the topic of litigation going forward).  But the public record, at least, makes clear that those threats of violence correlate with a decision to seek more punitive treatment of the President’s son.

And that’s a very chilling prospect: that MAGA right wingers could bully prosecutors into taking punitive action against Hunter Biden.

Share this entry

Not Breaking News and Stop Lying to Your Followers It is: David Weiss Indicts Hunter Biden

/75 Comments/in , /by

As promised, David Weiss has indicted the President’s son. As I suspected, he added a False Statements charge, on top of the weapons charge, so even if SCOTUS rules 18 USC 922 to be unconstitutional, Weiss will still have a felony against Hunter.

He charged a total of three charges.

This is where things start to get interesting.

Remember: Abbe Lowell insists that Weiss can’t charge Hunter, because he Weiss signed a diversion agreement that — per AUSA Leo Wise — was a binding contract between DE USAO and Hunter. Over the weekend, I wrote about how even with this indictment, Weiss may have far less leverage over Hunter than he thinks.

Share this entry

Gary Shapley’s Notes Show That Gary Shapley Misrepresented David Weiss

/21 Comments/in , , /by

When Gary Shapley wrote down what was said about charging Hunter Biden with tax crimes in California at a contested meeting on October 7, 2022, he quoted Weiss as saying that if the US Attorney declined to prosecute, Weiss, “will request approval to proceed in CA” [my emphasis].

When Shapley relayed what happened in the meeting to his boss around six hours later, he described that Weiss “would have to request permission,” [my emphasis] even while admitting he was “unclear” on what Weiss said about where he’d get that permission.

Shapley’s lawyers shared these handwritten notes, over three months into his media tour with the right wing congressional set, because they think the fact that Shapley wrote down his understanding that Weiss said, “he is not the deciding person” [the latter part of which is redacted in the hand-written notes], that they disprove the testimony of others at the meeting.

The Special Agent in Charge, Thomas Sobocinski, said that both before and after the meeting, he understood Weiss to be the final decision-maker.

But this discrepancy later in his notes — Shapley’s replacement of “will” with “would have to,” his replacement of “approval” with “permission” — instead reveals that Shapley misunderstood what was said in the meeting, and then misrepresented what happened both that same day, with his supervisor, and ever since, with dumb right wingers in Congress.

To be sure, both versions are consistent with what David Weiss and Merrick Garland have been saying all along — including to Jim Jordan in June and to Lindsey Graham in July: that if Weiss decided to bring charges outside Delaware and the local US Attorneys didn’t want to partner on the case, he could ask for Special Attorney authority under 28 USC 515 and Garland would grant it. Both versions are consistent with the process Weiss has laid out. You ask the local US Attorney, and if they say no, you get Special Attorney authority.

But in the notes Shapley took in the meeting, he recorded Weiss committing to taking the steps to charge the later tax years — the ones that had to be charged in Los Angeles, two of the three years that were part of the plea deal. In his email to his supervisor, Shapley transformed that into his panic that, “this case could end up without any charges,” [emphasis and panic Shapley’s], something that was sharply at odds with the commitment Shapley had recorded Weiss making in the meeting — will — to follow the process necessary to charge the case. Plus, Weiss’ description of seeking “approval” rather than “permission” substantially disproves Shapley’s claim that anything said at the meeting was “inconsistent with DOJ public position and Merrick Garland testimony.” Shapley had to reword what he originally recorded Weiss as saying to support that claim.

That he did so — that he rewrote his own notes to match his belief, and then shared the rewritten version rather than the original with Congress — damages his credibility rather than backing it.

To be sure, neither set of notes is reliable.

For example, there is at least one thing missing from Shapley’s hand-written notes that he records in the email to his boss: the substance of his objection to David Weiss’ decision not to charge the 2014 and 2015 tax years.

I stated for the record, that I did not concur with that decision and put on the record that IRS will have a lot of risk associated with this decision that there is still a large amount of unreported income in that year from Burisma that we have no mechanism to recover.

Shapley’s claim may not be (or may no longer be) true: at the plea hearing, AUSA Leo Wise stated that there was no restitution owed. But I have no doubt Shapley did make this objection. If he didn’t record making a statement he thought to be that important, then, what else did Shapley say that he didn’t write down?

More importantly, what did Shapley not say that he didn’t record?

There’s nothing unredacted in Shapley’s notes recording Sobocinski’s question — which Shapley included in his email to his boss — about whether there was any problem on the case with politicization.

FBI SAC asked the room if anyone thought the case had been politicized — we can discuss this [if] you prefer.

That’s important because, at least per Sobocinski’s interview with the Committee, no one raised concerns about politicization at the meeting. “I was asking in a room of leaders on this case to say, ‘Hey, we are working together. We’re moving this thing
forward. Do you think there’s any manipulation from the outside that’s stopping us from what we’re doing?'” Sobocinski told the House Judiciary Committee about the question. And, at least per Sobocinski’s representation, “nobody in that room raised their voice to say anything other.”

So unless the redacted lines at the end of Shapley’s notes record Shapley providing some kind of affirmative answer, then there’s no evidence he took the opportunity to express the wild claims of politicization he was making contemporaneously, but he also didn’t record himself passing up that opportunity. At least per Sobocinski’s memory, the SAC gave him an opportunity to air those concerns and he didn’t take it, an opportunity that might have elicited a very simple explanation about what Shapely was misunderstanding about how the Special Attorney process worked and might have saved us from all the theatricality that threatens all charges against Hunter Biden now.

Indeed, whether or not Shapley said anything in response to Sobocinski’s question, the most suspect part of his email to his boss was an offer to discuss politicization in person: “we can discuss this [if] you prefer.” Both these documents are designed to provide for accountability, but Shapley appears to have declined to write down anywhere what his claims about politicization were, which would have made him accountable to his claims just like he wants to hold Weiss accountable for what he understood him to say.

Shapley reorganized his notes between the hand-written ones and the email in a way that changes their meaning, too.

Per his contemporaneous notes, the first thing discussed after the discussion about the leak was Weiss’ rationale for not charging 2014 and 2015, the two more substantive years that would have to be charged in DC. Once you’ve explained that, then whether or not Weiss got Special Attorney status for DC is significantly moot (2016 was only ever treated as a misdemeanor).

In his email to his boss, though, Shapley moved that discussion to after his argument, covering the DC charges, the LA charges, and the involvement of DOJ Tax Attorney, that Weiss didn’t have authority to charge. If Weiss had already explained his prosecutorial decision about the most problematic Burisma years — something Shapley’s hand-written notes record him has having done — then none of the other complaints about these years (that Weiss or Lesley Wolf let the Statutes of Limitation expire, that Weiss didn’t get Special Attorney authority in DC) matter. Shapely reorders his notes to hide the fact that the DC decision didn’t matter.

The LA decision mattered — the one about which Shapley originally recorded Weiss saying he “will” pursue Special Attorney authority if need be. The DC decision did not.

Just as important a problem for Shapley’s credibility is that for more than three months, Shapley has been claiming the email was his best record of the meeting, without distinguishing what parts of the email were his editorial statements and what parts a record of the meeting. That parts of the email reflected him editorializing should have been clear to anyone smarter than Jim Jordan; Shapley’s use of “I believe” and “in my opinion” are a big tip-off.

But it’s clear that Republicans have nevertheless treated the email, and all its bullet points, as a record of the meeting. That’s most problematic with the way Shapley recorded his understanding that Weiss had asked for permission to file in DC, permission which hadn’t been granted.

Staffers in Congress have been quizzing meeting attendees about things Shapley included in his email, without making clear they were background and not contemporaneous notes. One example that relates to the way Shapley packaged up his notes, at several points Steve Castor quizzed Sobocinski about whether he, “remember[ed] anything in that meeting about the fact that D.C. had declined to bring a case?” Sobocinski didn’t remember that — but likely for good reason. Shapley doesn’t record it as having happened, at all, in this meeting (and Sobocinski did not entirely back Shapley’s claim that that is what did happen). All Shapley recorded in his hand-written notes is that when Weiss asked for Special Attorney status (which Shapley lists as Special Counsel), DOJ — not Matthew Graves — told him to follow the process, which requires first asking if the US Attorney wants to partner on the case.

Even in these hand-written notes, this comment may have been editorializing; after all, Shapley records it after Weiss had already delivered his decision not to charge 2014 and 2015. But his hand-written notes definitely don’t reflect anyone saying that Graves had refused to partner on the case at the meeting.

In Sobocinski’s interview, he talked about how Shapley’s little media tour has created more challenges to actually charge this case, including threats against team members, particularly Lesley Wolf. There is nothing that Shapley has released publicly that helps the case and a great deal that will give Abbe Lowell more ammunition to demonstrate that the people pushing for tax charges against his client were going nuts because they weren’t allowed to violate rules on Sensitive Investigative Matters and because they didn’t understand bureaucratic process.

This is yet another example: Gary Shapley provided his editorialized version of a meeting that, he claims, was his red line to Congress and only months later did he share the underlying notes. Not only do the notes show he misrepresented what Weiss said about Los Angeles, but they raise yet more questions about Shapley’s equivocations about a leak that happened to coincide with a red line that isn’t entirely backed by his own notes. The motivated inconsistencies in the notes are the kind of thing defense attorneys use to discredit entire investigative teams, and Shapley has simply offered it up.

At this rate, Shapley’s media tour will be singularly responsible for making it impossible for Weiss to do the one thing Shapley claimed had to happen: charges against Hunter Biden.

Share this entry

By the Time Kevin McCarthy Rolled Out an Impeachment Inquiry, the FBI Had Already Debunked a Key Premise

/57 Comments/in , , /by

Yesterday morning, in a desperate bid to keep his gavel, Speaker McCarthy directed three committees, including the House Judiciary Committee, to begin an impeachment query.

As Philip Bump laid out, only one of McCarthy’s justifications for impeachment — that Biden knew more about his son’s business than he stated publicly (but not under oath) — has been substantiated; several of the rest have no basis in fact.

More importantly, just one relates to Biden’s current term as President: the allegation that his Administration has interfered in the investigation into his son. When Bump wrote his column, he noted that David Weiss — the Trump appointed US Attorney whom Biden retained precisely to give independence to the investigation — had disputed the claim.

“Finally, despite these serious allegations,” McCarthy continued, “it appears that the president’s family has been offered special treatment by Biden’s own administration, treatment that not otherwise would have received if they were not related to the president.”

This allegation does have one advantage over the preceding four: It’s actually related to Biden’s time in office as president.

The suggestion here is that the handling of Hunter Biden’s tax and gun case was unfairly lenient, thanks to pressure from the Justice Department. This was alleged by whistleblowers from the IRS who offered testimony in front of Congress. The U.S. attorney leading the Hunter Biden investigation, David Weiss, disputed the allegations.

Only, according to a report from the WaPo, by the time McCarthy made this allegation, it had been even further debunked.

Last Thursday, FBI’s Baltimore Special Agent in Charge Thomas Sobocinski appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. He testified that his memory of a key October 7 meeting conflicts with claims that purported whistleblower Gary Shapley made about the meeting.

Shapley said Weiss told FBI and IRS agents during that meeting that Weiss was not the “deciding official on whether charges are filed.” But Sobocinski, who was also there, said he did not hear Weiss say that and “never felt that [Weiss] needed approval” to bring charges.

Sobocinski, who is the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office, noted there was “bureaucratic administrative process” Weiss had to work through to bring charges outside Delaware but that his understanding was “that [Weiss] had the authority to bring whatever he needed to do.”

“I never thought that anybody was there above David Weiss to say no,” he said.

Pressed again on the issue later in the interview, he said, “I went into that meeting believing he had the authority, and I have left that meeting believing he had the authority to bring charges.”

Gary Shapley’s claims of politicization have been debunked twice now. The key claim of favoritism at the core of impeachment keeps crumbling.

Jim Jordan, at least, knew all this before McCarthy’s impeachment decision.

And yet McCarthy went forward anyway, with even less basis for the inquiry.

Share this entry

As Kevin McCarthy Embraces James Comer’s Wet Dreams of Dick Pics, George Santos Discusses “Paths Forward”

/51 Comments/in , /by

I don’t, yet, have the stomach to write up the shittiness of the Hill reporting on Kevin McCarthy’s embrace of James Comer’s wet dreams of dick pics and SARs.

Suffice it to say access merchants like Jake Sherman are transcribing Big Kev’s preordained decision to back impeachment without mentioning that he is supporting an inquiry because he has no evidence of wrongdoing on Biden’s part, a constitutional abomination.

This WaPo story is the rare story on the development that makes the corruption behind McCarthy’s decision — and his own weakness in adopting it — the story, as it should be.

To appease those lawmakers, Republican leaders are weighing whether to use a potential impeachment inquiry vote as a bargaining chip in the funding negotiations. But even if the inquiry is included in the talks, it’s not certain that Republicans have the necessary 218 votes to pass it. Some lawmakers are staunchly against it, and McCarthy has said that an impeachment inquiry would occur through a vote on the House floor, as opposed to his unilateral decision-making.

“I think it’s abusing the process,” Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) said, lamenting how political impeachments have become. “We’ve been good about letting [the] Judiciary and Oversight [committees] run their course, and I’ve not seen a compilation of facts or evidence that had been put together that would convince me or anybody else at the moment that the next step is an impeachment inquiry.”

House Republicans have been investigating whether Biden benefited from his son Hunter’s business dealings, but they have yet to discover evidence directly connecting the two. While they have uncovered allegations that the Justice Department stymied the investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial misdeeds, along with testimony about his penchant for touting the family brandto reel in business deals, investigators on the House Oversight and Judiciary committees have not unearthed any evidence of wrongdoing by the president.

The fact that McCarthy is capitulating to the most radical members of his own party out of desperation makes developments in Brooklyn more significant.

On August 15, EDNY indicted George Santos’ fundraiser, Samuel Miele, for impersonating McCarthy’s former Chief of Staff, Dan Meyer, in conversations with fundraisers.

That case was reassigned, as a case related to Santos‘ own fraud prosecution, to Judge Joanna Seybert. Within a week of the charges, the Miele case shifted to discussions of “possible dispositions,” code for a plea agreement, as suggested in a letter asking for a continuance of even an initial hearing to September 5.

Since that date, the parties have engaged in meaningful discussions about possible dispositions of this matter without the need for a trial. The parties are jointly requesting that the Court exclude the time from today’s date through September 5, 2023, to allow the parties to focus on those discussions instead of trial preparation.

Last week, after EDNY had provided some discovery to Miele, both sides joined in asking for another longer continuance to discuss what was explicitly described as a plea.

The parties now write to advise the Court that the government has made two substantial discovery productions in accordance with Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and that negotiations concerning a potential resolution of this case without the need for a trial are active and ongoing. Under these circumstances, the parties respectfully submit that excluding additional Speedy Trial time to accommodate the defendant’s ongoing discovery review and facilitate plea discussions will serve the ends of justice and outweigh the best interests of the public and the defendant in a speedy trial.

The day after the continuance in Miele’s case, prosecutors in Santos’ case asked for a continuance of a status hearing that had been scheduled for Thursday, in part, to “discuss possible paths forward in this matter.”

Further, the parties have continued to discuss possible paths forward in this matter. The parties wish to have additional time to continue those discussions.

By all appearances, Santos is further from a plea than Miele is, probably for good reason. Miele has testimony against Santos to offer as leverage; Santos has his seat in the House (though depending on the precise nature of his relationship with Andrew Intrater and Viktor Vekselberg, Santos might be able to trade testimony as well).

But this is a public integrity case, and as such, a resignation is one of the things that prosecutors are permitted to use in negotiating a plea deal.

And EDNY is discussing very short timelines, with Miele’s next hearing currently scheduled for October 6, and Santos’ next status hearing scheduled for October 27.

Which is to say that Big Kev may lose the deciding vote that made him Speaker even before discussions of impeachment and shutdowns are resolved.

Share this entry

David Weiss May Have More Bluster than Tactical Leverage

/102 Comments/in , , /by

There’s something missing from coverage of the claim, made in the second-to-last sentence of a Speedy Trial filing submitted Wednesday, that David Weiss will indict Hunter Biden before September 29, when — according to calculations laid out by prosecutor Leo Wise in the filing — the Speedy Trial Act mandates an indictment.

None of the coverage has considered why David Weiss hasn’t already charged the President’s son.

The filing was submitted in response to an August 31 order from Judge Maryellen Noreika; its very last sentence politely asked her to butt out: “[T]he Government does not believe any action by the Court is necessary at this time.” Given the unusual nature of this legal proceeding, there may at least be question about Wise’s Speedy Trial calculations. One way or another, though, the Speedy Trial clock and the statute of limitations (which Wise said in July would expire on October 12) are ticking.

It would take probably half an hour to present the evidence for the weapons charge — which would consist of the form Hunter signed to purchase a gun, passages from Hunter’s book, a presumed grand jury transcript from Hallie Biden, and testimony from an FBI agent — to a grand jury. It would take maybe another ten minutes if Weiss wanted to add a false statements charge on top of the weapons charge. There certainly would be no need for a special grand jury.

Any tax charges would be more complicated, sure, but they would be in one or another district (probably Los Angeles), ostensibly severed from the weapons charge to which the misdemeanors planned as part of an aborted plea deal were linked.

So why wait? Why not simply indict and avoid any possible challenge to Speedy Trial calculations?

The answer may lie in something included in a long NYT story citing liberally from an anonymous senior law enforcement official who knew at least one thing that only David Weiss could know. That story explains that Weiss sought Special Counsel status, in part, to get, “added leverage in a revamped deal with Mr. Biden.”

If Weiss indeed sought Special Counsel status to get leverage for a deal, then at least last month when he asked for it, he wasn’t really planning on indicting Hunter Biden. He was hoping to get more tactical leverage to convince Hunter Biden to enter into a plea agreement that would better satisfy GOP bloodlust than the plea that failed in July.

Now he has used the opportunity presented by Noreika’s order to claim he really really is going to indict Hunter, a claim that set off predictably titillated reporting about the prospect of a Hunter Biden trial during the presidential election.

Again, if you’re going to charge Hunter Biden with a simple weapons charge, possibly a false statements charge, why not do it already, rather than threatening to do it publicly? Why not charge him in the week after Noreika entered that order, mooting all Speedy Trial concerns?

Abbe Lowell appears unimpressed with Weiss’ promised indictment. He repeated in both a separate filing and a statement to the press that Weiss can’t charge Hunter because he already entered into a diversion agreement pertaining to the charge.

We believe the signed and filed diversion agreement remains valid and prevents any additional charges from being filed against Mr. Biden, who has been abiding by the conditions of release under that agreement for the last several weeks, including regular visits by the probation office. We expect a fair resolution of the sprawling, five-year investigation into Mr. Biden that was based on the evidence and the law, not outside political pressure, and we’ll do what is necessary on behalf of Mr. Biden to achieve that.

I think few stories on this have accounted for the possibility that that statement — “we’ll do what is necessary … to achieve” a fair resolution of the case — is as pregnant a threat as DOJ’s promise to indict in the next several weeks. That’s because everything leading up to David Weiss obtaining Special Counsel status actually squandered much of any leverage that Weiss had, and that’s before you consider the swap of Chris Clark as Hunter’s lead attorney for the more confrontational Lowell, making Clark available as a witness against Weiss.

As Politico (but not NYT, working off what are presumably the same materials) laid out, Hunter’s legal team has long been arguing that this investigation was plagued by improper political influence.

But even before the plea deal was first docketed on June 20, the GOP House started interfering in ways that will not only help Abbe Lowell prove there was improper influence, but may well give him unusual ability to go seek for more proof of it.

It appears to have started between the time the deal was struck on June 8 and when it was docketed on June 20. AUSA Lesley Wolf, who had negotiated the deal, was replaced by Leo Wise and others. When Weiss claimed, with the announcement of the deal, that the investigation was ongoing and he was even pursuing dodgy leads obtained from a likely Russian influence operation, it became clear that the two sides’ understanding of the deal had begun to rupture. This is the basis of Lowell’s claim that Weiss reneged on the deal: that Weiss approved an agreement negotiated by Wolf but then brought in Wise to abrogate that deal.

Whatever the merit of Lowell’s claim that the diversion agreement remains in place — the plea deal was such a stinker that both sides have some basis to defend their side of that argument — by charging Hunter, Weiss will give Lowell an opportunity to litigate the claim that Weiss reneged on the diversion agreement, and will do so on what may be the easier of the two parts of the plea agreements to make a claim that Weiss reneged on a deal, with Judge Noreika already issuing orders to find out why this stinker is still on her docket. I’m not sure how Lowell would litigate it — possibly a double jeopardy challenge — but his promise to do what’s necessary likely guarantees that he will litigate it. He’ll presumably do the same if and when Weiss files tax charges in California. It’s not necessarily that these arguments about reneging on a deal will, themselves, work, but litigating the issue will provide opportunity to introduce plenty more problems with the case.

That’s part of what was missed in coverage of this development this week. Weiss promised to indict. Lowell responded, effectively, by challenging the newly-minted Special Counsel to bring it on, because it will give Lowell opportunity to substantiate his claim that Weiss reneged on a deal because of political influence.

And those IRS agents claiming to be whistleblowers have only offered gift after gift to Lowell to destroy their own case. In their own testimony they revealed:

  • From the start, a supervisor documented concerns about improper influence and Sixth Amendment problems with this investigation
  • Joseph Ziegler, the IRS agent who improbably claims to be a Democrat, treated such concerns as liberal bias, evincing political bias on his own part
  • DOJ didn’t do the most basic due diligence on the laptop and may have used it in warrants, creating poisonous fruit problems
  • Ziegler treated key WhatsApp messages obtained with a later warrant with shocking sloppiness, and may even have misidentified the interlocutors involved
  • Ziegler didn’t shield himself from the taint of publicly released laptop materials (and Shapley was further tainted by viewing exhibits during his deposition)
  • Gary Shapley is hiding … something … in his emails

These two self-proclaimed whistleblowers have made evidence from this case public — all of which would never have seen the light of day if Weiss had honored the plea agreement — without the filter of a prosecutor to clean it up in advance.

All that’s before you consider the rampant leaking.

In both their depositions and their giddy public testimony before the House both Shapely and Ziegler did plenty of things that will provide basis to impeach them, not just as witnesses, but even as investigators, as did their anonymous FBI agent colleague’s laughable claim in his deposition that this was not an investigation riddled with leaks. James Comer seems intent on inviting all the other investigators who have complained they weren’t able to bulldoze rules designed to protect sensitive investigations to be deposed in an adversarial setting, which will provide still more surface area that Lowell can attack.

The gun charge is simple. But what investigative witnesses would present any tax case against Hunter Biden and would their testimony be impressive enough to sustain a case after Lowell serially destroyed Ziegler as the key investigator? And because Weiss has left Lowell with a viable claim that the diversion remains valid, he may be able to introduce the taint of the tax case into any gun prosecution.

Some of this shit goes on in any case, though not usually this much with politically exposed people like the President’s son. But prosecutors have a great number of tools to prevent defendants from learning about it or at least keeping it off the stand. Many of the IRS agents’ complaints were really complaints about Lesley Wolf’s efforts to preserve the integrity of the case. By bitching non-stop about her efforts, the IRS agents have ensured that Hunter Biden will get access to everything that Wolf tried hard to stave off from the investigation.

And there’s something more. Ziegler provided the name of his initial supervisor, who documented concerns that this case was politicized from the start. Both IRS agents identified for Lowell a slew of irregularities he can use to undermine any case. Republicans in Congress have bent over backwards to expose witnesses against Hunter to adversarial questioning (and both IRS agents got downright reckless in their public testimony). The way in which this plea collapsed provides Lowell reason to challenge any indictment from the start.

But the collapse also provided something else, as described in the NYT story: a David Weiss associate told the NYT that Weiss told them that any other American would not be prosecuted on the evidence against Hunter.

Mr. Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses. (A senior law enforcement official forcefully denied the account.)

If this witness makes themselves available to Lowell, it provides him something that is virtually unheard of in any prosecution: Evidence to substantiate a claim of selective prosecution, the argument that Weiss believes that similarly situated people would not have been prosecuted and the only reason Hunter was being prosecuted was because of non-stop GOP bloodlust that originated with Donald Trump. It is darn near impossible for a defense attorney to get discovery to support a selective prosecution claim. Weiss may have given Lowell, one of the most formidable lawyers in the country, a way to get that discovery.

And all that’s before Lowell unveils whatever evidence he has that Joseph Ziegler watched and did nothing as Hunter Biden’s digital life was hijacked, possibly by people associated with the same Republicans driving the political bloodlust, possibly by the very same sex workers on which the case was initially predicated. That’s before Lowell unveils evidence that Ziegler witnessed what should have been clear alarms that Hunter Biden was a crime victim but Ziegler chose instead to trump up a weak criminal case against the crime victim. I suspect that Weiss doesn’t know what Lowell knows about this, either, adding still more uncertainty to any case he charges.

Over four weeks ago, Leo Wise asked Noreika to dismiss the misdemeanor tax charges against Hunter so they could charge them in another venue.

In light of that requirement, and the important constitutional rights it embodies, the Government moves the Court to dismiss the information without prejudice so that it may bring tax charges in a district where venue lies.

Now he and Weiss have made promises of another upcoming indictment, without yet charging it. At the very least, that suggests that there are a number of challenges to overcome before they can charge Hunter.

They likely still have time on any 2019 tax charges — the ones where, reportedly, both sides agree that Hunter overstated his income, which will make a tax case hard to prove. I’m not saying that Weiss won’t charge Hunter. Indeed, he has backed himself into a corner where he likely has to. But with each step forward, Lowell has obtained leverage to make Weiss’ own conduct a central issue in this prosecution (and even Wise may have made himself a witness given the centrality of his statements during the plea colloquy to Lowell’s claim that the diversion remains valid).

The Speedy Trial filings seem to have hinted at an intense game of chicken between Weiss and Lowell. And thus far at least, Weiss seems more afraid of a Hunter Biden indictment than Lowell is.

Share this entry

Right Wing Operatives Say Hunter Biden Shouldn’t Get Same Treatment as Dmitry Firtash

/34 Comments/in , , , , /by

In the wake of the Politico and NYT reports on the collapse of the Hunter Biden plea deal (which I wrote up here), right wing operatives have a remarkable complaint: That the President’s son got worse treatment from DOJ than mobbed up Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash.

The complaint started with Federalist Faceplant Margot Cleveland (who called the good Politico piece and the problematic NYT piece “virtually identical”).

Margot complains that Hunter Biden’s lawyer Chris Clark attempted to reach out to high level DOJ personnel to raise concerns about the degree to which the investigation into his client had been politicized from the start.

Clark’s efforts to meet with Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco failed.

Ultimately, though, he did get a meeting with Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer, who oversees ethical violations at DOJ. As Faceplant Margot helpfully lays out, the meeting happened in the wake of yet another attempt by agents involved in the case — after repeated leaks to the press — to  force Weiss’ hand.

According to Politico, from the fall of 2022 through the spring of 2023, Clark, on behalf of Hunter, sought meetings with high-level Justice Department officials, including the head of the Criminal Division, the head of the Tax Division, the Office of Legal Counsel, the Office of the Solicitor General, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and the attorney general himself. Clark finally succeeded in his efforts to meet with a higher-up at Main Justice, when on April 26, 2023, Clark met with Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer and Delaware U.S. Attorney Weiss.

Just one week earlier, Mark Lytle, a partner at the law firm Nixon Peabody, had penned a letter to key House and Senate committees informing them that his client, a career IRS criminal supervisory special agent, sought to make “protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress,” concerning an investigation into a politically connected individual. Those whistleblower disclosures, the letter explained, would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee,” would show the “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interests,” and would provide “examples of preferential treatment” and improper political influence. While the whistleblowers did not identify the politically connected taxpayer, Just The News confirmed the allegations concerned Hunter Biden.

So that means that after Hunter’s lawyer spent some six months trying to swing a meeting with top DOJ officials, a meeting materialized a week after news broke of the whistleblowers’ claims that political favoritism prevented them from properly investigating Hunter Biden.

Soon after Weiss, Hunter’s attorney Clark, and Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer met in late April 2023 to discuss the Hunter Biden investigation, the House Ways and Means Committee met on May 5, 2023, and received a “proffer” from the whistleblowers’ attorney concerning the testimony their client would provide Congress about the political interference into the Hunter Biden investigation.

Less than a week later, on May 11, 2023, Weinsheimer “thanked Clark for the meeting and told him Weiss would handle the next steps.” Then, on May 15, 2023, “at the request of the Department of Justice,” the two whistleblowers and their entire elite team of IRS investigators were removed from the Hunter Biden investigation. It was the same day, according to the Times’ weekend reporting, that Wolf proposed resolving the investigation into Hunter Biden with only a deferred prosecution agreement.

Margot leaves out a few details about what led up to the removal of the IRS investigators from the case. According to his own testimony, Gary Shapley had been sidelined months earlier, as he continued to resist requests from DOJ that he provide his emails pertaining to the case. According to Ziegler’s testimony, his related cases had already been put on hold.

Margot seeks to blame a meeting in April for things that IRS agents’ own behavior had triggered months (and in Shapley’s case, over a year) earlier.

After Faceplant Margot’s piece, one of Gary Shapley’s attorneys, Tristan Leavitt, got into it.

The thing is, Main DOJ grants audiences to the lawyers of high profile suspects fairly routinely. It’s one of the things you get when you hire a a lawyer of a certain stature.

On behalf of “Hunter Biden” “laptop” disseminator Steve Bannon, for example, “Hunter Biden” “laptop” disseminator Robert Costello met with JP Cooney and two other AUSAs twice in November 2022.

And in fact, as I pointed out in the beginning of an amusing exchange with Leavitt, someone directly tied to the politicized allegations against Hunter Biden availed himself of just that kind of access: Dmitry Firtash.

Unlike Hunter Biden, when Dmitry Firtash leveraged that kind of access, his attorneys — Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova  — were granted a meeting with the Attorney General, with Bill Barr, who may or may not have had a role in putting the investigation into Hunter Biden in Delaware in the first place.

In July, the tycoon changed legal teams, replacing longtime Democratic lawyer Lanny Davis with the husband-and-wife team of Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, who appear frequently on Fox News to defend Trump and have served as informal advisers to Trump’s legal team, including Giuliani.

After taking on Firtash’s case, Toensing and diGenova secured a rare face-to-face meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr and other Justice Department officials to argue against the charges, three people familiar with the meeting said.

Barr declined to intercede, the people said.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said that the case “has the support of the department leadership,” adding: “We continue to work closely with the Austrian Ministry of Justice to extradite Mr. Firtash.”

Mind you, Toensing and DiGenova did not succeed in getting DOJ to drop the case against the mobbed up Ukrainian oligarch — though neither did Chris Clark’s meeting with Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer succeed in getting David Weiss to drop the case against Hunter Biden.

After Firtash’s success at getting an audience with the Attorney General was disclosed, only Mitt Romney, of all the Republicans in Congress, voiced any problem with the larger corruption aired during Trump’s first impeachment, which included the means and purpose for which Toensing got that meeting. But Republicans now feign outrage that the American citizen targeted in that earlier access campaign might seek a similar meeting.

At least according to Lev Parnas, the Firtash meeting had a direct role in a campaign against Hunter Biden, a campaign that developed in parallel to the criminal investigation and which — at least since Leavitt’s client has gone public — has provably merged.

Rudy first reached out to Parnas in November 2018. Joseph Ziegler first attempted to open the investigation, based on payments to a sex worker network, in November 2018.

In January 2019, per Ziegler’s testimony, Delaware’s US Attorney’s Office first started looking into Hunter Biden. That same month, Rudy and Parnas met with Yuri Lutsenko in New York, where Rudy — who connected Trump in on the phone in the way Republicans falsely alleged Hunter connected his father in to weigh in on the substance of business deals — tried to trade access to Bill Barr in exchange for dirt on Hunter and $200K.

Giuliani continued to receive conspiracy theories from different sources, and remained insistent that there must be some data on the Bidens’ corruption. In late January 2019, my business partner Igor Fruman got word that Yuri Lutsenko, Shokin’s replacement as Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, was in New York and wanted to meet with Giuliani to discuss some legal matters. We set up the meeting in Giuliani’s office on Park Avenue. There, Lutsenko explained he’d requested the meeting because he wanted to sit down with Bill Barr and, Attorney General to Attorney General, discuss the overall problem of Ukrainian and American corruption, including the funneling of Ukrainian money into American institutions. Giuliani stopped Lutsenko and said he wasn’t interested in that, only in information concerning Joe and Hunter Biden. He then added statements to the effect that if Lutsenko wanted a conversation with Barr, he would need to offer a give and take, and Giuliani was interested in details about the Bidens.

[snip]

During the meeting, Giuliani stopped to call President Trump for about 3-5 minutes to update him on how the meeting was going with Lutsenko, and told Lutsenko that Trump was very happy with the help he was giving. He gave Lutsenko the thumbs-up. Lutsenko then promised that if we went to Ukraine, he would help us meet President Poroshenko and other officials who were dealing directly with the Burisma investigation. After the first meeting, Lutsenko kept pressuring Giuliani that he needed to meet Bill Barr. However, Giuliani eventually told Lutsenko he hadn’t provided enough information, and that the only way he could meet Bill Barr was if he retained Giuliani for $200,000. He then gave Lutsenko a “contract”. (It should be noted that Lutsenko refused to pay and to this day has never met Bill Barr.)

A few days later, Giuliani told me that he had decided that it might not be a good look for him to represent Ukrainian officials while representing Donald Trump, and introduced me to attorneys Victoria Toensing and Joseph DiGenova, who he said would represent Lutsenko instead. Later on, Giuliani told me that Toensing and DiGenova had agreed to split the $200,000 retainer fee in some part with him.

In April 2019, Ziegler’s investigation and DE USAO’s investigations were consolidated.

The next month, Rudy’s efforts started to incorporate Firtash, with Toensing and DiGenova again serving as the public face of the effort, but with Rudy allegedly sharing in the spoils.

Near the end of our trip to Paris, we were introduced to one of Igor Fruman’s associates, a friend who happened to be an employee of a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmitry Firtash, who had many political and business connections, including with the head of Burisma, Zlochevsky. When we returned to the U.S., we met with the BLT Team and John Solomon said Firtash’s help would be key because of his relationship with Zlochevsky.

The problem was that Firtash would prove nearly impossible to contact. He was also facing a serious extradition case to the U.S. for a number of bribery, racketeering and other charges since 2014. Solomon and Giuliani put together a package of documents regarding confidential information in Firtash’s case, and had me travel to Vienna in June 2019 to meet with Firtash, letting him know that Giuliani and our whole team were serious and that we could help him if he helped us. From June until the time of my arrest in October 2019, we had ongoing communications with Firtash.

In October 2019 — per notes taken by Leavitt’s client — FBI received the first official outreach from John Paul Mac Isaac about a laptop that appears to have been packaged up, during a period when Hunter Biden’s digital life shows signs of being compromised, after Ziegler had opened the investigation. That happened just days after Rudy, Parnas, and John Solomon had planned to go to Vienna to obtain a different instance of the “Hunter Biden” “laptop,” a trip that was forestalled by Parnas’ arrest and Barr’s warnings to (at least) Fox News.

In the early part of October 2019, I got a call telling me to go to Vienna with Giuliani, where the former Chief Financial Officer of Burisma, Alexander Gorbunenko, would meet Giuliani and give us Hunter Biden’s hard drive and answer any questions we had. My Ukrainian contacts also told me they would have Viktor Shokin in Vienna to give an interview to Sean Hannity of FOX News, because Shokin was supposed to appear in a Viennese court on behalf of Dmitry Firtash, giving sworn testimony in court that would basically be saying what Giuliani wanted him to say – that he was fired because of Joe Biden. (As mentioned earlier, Biden did make statements that he had helped to get Shokin fired, but Ukrainian investigations into the matter some years later concluded that Shokin had been terminated because of multiple cases of corruption while in office.)

I have text messages confirming all these plans, and all are among the materials I submitted to Congress during the first impeachment inquiry. These include messages from Hannity setting up the interview, and messages coordinating that Giuliani, Toensing, and I would go to Vienna to meet Burisma’s ex-CFO Gorbunenko. Just before we were to fly to Austria, there was a meeting at FOX News in Washington, because Solomon was appearing that night on Hannity’s show and Giuliani was appearing on Laura Ingraham’s. The BLT Team got together in a FOX conference room and discussed how we would blow up the story once we got Hunter Biden’s hard drive in Vienna.

Right in the middle of these seeming lockstep parallel investigations of Hunter Biden — by Bill Barr’s DOJ and by the then President’s lawyer all over Europe, and before offers of two laptops — both with ties to Rudy Giuliani — were made, two things happened.

On July 25, 2019, then President Donald Trump got on the phone with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and — after making a quid pro quo tying aid to the announcement of an investigation into Burisma — told Ukraine’s president that both Rudy and Barr would reach out.

I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it.

[snip]

I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call.

The next month, in August, Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova succeeded in scoring the meeting Firtash wanted with the Attorney General. The Rudy investigation and the Barr investigation met first at Trump’s hotel and then at DOJ. And the day after IRS got a warrant to access the Hunter Biden laptop seemingly packaged up after Joseph Ziegler was already investigating, DOJ told Barr they were sending him a laptop.

Whether or not that Dmitry Firtash meeting was an explicit meeting of the Rudy and the DOJ investigations, whether or not that laptop Barr obtained was the same one Rudy had a role in packaging up, we do know the investigations have since merged.

After the first press blitz about Gary Shapley — arranged in significant part by Tristan Leavitt — Bill Barr raised attention to an FD-1023 obtained via a channel he set up to ensure that Rudy could share information obtained from known Russian spies without being prosecuted for soliciting known Russian spies. In response, Shapley and Ziegler both complained that they hadn’t had access to an informant report the sole operative detail of which involved a 2019 call set up with Mykola Zlochevsky during impeachment, in which he used those politicized discussions to reverse his earlier admissions in order to claim to have made a bribe to Joe Biden. Remarkably, Shapley — lawyered by people with close ties to Chuck Grassley, who released the FD-1023 — claims to have known about the tainted Pittsburgh evidence in real time.

That is, even three years later (or perhaps, especially three years later) the IRS agents who should have seen Hunter Biden’s digital life get attacked if not packaged up for their own consumption are complaining they’re not able to pursue leads obtained via a channel catering to Russian spies.

It’s not surprising that you could look at this timeline and still have right wingers claim that Hunter Biden is the one who got favorable treatment. Those people don’t care if they reveal their cynical hypocrisy in pursuit of attacks on democracy.

What is surprising is that people claiming to be journalists wouldn’t immediately lay out how absurd that is. The “democracy dies in darkness” guys sitting on their own evidence about this stuff have assigned upwards six journalists to cover this story, but few have shown any curiosity about how the known political hit job on Hunter Biden ties to the wails of the sources whose own stories they don’t bother to test.

It is the collective stance of the entire Republican party, save Mitt Romney, that it’s fine for Dmitry Firtash to score a meeting with the Attorney General as part of an alleged quid pro quo to get an investigation into Hunter Biden, but it’s a sign of corruption for Hunter’s lawyers to point out that happened to DOJ.

The Republican party claims it is a sign of corruption to call out their own corruption.

And virtually every Hill journalist is playing along.

Share this entry