Hunter Biden’s Replies to His Motion to Dismiss
I was laughing that David Weiss’ prosecutors would get sloppy with Roger Stone references in a case I was covering closely. It got me two citations in Hunter’s reply on selective prosecution.
8 Stone, No. 21-cv-60825, DE 1 ¶¶ 40-53 (accusing Stone of seeking to shelter his wealth from criminal forfeiture); Bill Barr Repeatedly Lied, Under Oath, About Judge Amy Berman Jackson, https://www.emptywheel.net/; United States v. Stone, Case 1:19-cr- 00018-ABJ DE 260 (Verdict Form). It is particularly ironic that DOJ would try to use Biden’s gun charge under a statute expressly reserved to protect public safety—to justify criminal tax charges when only Stone was charged with endangering anyone.
9 DOJ acts like, rather than honestly describe his struggles, Biden published his memoir to brag about his crimes, which is particularly absurd considering the memoir mentions neither the gun he is accused of purchasing nor his failure to pay his taxes.
10 See Marcy Wheeler, David Weiss is Smoking Roger Stone’s Witness-Tampering Gun, Emptywheel (Mar. 11, 2024), https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/03/11/david-weiss-is- smoking-roger-stones-witness-tampering-gun/. This included an introduction repeating the false claims at the core of his 2019 convictions for threats and intimidation, and Stone even litigated whether his memoir was covered by the gag order the judge issued in response to his threats. See Stone, No. 1:19-cr-00018, DE61 (S.D. Fl.).
As I’ll lay out later, it’s now crystal clear that David Weiss reneged on the plea deal in order to chase Alexander Smirnov’s lies.
Here are the reply motions:
Nicely done. Glad to see you get some well deserved recognition for the hard work you do. Thank you
und nochmal:
Nicely done. Glad to see you get some well deserved recognition for the hard work you do. Thank you — OmegaMan
Danke Sehr
They include the titles of the articles, so I guess it’s lucky the ones they included didn’t mention “Dik Pix”.
Lucky for Weiss, anyway…
You go girl! I knew Lowell would absolutely read your posts before drafting his replies.
We readers certainly value your work, but a few of us are slow learners. Lowell is, of course, fully up to speed, so it’s nice to see the timely impact of your work!
Kudos, Marcy!
The reply starts strong:
I haven’t played AD&D in donkey’s years but I do hope that the true ‘Wizards of Justice’ (Lowell + Marcy) are about to wield the ‘Table of Willfulness’ (sic), thereby rendering null and void the ‘Reply Duplicitous’*.
*Legal term of art: refers to every Trump legal filing ever.
Wizards of Justice is the title of my superhero fanfic.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Being cited as authoritative is even better.
Since we know Lowell’s team follows this blog: please ask Hunter to give Marcy one of his paintings. I can’t think of anybody who deserves one more than her.
So, GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, Chair of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, has suggested recently that he may refer several subjects to DOJ for criminal prosecution (not specifying who exactly) whose conduct was uncovered during recent GOP congressional committee investigations into the Russia-invented, fictional “Biden Crime family.”
Any former prosecutors out there want to take Marcy’s 7th bulleted item above entitled “Reply IRS Misconduct” and fill out a mock federal criminal complaint form AO 91, one each for Gary Shapley and Joseph Zeigler, to share with Chairman Jordan and ranking member Jerrold Nadler to help the Committee get its criminal referral drafting started?
https://www.uscourts.gov/forms/law-enforcement-grand-jury-and-prosecution-forms/criminal-complaint
Congressional staffers are exceptionally busy, so I’m sure Jordan would warmly accept any assistance, no matter how small, that is timely and pro-bono, and direct his staff to begin verifying your mock submission and perfecting a draft referral for DOJ. In addition, the website Just Security may even agree to publish the submission you send Jordan, to help the committee advance its goals of exposing wrongdoing of culpable parties.
The REPLY above lists not only the grand jury secrecy rule and federal criminal statutes that Zeiglar and Shapley allegedly violated, but also lists a very recent case of a similarly situated defendant (Littlejohn) that demonstrates prosecution of these 2 IRS agents would be righteous. So, a lot of the work is already done for you; it just needs some cleanly worded prosecutorial prose based on facts also included in the REPLY.
And anyone seeking “extra credit” could fill out other referrals based on Lowell’s many briefs and motions not listed above (e.g., detailing 18 USC 1033 violations by JPMI or the other Zeigler who runs the Marco Polo site), but you’d have to do some short hunting through Marcy’s “Abbe Lowell” tagged posts that discuss civil defamation filings…after first checking, of course, that the committee received testimony or documents from that party which could have resulted in disclosure of criminal conduct.
This is perfect Marcy! Big smile here knowing your “weeding” is making the case!
Kudos on getting cited by Lowell! I am gratified by proxy to see your insightful work recognized.
If I haven’t told you how much I appreciate your in-your-face post titles, let me do so now.
I am seriously considering cross stitching these onto pillows to memorialize them.
Nicole Sandler’s podcast this Friday is going to be a particular doozy at this rate. LOL
LOL.
I REALLY didn’t expect the titles to show up in court filings. But I guess since Lowell got away with the last one …
These are just so perfect. I would love to know how many times Bill Barr will have that particular post’s title crammed in his face after Lowell’s citation.
(edited for autoincorrect – gah)
I said it over a decade ago, your post titles need to be t-shirt merch for fundraising! Volunteer designer here.
We probably should have run with that and used the shirts for fundraising. Still could through sites like Cafepress. :-)
If you’re doing t-shirts can we please have a reverse ferret :-)
Merch, please! I love merch. Overprice it to the max, but if it’s cotton and the design is witty and/or elegant and foregrounds EW, I will snatch it up.
You should see my closet. Which is to say my entire apartment, since the merch I’ve accumulated over the years doesn’t fit in a closet. And now I have to move all of it across town, so I’m all too aware of the worldliness of my goods.
I will still buy any merch you offer!
Rayne, are you familiar with the Profanity Embroidery Group? I’m guessing that you’d enjoy it: https://pegwhitstable.co.uk/galleries/
Spot on, good guess!
Lol.
Talking of potty-mouthed older women, might I suggest some Fascinating Aida? Fittingly enough, this particular song also has an Irish theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAg0lUYHHFc
Hot damn, you go girl, Righteous!
Impressive as are you Dr. Wheeler. I am today wearing the bullshit-proof vest you wove for me.
The opening to the Reply 2019 Selective Prosecution brief is a brutal takedown of the DOJ’s position:
Back in the day, I did debate in high school, and this is a classic illustration of how one uses your opponent’s lack of words against them. Not words, but lack of words – specifically, lack of evidence to support their contentions, and lack of reply when this was initially challenged.
I also get the sense that the DOJ regularly conflates a failure to pay with a failure to file. Not in the formal charges, mind you, but in the general discussion of the tax issues. I suspect this is more for public consumption, rather than ignorance of the difference between the two.
And of course, you gotta love the language. That opening sentence is a gem, precisely cut and polished. “The prosecution failed to do the one simple thing . . .”
If the Sp Counsel cannot obtain convictions the line of argument you note would let them go on the offensive against the individuals and the US government.
*insert “You Had One Job” meme*
It SOUNDS good, but it’s not the standard. The burden is on Hunter to find people who weren’t charged.
Is it possible for another citizen to meet this standard? How are you supposed to find examples of people who filed but failed to timely pay? Isn’t this considered confidential tax information? Or is there a searchable database since this is civil enforcement information?
Criminal charges for failure to pay 2019 taxes ought to be available via PACER, and I strongly suspect Lowell’s team searched high and low to find such cases before they wrote “. . . because there is no case to point to . . .” in their reply brief.
So that n=1 stands out like a sore thumb.
In that paragraph above, Lowell cites IRS guidance that makes prosecutions far less likely in general: “To the contrary, under the IRS relief programs at the time, most taxpayers that failed to timely pay their 2019 taxes were automatically granted relief from any civil tax penalties during that period.” This points to, though not absolutely prove, a general disinclination to charge 2019 failure to pay cases under guidance drafted due to the pandemic.
But to find specific people who weren’t charged . . . as a practical (and legal) matter, that’s hard to do, because of the strict laws around the confidentiality of tax matters. It’s not like the IRS and DOJ will let Lowell rummage through their files to find “investigated but not charged” cases.
But if the DOJ represented to the court in their brief that there *were* such people, doesn’t that shift the burden to the prosecution to support their claim?
Not only that, but it’s also nearly impossible to prove a negative. “Prove to me that there’s no stone in the world that can let you speak to the dead”
Yep. “Impossible to prove a negative” is also the cornerstone of all religions.
Every president going back thirty years (before Trump) had daughters, not sons. So Hunter and Abbe would have an impossible task of finding a similarly situated individual: there is no such person.
This assumes that Weiss et. al. kept Don Jr. out of consideration.
It’s not nearly impossible to prove a negative. Some negative claims can be proved and others can’t, just like some positive claims can be proved and others can’t. It’s fairly common in math to prove negative claims.
Don’t Lowell and Biden have other evidence to prove the malice motivating the prosecution?
It goes to follow that if DOJ rarely prosecutes these kinds of violations that they will execute poorly due to insufficient reps.
Excellante!
Not to fire up paranoia but residing in Ireland may be beneficial if Jordan/Comer want to harrass you with subpoenas as payback in waning months of their evil circuses.
Weiss should end up with more than egg on his face as this ends badly for him.
This is so absurdly funny it could be English.
It’s too bad all of the usual suspect journalists covering this think it’s beneath them to actually read anything themselves. They might start thinking about changes to their network of sources.
As it stands, the background sources who feed them excerpts to bolster their canned narratives will be sure to wave it all off.
I am reminded of Upton Sinclair’s apt quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
He who pays the piper, and all that…
It’s a crazy world where a reporter’s value isn’t judged by bosses on the work product so much as the source network that goes into it.
It’s as if carpenters weren’t judged by the tables they made, but only whether they used mahogony or basic pine. Never mind that the mahogony table only has two legs and has huge cracks, its source is judged more valuable so it must be better.
For a lot of editors and reporters, open sources are available to anyone and therefore must be cheap, while getting spoonfed a gloss on a report by some former DOJ official is more exclusive so it must be valuable.
Access to power – for people like them – seems to be more important than accurate reporting, especially if you can fake the latter.
Maggie Haberman comes to mind
Always nice to get a nod of formal recognition.
I’ve even at times wondered if some of the judges involved have also taken a look at what Marcy has written…
(… though probably not Aileen Cannon, who seems to be on a journey of her own…)
Then Lowell and behold, Marcy spun the dross to gold.
Perfect!
EW’s research and analysis is second to none! It’s obvious competent attorneys know that as well. I suspect judges and some on SCOTUS do, too.
Congratulations on the callout, Dr. Wheeler. Clerks, congressional aides, and law associates everywhere are having your work thrust into their faces couched in the question “Why can’t you do this?”.
Absolutely fabulous! Well-deserved recognition there!
Criminal that the words “Bill Barr Repeatedly Lied, Under Oath” appear in a legal filing, no? LOL!
Wasn’t he that guy….
[Welcome back to emptywheel. Please use the same username and email address each time you comment so that community members get to know you. You changed your username to “rvishere” last August; I have corrected your entry this once from “rvh@myhouse” which caused your comment to be held up in moderation. Please make a note of your correct name for future use as future mismatches may prevent your comment from clearing for publication. /~Rayne]
There gonna be an article on Judge Cannon’s latest set of instructions? Apparently, she’s informed the prosecutors that they either have to allow the jury and Trump’s team unlimited access to classified documents (so they can confirm if they’re Trump’s or not), or she wants them to acquit him…
Already being discussed in the Manafort thread—with a helpful link to the news provided (hint).
That said, Marcy will write what she writes, but I imagine it’s quite likely this could be a topic in the near future.
How’s it feel to be on the right side of history?
Sleep in tomorrow, you’ve more than earned it.
Ask Scooter
SNAP!
Marcy Wheeler’s journalism gets cited more often where the news is being made in the court filings than it gets cited in the NY Times or Washington Post. They no longer care about their reputations, I think, or their role in society. An informed reader can see they are being purposefully or willfully ignorant at this point regarding the nature of Hunter Biden’s prosecution and the intersections of MAGA and Russian intelligence. Why? What are they afraid will happen if they lay the facts out for the American people? They will be accused of being partisan? Don’t make me laugh. That’s not the reason for it.
That is amazing! You truly are the best.
Thank you.
ATTN. rvh@myhouse —
STOP USING THE WRONG USERNAME. Your correct username is “rvhishere” which you chose last August. Your two previous comments were corrected as a favor this time and approved for publication +2 hours ago.
Clear your browser’s cache and/or autofill;
Type in the correct username in the first field;
Enter the same email address you’ve used all along;
Type your comment and click Post Comment button.
Allow time for the comment system moderation to process your comment.
Sincerely,
The Frustrated On-Duty Moderator
Hope Lowell at least supports this site financially.
Lawyers and reporters are all too content to eat your brain and shit you out.
Certainly Lowell billed HB for referencing your work.
Not sure that supporting this site financially because of background research is really appropriate. I bet EmptyWheel gets a lot more rewards from her readers than a big dollar donation from some lawyer.
But I understand your sentiment.
So, only you should be able to donate to EW, not lawyers? Lol, first off, many already do. Secondly, it is just silly, and insulting to Marcy’s independence and ethics.
That’s crazy. If you’re suggesting that a reporter benefits when another professional cites their work, or cites it often, that’s true. It does not create an apparent or actual impropriety. Quite the opposite.
I hope he doesn’t. I don’t want even the appearance of a financial tie.
Of course defense counsel bills a client for work done for that client. That has SFA to do with anything else. Please don’t suggest it does.
I guess my question is does Garland read your site?
Does he read Weiss’s and Lowell’s filings and and see where Weiss is a witness to a crime he is ostensibly prosecuting and think, hmmm, maybe i should step in? Or can he step in? What is his remedy were he so inclined?
Dude. You tell us. Why would Marcy know what Garland reads and why in gods’ names would you ask her to tell you.
This stuff is going to play out the way John Durham’s stuff played out — in court, where it will continue to be outlined in filings that Weiss is a hack.