America Just Failed the Test of Responding to Trump’s Politicized Prosecutions
Let’s imagine that, two years from now, Pam Bondi rolls out charges against some onetime adversary of Donald Trump. To the extent that journalists will still be employed and reading court filings, to the extent that prosecutors under Emil Bove (who at SDNY oversaw a team sanctioned for discovery violations) comply with discovery requirements, the adversary in question learns the following about his prosecution:
- The case started when an investigator started looking into a transnational trafficking network
- The investigator discovered that the prominent adversary had paid one of the sex workers trafficked in the network
- Rather than pursuing the traffickers, the investigator used the payment for sex as cause to open an investigation
- Of course, no one is going to charge a John … so the investigator starts pulling divorce records and four year old tax returns to try to move from that payment for sex work to something that can be charged
- Then the investigator started incorporating oppo research from Peter Schweizer into his investigation
- Kash Patel’s FBI set up protected ways to accept tips from Trump supporters who’ve doctored documents to create a crime
- Trump called up Bondi and told her to take more aggressive steps
- Trump called up foreign leaders asking for help on this prosecution
- Bondi then set up a way to launder that information from foreign sources, including known spies, into the investigation of the adversary
- Patel’s FBI asked a partisan informant to fabricate claims against the adversary
- Trump publicly called out prosecutors — resulting in them and their children being followed — because they had not yet charged his adversary
- Ultimately, the adversary got charged on 5-year old dirt, and only then, after charging, did prosecutors quickly do the investigative work to win the case at trial
Now, as I’ve described it, you surely imagine you’d say, wow, that looks like a thoroughly corrupt prosecution, a clear case of Trump using DOJ to punish his adversaries.
Right?
It’s not so much that investigators didn’t, after the fact, find a crime to charge. They did. If you investigate most high profile people long enough, you’ll find something to charge, particularly if multiple people come to DOJ with doctored evidence to help create that crime.
It’s that someone found the name of an adversary in the digital records of crimes that were more important to investigate, and instead of pursuing that crime, used the electronic record as an excuse to keep looking until they found some evidence of a crime against Trump’s adversary.
Everyone would recognize that’s what happened, right?
Of course not. Of course no one would recognize that that was a political prosecution.
We need no further proof than the fact that none of those very same details showed up in any of the coverage of the Hunter Biden investigation. Not now that he has been pardoned. Not when all these details came out last year. Not in any of the retrospectives of the times Trump demanded investigations on his adversaries.
What will happen instead is that a bunch of self-important DC scribes will chase the most salacious allegations, provide endless headlines about sex workers and wild parties. The DC scribes will ignore every detail about the legal investigation — every one!! — and instead use the prosecution as an opportunity to sell political scandal. And also, they will point to their Tiger Beat coverage as proof, they say, they are not politically biased.
Rather than diligently rooting out the obviously politicized prosecution, the press will be complicit in it.
And rather than deciding that the adversary was the target of an obviously politicized prosecution, American public opinion would instead decide that the adversary was icky, and because he is icky, his statements about Trump cannot be credited.
That is what political prosecutions look like. That is, of course, precisely what the Hunter Biden prosecution was (ignoring the assurances from prosecutors who say no one with the fact set Hunter faced would be charged). Every single bullet has an analogue in the Hunter Biden case. That obviously political prosecution is what happened.
Once the GOP got the House majority, they did nothing else but platform these claims, which a different set of self-important scribes treated as an interesting process story, not an obvious case of a great abuse of government power.
And now that Biden has pardoned his son, the very same self important scribes who ignored all the signs this was a political prosecution, are giving non-stop coverage to a pardon that — unlike those of Trump’s Coffee Boy, National Security Adviser, campaign manager, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker — are not about self-protection, most with no mention of all the evidence Trump ordered up this prosecution to target Joe Biden.
The question is, what are we going to do about this, now that we have rock solid proof the press establishment is not only incapable, but wildly uninterested, in rooting out this kind of politicized prosecution — at least not when they can instead sell scandal?
In the face of seeing Pam Bondi and Kash Patel preparing to redouble efforts to find politicized prosecutions against Donald Trump’s adversaries, Joe Biden chose to end the process, with his son, at least.
I’m actually on the record opposing the pardon — but not for the reasons everyone else is. I don’t think pardoning Hunter in this circumstance is corrupt. I take Biden at his word that he changed his mind about pardoning Hunter. I’m far more interested in Trump admitting he was lying about his plans to implement Project 2025 than that Biden reneged on assurances no one much believed anyway.
I oppose the pardon because it eliminates Hunter’s standing to appeal and with those appeals to begin telling the story that the media chose to ignore. I oppose the pardon because if we don’t start laying out how Trump already politicized DOJ while there’s a good base of legitimate judges in place, it’ll be far too late.
And don’t get me wrong. I think Biden fucked this one up. Not just for saying he wouldn’t pardon Hunter, but for not taking action far earlier — like firing David Weiss the day he was inaugurated, citing Trump’s first impeachment, or pardoning Hunter and firing Weiss on November 6 — to do something about this. I think Merrick Garland shouldn’t have given Weiss himself SCO status (not least, because Weiss continues to investigate crimes — the alleged attempted framing of Joe Biden by Alexander Smirnov — to which he is a witness). I think Garland’s supervision of Special Counsels allowed the abuse of the system, repeatedly.
I’ve never, as far as I’m aware, spoken with Hunter Biden. I have, however, spoken to a good number of the people who were and who would be politically prosecuted in Trump’s second term (not including myself, of course). And the thing I’ve learned from them is because the press is complicit in their politicized prosecution, it guarantees they’ll be isolated, regardless of guilt or innocence. Because the press has unquenchable thirst for lazy dick pic sniffing, they don’t do the work of reading the court filings. Because the press thirsts for a false appearance of both sides neutrality, they’re always on the hunt for something to fit into their both sides scandal box.
And meanwhile, those very same self-important scribes were largely silent in 2020 when Trump pardoned his way out of Russian trouble, and even more silent in 2024 when they could have explained to voters that he had done so.
Whatever else you think about the Hunter Biden case and the way Joe Biden pardoned him, it is crystal clear proof that the thing defenders of democracy swear they’ll do in a second Trump term — rise to the defense of those targeted for political prosecution — they already failed to do. Whatever you think about the Hunter Biden case, the vast majority of people talking about it have absolutely no clue that it is precisely what people fear in Trump’s second term, not (just) because Hunter was charged in two indictments when others would not be, but because Trump and his people repeatedly ordered up this prosecution.
Update: Peter Baker, who wrote an otherwise thorough piece during the election about Trump’s corruption which ignored Hunter, claims to be unable to tell whether Biden’s claim that Hunter’s prosecution was politicized is true or not.
Update: Here’s a copy of a white paper Hunter’s attorneys released to describe the politicization of the case. It adds the Parnas and Scott Brady allegations to the stuff in the selective prosecution motions.
I wonder if any of these “Trump scribes” will be targeted themselves? I am pretty certain that there are some that Trump would like to punish.
Trump threatened to sue the NYT, in part based on the Baker story.
I’ll bet they sure think they won’t…and as will many folks they may well find out how little care fascists have for breaking their word to those they wish to dominate. I’m sure they’ll yell and scream and use it as a badge of honor.
Jimmy the Saint (Andy Garcia): “You gave me your word!”
The Man with the Plan (Christopher Walken): “Right….my word. Gee whiz, Jimmy, don’t you see? I’m a criminal. My word don’t mean dick.”
From the movie Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead
I couldn’t possibly have said that better myself.
Trump isn’t just transactional (“what have you done for me lately?”), he’s transactional with the memory of a mayfly (“what have you done for me since I woke up?”).
WAY too many people who do their fascist master’s bidding find themselves fleeing for their lives from someone else who is doing the same fascist master’s bidding.
Yagoda < Yezhov < Beria. Q.E.D.
Further: “What have you done for me since we last spoke an hour ago?”
Nice details, wrong conclusion. Biden has finally learned how to fight back against a wannabe king and his puppet master. The Marquis of Queensbury rules expired back in 2017.
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You also saw this firsthand at the Scooter Libby trial, where most of the media played the “both sides” game while the liveblogging of the Trial by the residents of the Plame House showed folks how a trial like that ought to be covered. Read the filings. Listen to the testimony. Notice what *wasn’t* asked and what *wasn’t* answered. Notice where the testimony conflicts with contemporary notes, memos, and emails. Build your own timeline. Most of all, call out the liars when they lie.
Dan Froomkin saw what you were doing, as well as some others in the media. Most, however, dismissed it as rabid angry lambshires (IIRC) or some version of amateur hour journalists. And Froomkin was given his walking papers by the WaPo for arguing with them from within.
If the press wants to survive, they are going to have to realize that they are in a fight for their lives and have to pick a side. Bezos thinks that the way to fight is to do *more* bothsiderism and grovelling, and he is going to get a rude awakening.
Maybe I am just really not happy with the Fourth Estate right now, but can we call a spade a spade here? This is not “both siderism.” True both siderism would be explicit in the call out of quoting what the other side says just because there is a perceived grudge and then backing that up with unbiased 3rd party commentary. That’s not what’s happening. There is no context to any of these quotes; they are just accepted as fact and/or legitimate points of view by the stenographers themselves.
No, either the reporters are being willfully ignorant to the fact that Trump is naked, or they are being told by management that this is the angle the editorial room wants. And if they want to see their byline in print, they toe the company line.
Now, this may not be an explicit order. But rightly or wrongly, that’s the message the mainstream journos seem to get. And it’s only going to get worse as corporate parents fear reprisal by the Trump admin.
It’s going to take someone with a spine to stand up to the bully and call him out. It’s worked in the past. It can work again.
Your key phrase “and then backing that up with unbiased 3rd party commentary” is what distinguishes journalism from bothsiderism.
Without that commentary, what passes for journalism is mere stenography. “He said . . . . she said . . . and who knows who is right? We don’t pick sides. . . .”
Without the commentary to put things in context it worthless or worse, misleading. Either they are corrupted, lazy, or stupid.
Twas’, I think the fourth option you left off is “all three.”
I don’t know at all that Bezos gives a fck about the WAPO or “journalistic integrity” or TCF coming after him because he own the Post. My guess is he cares mostly about his govt contracts, his mailing business and his space shuttle business. Those things he cares about.
Hadn’t looked at an Amazon annual report for several years, but around 6 years ago, the only part of the company making a profit was Amazon Web Services, their cloud business. At the time, they had the cloud contract with Major League Baseball, storing 7 TB of data per ball game. Lost that contract 2 or 3 years ago, but that part of the company is still doing well.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/31/amazons-cloud-unit-records-highest-profit-margin-in-at-least-a-decade.html
With likely a number of government contract that they’d like to keep or build upon.
My dad advised, “Denial is very common and it is very dangerous.” I was a teen when he said this to me. He was referring to people who suffer chest pains and talk themselves out of going to the ER by rationalizing the pain as everything but a heart attack. He knew all about it through lived experience. His advice fits here. Denial is the first route most of us take when reality upends our assumptions.
I would also add it is really rich of the press to complain about Harris’s campaign team’s legitimate gripes with the election coverage when this post by Dr. Wheeler so devastatingly demonstrates that Harris’ aides are 100% correct to point out the double standard.
Again, is this willful ignorance, or just defensive actions by the press? Or is it this is what they have to say if they want a job?
It’s 40 years of being bashed as liberal. They’ve effectively been house trained, hiring and promting only those who treat ‘both sides’ as the gold standard of journalism.
I first saw Republicans trashing the media 55 years ago when Agnew repeatedly attacked them. That has really intimidated the media but I think there are other reasons, too. The media definitely has favorites they give a pass to. The media never wanted to hold GHW Bush accountable for repeatedly lying to them by claiming he had been “out of the loop” on Iran Contra. Even after it became public that Bush had kept a diary of all those Iran Contra meetings he said had never attended and that he had kept that evidence from the Independent Counsel’s investigation the media shrugged. Even when Bush pardoned all of his Iran Contra co-conspirators and the furious Independent Counsel accused him of “completing the coverup” the media gave that far less attention than they soon were giving to the phony Clinton scandals cooked up by right wing operatives and fed to the media.
In fact it was the NYT’s credulous coverage of those false accusations against the Clintons that led to the investigations of Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, etc. I have always thought that a big factor in that obsession with proving the Clintons were corrupt — even though the media knew they were far from wealthy— was their bias against rubes from the South. They were offended that a man they saw as white trash had risen above them. In fact I once had a conversation with a woman who had been producer on Chris Matthews’ show. She asked him why he obsessed about Clinton on every show when his staff had given him info on all kinds of other important subjects. Matthews responded with a rank about some guy from Hope Arkansas who was not better educated than himself being president and getting all the ladies. The Bushes get a pass because they are a patrician family. When journalists lecture Dems about being elitist and looking down on the working class and rural people they are projecting their own biases onto us.
Unfortunately that bias is an inaccurate assumption about the demographics of journalism.
Who can get through J-school without suffocating debt, land a full-time gig and not have to hustle second and third jobs? Who can build a portfolio from freelance reporting which pays pennies, especially when so many news outlets have shuttered? Who can afford to continue political reporting in spite of the waves of election season hiring/firing?
The truth is that journalists who survive and make it to bigger media outlets are the elite themselves. They’ve decided they like the prestige of their roles and the strokes they get from other elites more than doing what they should have been taught — afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, while validating claims it’s raining instead of merely regurgitating reports from others both sides of the claims.
The guy who wrote those press-bashing speeches for Agnew was rewarded with a long-time column in that nexus for the nattering nabobs of negativism, the NYTimes. That was William Safire, the grammar scold.
And let us not forget that the architect for all those Iran-Contra pardons was Bill Barr.
Hollywood was for Harris, so the P Diddy salacious case will be front burner, because it is entertainment excesses at trial, because it will sell to the press, and because it will divert attention from Trump’s own family’s crypto profiteering. Crypto will have a smooth time under Trump. No bumps, please.
Times will be frustrating for Liz Warren. Nobody hearing what she’ll be saying.
Unfortunately nobody has been listening to Liz W. for a long time. It’s really very sad.
You sound like a Republican from Massachusetts.
Most certainly not. This pardon, and the SCOTUS Immunity ruling, just solidifies his belief that he is above the law. He is telling his scribes “go forth and plunder our “justice for all” legal system. He is messaging to his scribes “I got your back”.
“Most certainly not” what? Please clarify.
Also, the “scribes” in question are independent journalists, so if you have a link to evidence that the independent press are doing Biden’s bidding and/or “plundering the…legal system,” you should provide it.
If you can’t, you’re just spouting hyperbolic bullshit.
Signals that our democratic norms are just not working abound. I won’t list them here.
Dualistic thinking (bothsiderism) is always a problem because it, by definition, ignores a multiplicity of the complexity of any ‘issue’ it presents.
If what I same seeing all over the internet is accurate, people are done with the billionaire media have to say, people who haven’t swallowed the fascist kool aide that is.
The hundreds of thousands who cancelled their New York Times and Washington Post subscriptions signals many are absolutely disgusted with the billionaire media.
We need to monitor them for the garbage they are spewing and do precisely what you have done in this essay, expose it.
“The question is, what are we going to do about this, now that we have rock solid proof the press establishment is not only incapable, but wildly uninterested, in rooting out this kind of politicized prosecution — at least not when they can instead sell scandal?”
We need to create a loose network of the smart, courageous people who are already doing this work and recruit many others to do the same. Whether people create YouTube channels or sites like this, whether they create on Instagram or other platforms, we have to find a way to make all this resistance visible, redundant (so if one platform takes any one of us out, we have a plan to move elsewhere).
Maybe Bluesky can provide a flexible index of resistance media based on the their user list functions.
But we must create a citizen media that informs the Resistance and knits it together. Of course, if we lose the open internet, we are in even bigger trouble.
What do you guys think of this notion? What ideas/expertise can you contribute to a Resistance media network?
samizdat
Hopefully we won’t have to go back to typing on internet relay chat on multiple redundant servers.
I’m returning here to repeat my BlueSky question: why try to expose the use of Hunter as merely a pawn in a larger project by using him as merely a pawn in a larger project? Let him end his suffering and expose (or fail to) the corrupt investigation separately. Which would no doubt be swept away by fiat by the new administration anyway.
Reviewing emptywheel’s comprehensive coverage of the Hunter Biden case, I recalled this post:https: //www.emptywheel.net/2024/06/12/what-happened-to-hunter-bidens-plea-agreement/
Hunter Biden’s diversion agreement was effectively vetoed because Probation Officer Margaret Bray didn’t sign the final agreement by 7/26/2023, despite signing off on the changes to the agreement on 7/20/2023. Has this (i.e., a diversion or plea agreement rendered invalid because a case probation officer wouldn’t sign it) ever happened before? Has any journalist asked Bray why she wouldn’t sign the diversion agreement?
Excellent piece and summary!
I find this these two sentences below you wrote most telling:
“What will happen instead is that a bunch of self-important DC scribes will chase the most salacious allegations, provide endless headlines about sex workers and wild parties. The DC scribes will ignore every detail about the legal investigation — every one!! — and instead use the prosecution as an opportunity to sell political scandal.”
Your two sentences describe the National Enquirer—David Pecker—method of providing news to the public. They also describe how the 1940s/1950s Hollywood press, e.g., Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, working hand in hand with the studio moguls who had actors under contract, produced “news” about actors that was occasionally salacious and regularly beneficial to the studios.
WAPO, NYT, LA Times and too many other print or online media companies now practice the Pecker model of doing business. FOX News TV, CNN TV and other TV companies do the same.
I’m a septuagenarian and it’s hard for me believe that the National Enquirer, the rag paper/magazine that used to hang on the rack adjacent to the local grocery store’s check stand, the same trashy paper/magazine my mother used to ask me to buy for lining the kitty litter box, is now a model for American journalism.
“I’ve never, as far as I’m aware, spoken with Hunter Biden.”
Are there conversations you had that it was ambiguous with whom you were speaking?
Maybe now the cases are concluded, Hunter will share discovery files with you, from these criminal cases or from Mac Isaac.
ATTN Hunter’s legal team, if you’re listening…
There’s a protective order. He can’t share the files (unless dad declassifies).
There are people like Snowden and Josh Schulte who I wouldn’t rule out having chats under a pseudo (and Schulte or someone with him did reach out, pretending to be his cousin).
You can never tell who is on a call or in a room, after all.
NPR this morning interviewed Kim Wehle, author of “Pardon Power” on this. The interviewer brought up the pardons of Bannon and Manafort, no mention of RFer Stone. Pre-emptive pardons were suggested. https://www.npr.org/2024/12/02/nx-s1-5212470/president-biden-pardons-son-hunter-weeks-before-he-was-due-to-be-sentenced
Huh. That’s more compelling to me on mass pardons than anyone else.
The Federalist lawyer. . .I guess my hope is that there are more like him, who understand the Constitutional crises.
Thank you so much for all of the endless work on this you have done, Marcy. The lingering appeals question that goes unanswered as a result. Truly, I depend so much on your work and the commentariat here. So urgent.
In case you didn’t see it, Kim Wehle wrote out her Hunter Pardon arguments in a Bulwark column yesterday:
Pre-apologies if this is too off topic and, if so, perhaps it warrants being addressed on its own.
Molly Jong-Fast posted a link to the paywall article below that in essence reports that Trump is asking career DOJ to stay rather than look elsewhere as the article implies:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/12/02/trump-justice-department-merrick-garland/
Got me to thinking….The US Government works – for better or worse depending on your PoV – due to people in place that know how things work. On the one hand an argument can be made that this all needs a rework, but an equal argument can be made that Trump/DOGE is NOT the way to do it for some very obvious reasons. And maybe it cannot be really re-worked because of “inertia”.
But if there are mass resignations (or firings) then is it likely that Trump may be impeded in achieving some/none/most of what he (Project 20205 or DOGE) “want” to do? There will certainly be undesirable changes put into effect – that seems baked in. many stayed let time in order to try to be an inside bulwark against the worst. it sort of worked, but this time Trump has a skilled more motivated “army”.
Many talented civil servants will leave for other options, as many did in DOJ when Reagan won the 1980 election. I was a line attorney then, in the Civil Rights Division, and after that election our legal arguments as to civil rights issues took place more inside the building than in court.
A cadre of people with no institutional memory or even appreciation for the law or the “why” behind the way things are done seem to me most likely to produce missteps that get hauled into court and (one can only hope) struck down. Parallel to how the first efforts at the Muslim travel ban in 2017 were clumsily implemented, struck down, then later refined.
Much chaos awaits ahead, it seems to me.
Oh, my. Trump is asking career civil servants to stay, especially at the DoJ, the way an abuser asks the spouse they abuse to stay. Trump is nothing without a pinata to break.
It’s not Trump who’s asking – it’s Garland and other top DOJ officials. Pete either mistyped or is simply inaccurate in summarizing the article.
yes, that’s correct…it’s Garland asking his professional staff to stick around…
Hmmm…that is interesting.
I do not have access to the paywalled article and my weakest SATs were in reading comprehension so I guess I can’t blame Molly or the – to me – rather odd phrasing/grammar/punctuation of the headline.
So Garland is asking career professionals to stay. And Trump likely wants to fire a good deal of them.
We do live in interesting times.
TY for the correction.
not unlike private business when key personnel move to greener pastures. they’re not so easily replaced as owners think, and when the rubes that make the sprockets start leaving as well, it’s all done but the wiping.
If Biden was savvy, he’d now pardon the gun store owner and the FBI agents that doctored the ATF form in 2021 when they realized the store didn’t ask Hunter for identification showing he was a Maryland resident.
Streisand Effect this to show how corrupt the case was. Do the pardons on National TV. Give a Trumpy fake “press conference” where he doesn’t take questions.
The story of Jared’s dad’s disgusting behavior and crimes that he pleaded guilty to and then was pardoned for by a sitting President and is now nominated to be the U.S. Ambassador to France by that same former President should be receiving 100 times more press than the Biden pardon.
Great post EW. Thank you.
BTW, this post is making big rounds on social media. For ex: TNHoller.
Congrats for the well deserved recognition.
We are screwed. My phone is filled with nothing but stories hyperventilating over this pardon when virtually nothing was ever said about Trump’s quid pro quo pardons for Omertà. It has become impossible to have an informed electorate.
I read Baker and Chait this morning and was appalled by their both siderism. (Chait was so dishonest as to fail to note that Hunter had paid the taxes at issue in claiming that tax violations of the same magnitude are regularly prosecuted.) What struck me most was their inability–or unwillingness–to draw any meaningful distinction between Biden’s one allegedly unwise pardon and the innumerable patently corrupt pardons issued and threatened by El Trumpo. Eric Alterman once wrote that the essential qualification of a true intellectual is the ability to draw distinctions. As a retired attorney, I would say that this analysis applies with equal force to decent lawyers. However, lacking the ability seems to be no impediment to a successful career in journalism.
Maybe the elite journalists are just waiting to write their in-depth books about the long history of the Hunter Biden set up by Republicans.
Meanwhile the conventional wisdom seems to be that Biden broke his promise, politicized the DOJ, and gave Trump a basis for both claiming the indictments against him were political and justifying the liberal use of the pardon power. Peter Baker’s analysis in The NY Times today has a little bit of truth-telling and a lot of conventional wisdom.
The truth is that had Biden not pardoned his son, Trump would just make some other spurious allegation. If nothing else has been learned over the past nine years, it should be that doing or not doing something in order to deprive Trump of an argument or excuse doesn’t work. The press corps seems intent on pretending that Trump plays by the rules and that there is a normal pattern of political cause and effect. It is going to be a long 4 years.
Is this new?
From the white paper:
January 2019: Delaware prosecutors opened an investigation into tax violations based on the bank records. This is tied to Rudy’s conversation with Lutsenko in January.
Different from the November 2018 investigation which was opened by Joseph Ziegler in IRS CI, which stemmed from another case [likely the UK amateur porn case]
Oh. The tie to Lutsenko is.
Ok I see, yes that was known from one of the IRS guys House testimony
Oh. Hmm. I think the lawyers are associating.
1) Shokin
2) Lutsenko suggests tax case
3) DE USAO opens tax case
4) Rollie shares tax info with wildly enthusiastic DE Feebs
The investigation itself started off SARs, I think.
A couple of other notes:
1. The executive summary says Solomon got the 261 pages of bank records from an “FBi source”. But they later on just cite the email from Solomon to Parnas which says that the FBI gathered the records , and that a source provided to him. He doesn’t say “FBI source”.
I have been curious who that source is. Would those records show up in an FBI counterintelligence investigation? Would someone at the NSC have access to counterintelligence reports? Or from Devine Nunes office?
2. Trump tweet 10/6/19: the Biden family was “PAID OFF, pure and simple!”
As far as I know, at that time, any conspiracy theory involving Biden and paying off was Biden paying off Poroshenko with the loan guarantees.
That Biden himself was paid off, as far as I know, was a narrative that originated from Smirnov. So if Trump is saying this back in October 2019, that suggests he has some inside baseball with what would become the Smirnov allegation.
[If anyone sees otherwise, please post. I put a lot of effort looking at these narratives but don’t want to say 100% as I may have missed something. What is the earliest date there is a public conspiracy theory that Biden was personally the recipient of money related to Ukraine for protection?]
Tony Bobulinski, Vekselberg, CEFC, might factor into the timeline somewhere. Although Tony Bobulinski first raised allegations of Biden corruption in October 2020, the timeframes he referenced in his March 2024 testimony before the House covered the years 2015 and forward.
I will take a look, thanks
But I’m guessing Bobulinski would be talking China mostly, not Ukraine
Right. China. But his alleged Vekselberg connection is interesting. Vekselberg was born in Ukraine. And there was that CEFC-Rosneft dealmaking connection Bobulinski had that angered Hunter. The article below claims that Rosneft is a Vekselberg company. But I think that may be an error or shorthand way of alluding to AAR and TNK and mergers. Here are some excerpts:
“Texts shed light on anti-Biden witness’ ‘connections to Russia’” – 3/20/24
“Sollenberger continues, “In 2017, while SinoHawk pursued its deal with CEFC —securing an investment of $5 million — CEFC was simultaneously chasing an exponentially bigger deal. That deal involved purchasing a $9 billion stake in Rosneft, the Russian-controlled energy conglomerate whose founder, Viktor Vekselberg, had close ties to Bobulinski, The Daily Beast previously reported.”
Text messages, according to Sollenberger, reveal that the “CEFC-Rosneft negotiations” caused “friction between Bobulinski and Hunter Biden” — who had an “aversion to dealing with” Vekselberg’s “sanctioned Russian company” Rosneft”
https://www.alternet.org/revealed-texts-shed-light-on-anti-biden-witness-connections-to-russia/
So, it appears there was a Derkach press conference on 10/9/19 where Derkach connects money to Biden and Biden protecting Zlochevsky.
Rudy goes on Fox News and repeats it, while unbeknownst to the public Parnas has been arrested.
https://x.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1182361081513238529
Link to Interfax article about Derkach press conference: https://web.archive.org/web/20191009081501/https://interfax.com.ua/news/press-conference/617808.html://web.archive.org/web/20191009081501/https://interfax.com.ua/news/press-conference/617808.html
Pretty disappointing to see Isaac Chotiner so wrong on this today.
What about issuing a pardon for Commander for biting the USSS agents?