“Friendly to Us:” NYT Buries Its Own Role in Trump’s Attacks on Rule of Law

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There comes a time in almost every Trump legal scandal where evidence comes out that Trump insiders believe they manipulated Maggie Haberman to serve Trump’s interests.

Evidence that both Roger Stone and Rick Gates used Maggie for various purposes came out in the Mueller investigation files, as when Gates claimed leaking Trump’s foreign policy speech to Maggie was a way to share it with Stone.

At Trump’s NY trial, Michael Cohen described how he deliberately misled Maggie about the nature of the payments he made to Stormy Daniels.

Perhaps the most damning example came in Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, where she described how, after her last appearance before the January 6 Committee while still represented by Stefan Passantino, he took a call from Maggie and confirmed that Hutchinson had just finished testifying to the committee.

His phone is ringing.

I look down at his phone. It’s Maggie Haberman calling him. And I looked at Stefan, and I said, “Stefan, did you tell Maggie Haberman that we were meeting with the committee today?”

And he’s like, “No, no. Maybe that’s not what she’s calling me about.”

And I said, “Stefan, did you tell Maggie that we were meeting with the committee today?

And he said, “No, no, but I should probably answer to see if she knows, right? I should answer.”

And said, “Stefan, no. I don’t think you should answer that call. She probably wants to know if we met with the committee today.”

He said, “Cass, I’m just going to answer. It will just be 2 seconds. I just want to find out what she’s going to talk to me about.”

He answers.

I can’t hear what she’s saying, but I hear Stefan say, “Yeah, yeah, we did just leave her third interview. You can put it out, but don’t don’t – don’t – don’t make it too big of a deal. I don’t think she’ll want it to be too big of a deal. All right. Thanks.”

And I said, “Stefan, was that Maggie Haberman asking about my interview?”

And he said, “Yeah, but don’t worry. She’s not going to make it a big deal.”

I said, “Stefan, I don’t want this out there.”

He said, “Don’t worry. Like, Maggie’s friendly to us. We’ll be fine.”

So I was just like, “Whatever.” I was annoyed.

Hutchinson went on to describe how, even as Passantino was discouraging Hutchinson from reviewing documents in a SCIF that would allow a follow-up appearance, Passantino and Alex Cannon spent the weekend talking to Maggie about Hutchinson’s testimony.

So I reached out to him on Monday, May 23rd: “Has [redacted] reached out about the SCIF?”

And then he was just kind of being wishy-washy with it.

He also let me know on that phone conversation that Maggie Haberman, quote, “got a story from the committee about my third interview,” end quote, and he spent he, Stefan, spent the whole weekend with Alex Cannon convincing Maggie Haberman not to publish the story that she got from the committee about my third interview.

Hutchinson described her particular disinterest in sharing her story with Maggie (and Josh Dawsey, another Trump whisperer).

And s0 now we’re moving into the phase of you know, I did my best throughout this whole period — I don’ like talking to reporters. Reporters would text me during this period. Ninety-nine percent of reporter texts always go unresponded to. I don’t like talking to reporters. I think there are some that I have, like, a friendship/working relationship with that I knew from being on the Hill and at the White House, but, like, Josh [Dawsey], Maggie Haberman, all those people, I stay very clear from.

But Josh [Dawsey], for example, had started reaching out to me and saying that he heard that the committee was in talks with Stefan about bringing me in for a SCIF interview and a live testimony; where did I stand on that with Stefan?

Say what you will about Maggie’s role in all this: Assuming it was her on Passantino’s phone (Hutchinson does not name the journalist in her book), she was just chasing a big story.

But there’s no doubt that one source of Hutchinson’s distrust of Passantino in the period leading up to her decision to get new lawyers stemmed from his willingness to share details of her testimony with Maggie — at least as she portrayed it — against her wishes.

“I don’t think you should answer that call,” Hutchinson said.

“Don’t worry,” the attorney representing Hutchinson but paid by a Trump entity said. “Like, Maggie’s friendly to us. We’ll be fine.”

None of that shows up in NYT’s faux savvy review of the game behind Barry Loudermilk’s referral of Liz Cheney for criminal investigation for allegedly intervening in Hutchinson’s legal representation at the time. NYT doesn’t bother to disclose to readers that, as Hutchinson described it, Maggie — who is bylined — played as significant a role in the breakup of the relationship between Passantino and Hutchinson as Cheney did.

Having failed to disclose Maggie’s alleged role in all that, here’s how — starting 28¶¶ in — NYT ultimately describes Loudermilk’s report and the claims within it.

The House report on Ms. Cheney, prepared by a Republican-led subcommittee on oversight, was specifically focused on the former representative, who broke with her G.O.P. colleagues over their ongoing support of Mr. Trump in 2021. But she has also infuriated Mr. Trump not only because she helped to lead the congressional investigation into him, but because she crossed party lines in the election and campaigned against him in support of Ms. Harris.

The report claimed that Ms. Cheney may have violated “numerous federal laws” by secretly communicating with Cassidy Hutchinson, a star witness for the Jan. 6 committee, without the knowledge of Ms. Hutchinson’s lawyer.

When Ms. Hutchinson was first approached to provide testimony to the committee, she was represented by a lawyer who had once worked in the Trump administration’s White House Counsel’s Office.

After meeting with Ms. Cheney, she hired a different lawyer and her subsequent public testimony was damaging to Mr. Trump. It included allegations that he had been warned his supporters were carrying weapons on Jan. 6, but expressed no concern because they were not a threat to him.

The report asked the F.B.I. to investigate whether Ms. Cheney’s dealings with Ms. Hutchinson were carried out in violation of a federal obstruction statute that prohibits tampering with witnesses. The report also accused Ms. Hutchinson of lying under oath to the committee several times and suggested that investigators examine whether Ms. Cheney had played any role in “procuring another person to commit perjury.” [my emphasis]

There’s a lot that’s misleading in this description. As I’ve noted, the section of the report describing DOD’s failures is actually longer (39 pages as compared to 36) than the section on Cheney and Hutchinson. Particularly given Loudermilk’s silence about Kash Patel’s role in what Loudermilk claims was DOD misconduct, to claim the report was “specifically focused” on Cheney is particularly misleading.

Maggie, writing with Alan Feuer, takes as proven the timeline Loudermilk lays out, which overstates what the evidence shows. While Cheney did communicate directly with Hutchinson, that was in June 2022, hours after Passantino had advised Hutchinson to take the “small element of risk to refus[e] to cooperate” with the committee any further in light of DOJ’s declination to press contempt charges against Mark Meadows. Hutchinson initiated the communication with Cheney and did so because, as she told Passantino, “I don’t want to gamble with being held in contempt.”

NYT asserts that what was damning about Hutchinson’s testimony after she ditched Passantino was Trump’s knowledge that people were refusing to go through magnetometers, but he wasn’t concerned because they wouldn’t hurt him. Hutchinson did tell that story publicly on June 28, 2022 (and J6C played earlier video testimony she had provided). But that thread of testimony started in her first interview in February 2022 and continued in her May 2022 interview, both of which Passantino attended. It all stemmed from texts she exchanged with Tony Ornato (texts that also make clear Trump “kept mentioning [a trip to the Capitol] before he took the stage” to give his speech).

To the extent this is among the things Loudermilk claimed Hutchinson lied about, Loudermilk’s case is based on word games, conflating formal intelligence with notice from Secret Service manning the rally that rally goers had (at least) flagpoles that were triggering the mags, misrepresenting a conversation Hutchinson claims she and Tony Ornato had with Mark Meadows, and ignoring that one of Ornato’s denials amounted to a claim he didn’t remember.

Plus, Hutchinson always emphasized that Trump’s concern was “get[ting] the shot,” packing enough bodies into the audience to make it look crowded, and not about ensuring that his supporters could keep their weapons before they marched to the Capitol. The claim that Trump knew his supporters were armed was legally damaging; it meant he knew the risk when he riled them up further about Mike Pence. But that’s not how Hutchinson spun it and it was testimony rooted in what she said in Passantino’s presence.

A reader might expect some assessment of Loudermilk’s claims in an article that boasts, as the headline of this does, that “Republicans Map a Case Against Liz Cheney.” No they didn’t. They floated a number of flimsy claims that don’t amount to a crime. You’re reporters. Act like it. Make that clear (as Philip Bump did here), rather than pretending Loudermilk’s claims aren’t mere whitewash.

The report neither links nor shows much understanding of the report itself. Even where it quotes lawyers about the viability of the charges, it doesn’t mention (for example) that the Jack Smith investigation resulted in a new Speech and Debate opinion that would apply to Cheney’s actions.

The real sin with the four-paragraph description of Loudermilk’s case, however, is one closely tied to Maggie’s own undisclosed role in it. NYT claims that Passantino was merely a former Trump White House Counsel. That’s not the issue. The issue, which goes to the core of the dispute and the reason Hutchinson replaced him, is that he was paid by entities associated with Trump, and Hutchinson came to believe he represented Trump’s interests over her own.

Loudermilk packages up as a crime actions Cheney took to give Hutchinson confidence her attorney was representing her interests, not Trump’s. Loudermilk packages up as a crime Hutchinson’s effort to avoid what even Passantino depicted as a risk of a contempt referral.

When Passantino told Hutchinson that it was okay for him to share information against her wishes because, “Maggie’s friendly to us,” was he also expecting that Maggie might misrepresent his role in all this (and leave his name unmentioned)?

That’s why you disclose such things.

The rest of this column (NYT bills it as analysis and claims the reporters who wrote it have “deep experience in the subject,” which is one way you might describe involvement in the story you’re telling) focuses on describing how delivering this report after Trump’s public demands, “reliev[es] Mr. Trump of the potentially fraught step of explicitly ordering the inquiry himself.”

A “friendly to us” reporter treats Trump’s word games as if they absolve him of responsibility.

¶¶4-14 describe Trump’s contradictory claims, including an uncorrected quote from Trump’s spox that “the nation’s ‘system of justice must be fixed and due process must be restored for all Americans.'”

¶¶15-23 describe Trump’s efforts to gin up investigations into his adversaries in his first term and going forward. The section includes multiple grossly misleading claims. First, it falsely insinuates that Trump never got the investigation of Hillary he demanded.

During his first presidential campaign, he often joined crowds at his rallies in chanting, “Lock her up!” — a reference to his opponent Hillary Clinton, whom he and other Republicans believed should have been investigated for using a private email server while she was secretary of state. After he won that election, however, Mr. Trump appeared to soften his stance, telling The New York Times editorial board that he did not want to “hurt the Clintons.”

But Mr. Trump, facing a special counsel investigation of his own, changed his mind again in 2018, telling his White House counsel that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate Mrs. Clinton.

[snip]

While the White House counsel ultimately declined to approve his plans to investigate Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump made clear on social media during his years in office that he believed various people should be prosecuted.

NYT simply ignores the Clinton Foundation investigation predicated in significant part on Bannon-associated oppo research that (as NYT reported) continued throughout Trump’s first term.

More problematic, given the suggestion that someone stopped Trump from getting a Special Counsel investigation into Hillary, it ignores that Special Counsel John Durham not only insinuated two false statement indictments against people associated with Hillary — both of which ended in acquittal — were conspiracies, but fabricated a claim about Hillary to which he dedicated an 18-page section in his final report.

NYT goes onto to — again — falsely suggest that Trump never got a special counsel investigation into Joe Biden.

Mr. Trump has called for Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two criminal cases against him last year, to be “thrown out of the country.” And after he was arraigned on the first of Mr. Smith’s indictments, he said that, as president, he would appoint “a real special prosecutor” to “go after” President Biden and his family. (He has since backed away from his position on specifically investigating the Bidens.)

NYT’s “friendly” journalists would have you to believe they are ignorant that:

  • Trump extorted Ukraine for dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden
  • During Trump’s first impeachment, his personal attorney solicited such dirt from known Russian agents
  • Bill Barr set up a side channel via which Rudy could share that dirt obtained from Russian agents and others
  • Somehow, an FBI informant willing to frame Joe Biden came to share a claim that Mykola Zlochevsky bribed Biden that got laundered to the Biden investigation via that side channel
  • Trump spoke directly to both Barr and Jeffrey Rosen about the investigation into the Bidens
  • After David Weiss announced a plea deal with Hunter Biden, Trump attacked Weiss, contributing to threats against Weiss’ family
  • After Barr made public representations about the false bribery allegation, Weiss reneged on Hunter’s plea deal and obtained Special Counsel status and chased the bribery allegation, only to discover it was false

Trump already got his Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden, and just in time for election season. And while it flopped when Weiss discovered Scott Brady’s vetting failed to find obvious problems with the bribery claim, it nevertheless led to felony charges against Hunter and a humiliating trial in June.

Suggesting Trump didn’t get a Special Counsel to investigate the Bidens is propaganda, just as suggesting he didn’t get one to pursue Hillary is.

But I guess that’s what Trump’s people know they’ll get when they work with a journalist “friendly to us.”

David Weiss’ Rush Job on Alexander Smirnov’s Sentencing

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As I noted in an update to this post, Alexander Smirnov, the FBI informant who attempted to frame Joe Biden with bribery in 2020 as part of Bill Barr’s side channel for dirt on Hunter Biden, has pled guilty.

In his plea deal, Smirnov admitted,

The events Defendant first reported to the Handler in June 2020 were fabrications. In truth and fact. Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016 — in other words, when Public Official 1 could not engage in any official act to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office. Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.

Yesterday, Judge Otis Wright accepted Smirnov’s plea.

I’ll have a more substantive post about how David Weiss, along with an absolutely supine media, appears to have buried the frame job to which he was a witness.

For now, I want to point to a notable feature of the plea: the timing of it. One of the terms of the deal was that Smirnov agree to be sentenced within 30 days of his plea colloquy, but not before January 8.

3. Defendant agrees to:

a. At the earliest opportunity requested by the SCO-W and provided by the Court, appear and plead guilty to:

i. Count Two of the indictment in United States v. Alexander Smirnov, 2:24-CR-00091-ODW, which charges defendant with causing the creation of a false and fictitious record in a federal investigation, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1519 (hereafter the “obstruction of justice indictment”).

ii. Counts One, Five and Eight, of the indictment in United States v Alexander Smirnov, 2:24-CR-00702-ODW, which charges the defendant with tax evasion for tax years 2020, 2021 and 2022, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7201 (hereafter the “tax evasion indictment”).

b. Request that the Court sentence the defendant within 30 days of entry of the entry of his guilty pleas, but not sooner than January 8,2025

In yesterday’s plea, Judge Wright set that schedule in motion.

The Court refers the defendant to the Probation Office for the preparation of an EXPEDITED presentence report and continues the matter to January 8, 2025 at 10:30 a.m., for sentencing. Position papers are due 2 weeks before the sentencing. If the papers are NOT submitted in time, they will not be considered.

All dates other than the sentencing hearing date are vacated as to this defendant.

Counsel are notified that Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32(b)(6)(B) requires the parties to notify the Probation Officer, and each other, of any objections to the Presentence Report within fourteen (14) days of receipt. Alternatively, the Court will permit counsel to file such objections no later than twenty-one (21) days before Sentencing. The Court construes “objections” to include departure arguments. Requests for continuances shall be filed or requested no later than twenty-one (21) days before Sentencing. Strict compliance with the above is mandatory because untimely filings impede the abilities of the Probation Office and of the Court to prepare for Sentencing. Failure to meet these deadlines is grounds for sanctions. [bold original]

It’s hard to convey how impossibly aggressive this timeline is. Three months to sentencing is more common than 23 days. After Hunter pled guilty on September, for example, his sentencing was set for December 16, more than three months in the future.

As the paragraph above notes, the only way the parties could even dispute anything in the presentence report (one was drafted for Smirnov’s detention fights, but a PSR would need to test the sentencing guidelines prosecutors adopted for the plea, which recommends 48 to 72 months in prison), would be to object tomorrow. And the two sides have just over a week to get their sentencing guidelines in.

This entire plea was an effort to get Smirnov to be sentenced on (but not before) January 8.

I’m not sure what leverage prosecutors used to get Smirnov to agree to this schedule; it’s not like the 4-year proposed sentence is that generous.

Perhaps Smirnov wants what prosecutors are likely pursuing: the opportunity for prosecutors to write a very damning closing Special Counsel report before Weiss gets fired, either by Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Perhaps this is a bid to harm Joe Biden while he remains President, for depriving prosecutors of the glee of sentencing his son.

We’ll know soon enough.

Update: There’s one more reason why this rush to, uh, judgment is so curious. As noted, the plea included a fairly stiff 48-72 month sentence.

18. Defendant and the SCO-W agree that the base offense level for Count Two in the obstruction indictment is 14, pursuant to U.S.S.G. § 2J1.2(a)(2) and the base offense level for Counts One, Five and Eight is 20, pursuant to U.S.S.G. § 2T4.1(H). Defendant and the SCO-W reserve the right to argue that additional specific offense characteristics, adjustments, and departures under the Sentencing Guidelines are appropriate.

19. Defendant and the SCO-W agree that, taking into account the factors listed in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(l)-(7) and the relevant sentencing guideline factors, an appropriate disposition of this case is that the Court impose a sentence of: no less than 48 months and no greater than 72 months’ imprisonment; 1 year supervised release with conditions to be fixed by the Court; $400 special assessment; $675,502 restitution and no fine. The parties also agree that the defendant is entitled to credit in both Cr. Nos. 24- 91 and 24-702 for the period of his pretrial detention since the day of his arrest and that credits that the Bureau of Prisons may allow under 18 U.S.C. § 3585(b)) may be credited against this stipulated sentence, including credit under Sentencing Guideline § 5G1.3

But according to the sentencing table, the base assessment for Smirnov’s false statement of 14 would result in a range of 15-21 months (though those ranges are almost never actually applied for obstruction). And the 20 base assessment for Smirnov’s tax evasion (for three years, as compared to Hunter’s one) would be 33-41 months, assuming they were both applied with a no criminal history category.

Those add up to 48 to 62 months, not 48 to 72 months.

No defendant would agree to these terms before a tough judge (as Otis Wright is), unless he were certain that he’d soon be pardoned. There’s not even language stipulating how much credit Smirnov would get for pleading guilty (usually 2-3 points, which might bring the range down to 49 months).

This plea deal is designed to result in a wildly overinflated sentence (as it happens, for crimes equivalent to those that Hunter Biden was convicted of), all scheduled before Joe Biden leaves office.

Chuck Grassley Says the FBI Must Combat Sexual Misconduct But the Senate Can Whitewash It

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In a piece billed as “analysis” describing why Kash Patel likely faces little Republican opposition, the NYT’s Catie Edmondson chose to quote one after another Republican making false claims about bias from the Bureau:

  • Thom Tillis falsely claiming Patel’s nomination fulfilled Trump’s promise to “enforce our laws equally and fairly”
  • Chuck Grassley lying that the “unprecedented raid of President Trump’s home in Florida” was “to serve a warrant for records” and not conduct a search necessitated by Trump’s earlier obstruction
  • Joni Ernst imagining that Kash’s nomination would “create much-needed transparency at the F.B.I”
  • John Cornyn asserting that “no one should have to go through what President Trump went through by a partisan Department of Justice and F.B.I.,” which he falsely portrayed as a retribution tour launched by Jim Comey
  • Markwayne Mullin imagining that Kash might “actually get them focused on mission, rather than politics”

What the NYT describes but does not factually label is that most of the Republican party either parrots or truly believes Donald Trump’s manufactured claims of victimhood. But unless you describe that those claims that poor Donald Trump has been targeted are false, then you simply participate in the propaganda, blindly performing the same ritual of obeisance the Republican Senators are.

NYT quotes, but does not link, the letter in which Grassley issued his rant. Fact checking the letter (sent the day before Chris Wray announced he would resign, as Grassley demanded) might have provided a way to demonstrate the pile of false claims on which this impression of the FBI was built.

Oh sure, this particular journalist might not have had time to point out that on December 10, Alexander Smirnov answered any questions about the bribery claim he made up against Joe Biden by signing a plea deal (which the NYT wrote up yesterday, but buried), which Grassley complained about this way:

Consistent with that FBI failure, yet another glaring example of FBI’s broken promises under your leadership is its inexcusable failure to investigate bribery allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden, while strictly scrutinizing former President Trump. You’ve repeatedly claimed you would ensure the FBI does justice, “free of fear, favor, or partisan influence.”25 The FBI under your watch, however, had possession of incriminating information against President Biden for three years until I exposed the existence of the record outlining those allegations, but did nothing to investigate it.26 This record, known as an FD-1023, documented allegations of bribery between and among then-Vice President Biden, Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian officials.27 The FBI confidential human source (CHS) behind this FD-1023 was on the FBI’s payroll during the Obama administration, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, was given permission to violate the law, and the information he provided was used in prosecutions. The FBI called this CHS “highly credible,” and Deputy Director Abbate publicly testified in response to the FBI’s refusal to remove obstructive redactions from that document that “[w]e often redact documents to protect sources and methods…the document was redacted to protect the source as everyone knows, and this is a question of life and death, potentially.” 28 Then after the FD-1023 was made public – which didn’t include the source’s name – DOJ not only publicly named him, but indicted him, calling into question the truthfulness of Deputy Director Abbate’s testimony and his refusal to be transparent.29 Still, to-date, the DOJ and FBI have neither answered whether they investigated the substance of the FD-1023, nor have they provided an explanation for any effort undertaken to obtain the financial records and other pieces of evidence referenced within the document. This sounds a lot like Director Comey’s leadership of the FBI, which was nothing short of shameful.

As I noted on the Senate floor on February 27, 2024, if a highly regarded source had alleged President Trump accepted a bribe, the FBI would pursue this information without keeping it stored away in one of its dusty closets for three years.30

Even before Smirnov’s plea agreement, though, there was plenty in the indictment (like reference to all the travel records that disprove Smirnov’s claims) that not just debunk Grassley’s claims, but make clear that the scandal here was that Scott Brady falsely insinuated to Congress that Smirnov’s travel records corroborated his claims, when they did the opposite.

There’s a far, far bigger problem though: Grassley’s claims about how FBI would respond to a claim of bribery if one implicated Trump are ridiculous.

When FBI (in reality, the decisions here were repeatedly made by DOJ, not FBI, which returning SJC Chair Grassley should be expected to know) got credible claims Trump had been paid by Egyptian spooks, first Robert Mueller (probably Rod Rosenstein), then Bill Barr prevented investigators from obtaining the financial records to pursue the case, a version of which story NYT published in August.

There’s the tip that — the NYT described — the Italians gave Barr and John Durham in 2019 about “suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump,” a detail Durham chose to exclude from his final report.

There’s the $2 billion investment that Saudis made with Jared Kushner after Trump’s son-in-law finished his nepotistic service in the White House; as the NYT laid out, even the Saudis had doubts that Kushner had the expertise to invest that money. A NYT follow-up showed that Kushner’s firm has pocketed $112 million in fees without showing any profit from investments. Democrats have called for a Special Counsel to investigate that, but the Special Counsel-happy Merrick Garland has not done so.

And since the election, a Chinese national whom the SEC has accused of fraud, Justin Sun, effectively just sent Donald Trump $18 million (here’s a less direct NYT story on the how cryptocurrency creates real opportunity for corruption). Where’s your call for fairness, Chuck?

But there were alternative ways to debunk Grassley’s lies other than pointing to the six NYT stories that disproved his claims that FBI ignored a bribery allegation about Biden but chased them with Trump. Consider his most justified complaint, the one with which he begins his rant: The FBI has not explained whether it has pursued allegations of sexual misconduct within its own ranks fairly.

One of the most egregious examples is the FBI’s failure to provide basic information I requested more than two years ago related to the FBI’s ongoing mishandling of sexual harassment claims made by the FBI’s female employees. This request was not pulled out of a hat. It was based on credible whistleblower disclosures alleging hundreds of FBI employees had retired or resigned to avoid accountability for sexual misconduct. 5 Whistleblowers also alleged the FBI had disciplined senior officials less severely than their subordinates for this misconduct.6 In November 2022, I released internal FBI documents corroborating these disclosures.7 I and my staff ever since have asked repeatedly for information sufficient to determine how FBI handled these serious claims and how widespread the problem really is. The FBI, for its part, told the media it would provide the information to me.8 You personally told me at a December 5, 2023, Judiciary Committee hearing, when I confronted you with the FBI’s blatant inaction, that you would check with your team and then follow up with me.9 Your Deputy Director, Paul Abbate, also publicly stated the FBI is serious about removing officials for sexual misconduct. 10 After a year since you made that pledge, over three years since Deputy Director Abbate’s public comments, and after many more requests to FBI to provide this information, neither of you have followed up or followed through. This inexcusable delay and obstruction by you and Deputy Director Abbate has prevented Congress and the Judiciary Committee from addressing the shocking sexual misconduct at the FBI. This is a promise made and broken, on an issue of utmost importance.

Chuck Grassley says FBI’s failure to deal with credible claims of sexual misconduct is “an issue of utmost importance.”

Huh.

Grassley has not yet weighed in on the nominations of Pete Hegseth, Linda McMahon, or Kimberly Guilfoyle — all of whom have been implicated in sexual harassment or assault, but his comments about RFK Jr thus far have focused on, “educating him about agriculture,” rather than the assault of a nanny RFK admitted to. Other Senators, though, have suggested that Hegseth’s accusers should not enjoy the same protections that Grassley has fiercely defended for FBI whistleblowers, and have brushed off how Hegseth’s accuser could testify publicly given the nondisclosure agreement he paid her to sign.

More curiously, when he was asked about the sexual misconduct allegations against Matt Gaetz, Grassley falsely claimed his committee, “did a very thorough job following up on every accusation made against (Supreme Court) Justice Kavanaugh and nothing ever materialized.” Grassley said that after Sheldon Whitehouse issued a report showing that the FBI had forwarded all tips to the White House, rather than chasing them down.

On instructions from the White House, the FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came in through the FBI’s tip line. Instead, all tips related to Kavanaugh were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information.

Whitehouse’s report describing the whitewash FBI did quotes now-debunked claims Grassley made about the thoroughness of the investigation several times.

“These uncorroborated accusations have been unequivocally and repeatedly rejected by Judge Kavanaugh, and neither the Judiciary Committee nor the FBI could locate any third parties who can attest to any of the allegations.”

[snip]

Then-Chairman Grassley said that the FBI “decided” which individuals to contact,98 that the FBI’s investigation was being conducted “in accordance with the agency’s standard operating procedures,” that “the career public servants and professionals at the FBI know what they’re doing and how best to conduct a background investigation,” and that the FBI’s investigation “should be carried out independent of political or partisan considerations.”

If you want to talk about FBI’s inadequate response to sexual misconduct allegations, then surely its whitewash of allegations against Brett Kavanaugh should be included? Want to complain about the FBI? Complain about how they deprived you, Chuck Grassley, of treating misconduct claims against Brett Kavanaugh as “an issue of utmost importance.”

But doing so would expose Grassley’s crass double standard, refusing to exercise the same due diligence with sexual misconduct allegations that, he complains, the FBI has not done in his own job, exercising advice and consent with Donald Trump’s nominees.

The Lessons of Zero Accountability for a Kash Patel Bureau

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This is not your Chris Wray resignation post.

That’ll come later.

This post is a lessons learned about how Republicans — not just at FBI — exploited efforts to share fabricated evidence about Hunter Biden with Wray’s FBI.

In this post, I laid out the five different examples of fabricated evidence FBI or DOJ dealt with in the Hunter Biden case, along with four more instances where we can’t assess the rat-fuckery.

  1. After sharing a debunked Fox News meme, Alexander Smirnov makes false claims of bribery
  2. Derek Hines narratively plants a crack pipe in Wilmington
  3. The gun shop also lied on the gun form
  4. Tony Bobulinski[‘s FBI report] claims he saw a diamond pass hands
  5. Gal Luft claims Joe Biden met directly with CEFC Chairman Ye in 2016
  • FBI enthusiastically welcomes “The Economist’s” claims
  • The Scott Brady side channel launders dirt Rudy Giuliani obtained from Russian agents
  • FBI makes Peter Schweizer their special Hunter Biden informant
  • Judge Maryellen Noreika admits a laptop that has never been indexed

I argued that several examples of that fabricated evidence directly harmed Hunter Biden’s due process. The pressure to chase Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to frame Joe Biden with bribery seems to have played a significant role in the collapse of Hunter’s plea deal and the ratcheting up of charges afterwards. At least as early as Hunter’s bid to defeat a vindictive prosecution claim, AUSA Derek Hines misrepresented Hunter’s own memoir to claim the book helped prove Hunter was doing drugs when he owned a gun, a misrepresentation Hines sustained before the jury that convicted Hunter. While evidence that others lied on gun purchase forms, as the gun shop owner had done by doctoring the very gun form on which Hunter was convicted of lying, is routinely excluded at trials, doing so in this case prevented Hunter from arguing his lie was not material.

Fabricated evidence was allowed to infringe on the due process rights of the son of the President. And the dick pic sniffing media didn’t make a squeak.

But in other of the attempts to politicize Hunter’s case that I laid out, things worked the way it is supposed to. Other examples of fabricated or potentially fabricated evidence were excluded by diligent prosecutors or FBI agents. AUSA Lesley Wolf attempted to keep dirt funneled from Russian spies, Smirnov, and Rudy Giuliani through the Brady side channel from infecting the case. At the request of case agents, FBI supervisory agent Tim Thibault shut down Peter Schweizer as an informant … again, out of an interest to preserve the integrity of the case. Someone in that same vicinity deemed Tony Bobulinski’s claims to be suspect, so investigators didn’t rely on his testimony, but continued to investigate Hunter’s payments from CEFC via other means.

But this is the important lesson, especially going forward: those efforts to maintain the integrity of the investigation were punished, severely. House Republicans (assisted by the disgruntled IRS Agents, in the case of Wolf), treated Wolf and Thibault like villains, eliciting threats against them and leading to their retirement. Because they attempted to prevent the case against Hunter from being deliberately politicized, Trump’s allies in the House made them pariahs and chased them out of government.

This is what already happened to people who tried to uphold rule of law. This is what will happen more going forward. Congress will work in tandem with a politicized DOJ to ensure that the good guys get targeted and chased out.

Often, House Republicans efforts to demonize people who had upheld the integrity of evidence relied on “whistleblowers” who (with just a few exceptions) had themselves been caught politicizing law enforcement themselves, and to retaliate, ran to Jim Jordan to complain.

Aspiring FBI Director Kash Patel funded some of these people telling stories to undermine FBI’s efforts to uphold its integrity.

That’s not the only role the House GOP played in this process.

Congressman like Jim Jordan and James Comer are protected by Speech and Debate even if they lie. And they did lie — or perhaps were too stupid to realize the claims they made were baseless. They lied on right wing propaganda outlets. They lied in reports and hearings.

Whereas the legal prosecution against Hunter generally relied on actual facts (even if Derek Hines moved them around to where he wanted them to be), the House did not. They platformed Bobulinski (and then thought better of it), they championed Luft and Smirnov (and then thought better of it), they championed the Brady side channel. They made Matt Taibbi’s mistaken misrepresentations about the FBI a repeat feature. They turned loan repayments and daily check-in calls into international spy scandals. They guaranteed that the claims discarded by the Bureau because they didn’t meet evidentiary standards would be magnified in the public sphere.

In the Republican House, you don’t need facts to make a case in the court of public opinion. And such false claims played a key role in persecuting even the people who had done nothing more than exercise their First Amendment rights, people like disinformation experts and former spooks honestly expressing concerns about Russian influence operations.

As Kash Patel likely assumes control over an agency that is supposed to be bound by facts — but that even under Wray had begun to be corrupted by Trump’s politicization — remember how Congress has served as a annex to the presumptively evidence-bound investigations as to matters of law, an annex spun free of such bounds. Even before Patel dismantles those bounds, there’s always the alternative of having the loudmouths in Congress do Trump’s dirty work.

Importantly, the loudmouths can do so only as long as a supine press plays along.

But play along they have.

With Hunter Biden, two things facilitated that. For the political and DOJ beat journalists, the existence of the laptop seemingly melted their brain, making them incapable of seeing details through the dick pics.

But for Hill journalists, process was the hook. Jordan and Comer guaranteed breathless coverage by delivering bullshit disguised as events that Hill journalists treated as normal — a stern letter, a subpoena (issued, at first, without the authority to enforce it, which went widely unnoticed and unreported), a formal impeachment inquiry. Never mind that the thing underlying those events was a naked political stunt. Few ever got around to stepping back and observing that the House GOP blew almost their entire two year majority on making enemies. Few ever reported that the House GOP had spent millions of taxpayer dollars, not in paying the bills or funding highways, but in creating enemies. And by treating that process as normal legislative process, journalists normalized it all.

As we move forward to an even more politicized DOJ, keep in mind that with this kind of symbiosis already in place, with the House GOP already prepared to blow up stuff that gets thrown out by the FBI, much of Patel’s work — chasing out honest people trying to protect the integrity of investigations, manufacturing more bullshit claims — will be done for him.

There is one thing that Kash can and undoubtedly will do: recruit more allies — people like Schweizer, or the Proud Boys Bill Barr deputized to try to turn Antifa into a thing — to inform against Republican adversaries. With Pam Bondi’s help, Kash can trade immunity for fabricated claims against his targets, just as Rudy Giuliani was selling in search of dirt on Hunter Biden.

Otherwise, though, Kash can instead focus on ensuring that none of Trump’s people face consequences for their actions.

Zero Accountability: The Five-Plus Times DOJ Got Fabricated Evidence against Hunter Biden

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The other day, former FBI Agent Asha Rangappa attributed the 11-year scope of Hunter Biden’s pardon to the possibility that, “For the 1st time, the FBI and Justice Department could literally fabricate evidence, or collaborate with a foreign government to ‘find’ evidence of a ‘crime,’ with zero accountability.”

Rangappa is not wrong that the ability to fabricate evidence to invent new crimes with which to charge Hunter likely helps explain the scope of the pardon.

But her suggestion that a second Trump term would be the “1st time” the FBI was in a position to do that is, itself, a symptom of the “zero accountability” that allowed Trump to win a second term.

FBI and DOJ already allowed various types of people — from spies to grifters to informants to an AUSA — to fabricate evidence against Hunter Biden and his father at least five times, with another four instances of potentially false evidence. It appears that such fabricated evidence played a role in the collapse of Hunter’s plea deal, David Weiss’ request for Special Counsel authority, and the evidence that convicted Hunter in his Delaware trial.

And whatever its influence on Hunter’s ultimate conviction, how Republicans worked to insert fabricated and otherwise suspect information into Hunter’s case is a lesson for how it’ll continue to happen.

The following list includes five examples, with numbered headings, that present compelling evidence of fabricated information used either by Congress or DOJ to go after Hunter and his father, along with four suspect incidents. The first five are presented in order of seriousness with regards to the effect on Hunter’s due process. This post will review each. I’ll do a followup that explains the lessons we can take from this.

  1. After sharing a debunked Fox News meme, Alexander Smirnov makes false claims of bribery
  2. Derek Hines narratively plants a crack pipe in Wilmington
  3. The gun shop also lied on the gun form
  4. Tony Bobulinski[‘s FBI report] claims he saw a diamond pass hands
  5. Gal Luft claims Joe Biden met directly with CEFC Chairman Ye in 2016
  • FBI enthusiastically welcomes “The Economist’s” claims
  • The Scott Brady side channel launders dirt Rudy Giuliani obtained from Russian agents
  • FBI makes Peter Schweizer their special Hunter Biden informant
  • Judge Maryellen Noreika admits a laptop that has never been indexed

1. After sharing a debunked Fox News meme, Alexander Smirnov makes false claims of bribery

Fabrication: Longtime FBI informant Alexander Smirnov allegedly falsely claimed Mykola Zlochevsky twice told him that he was bribing Joe Biden.

Resolution: According to Scott Brady’s testimony, prosecutor Lesley Wolf had treated the Smirnov allegation with the same skepticism she did other tips shared via the side channel from Rudy. But after Congress leaked the Smirnov FD-1023 and Bill Barr publicly complained that David Weiss was supposed to have investigated it, it appears to have been part of — if not the primary reason — why Weiss reneged on the plea deal with Hunter, obtained Special Counsel status, and ratcheted up charges afterwards.

In January 2020, right in the middle of impeachment, Bill Barr set up a “discreet” side channel overseen via Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady via which Rudy Giuliani could share the dirt on Hunter Biden he had obtained, in part, from known Russian agent, Andrii Derkach.

As part of that process, Brady checked in on all investigations implicated by the side channel: the SDNY investigation into whether Rudy was acting as an unregistered agent of various Ukrainians, David Weiss’ investigation into Hunter Biden, and two oligarchs from whom Rudy solicited dirt on Hunter: Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky. In his interview, Brady didn’t claim to have looked into the investigation into another oligarch from whom Rudy solicited dirt (indirectly): Mykola Zlochevsky. That investigation reportedly started in 2016 while Joe Biden was Vice President and got shut down the previous month, December 2019, right in the middle of an impeachment focused on corruption at Burisma. Rather, Brady dubiously claimed he discovered Smirnov in a search on Hunter and Burisma.

As Alexander Smirnov’s first indictment describes it, it worked the other way. When Smirnov saw a report of Derkach’s meetings with Rudy, Smirnov started texting his handler that, “bribe of [Joe Biden] should soon be in the news))).” He promised to get proof — and then started sending already debunked memes made popular on Fox News.

Neither story convincingly explains how Brady came to reach out to Smirnov to give him opportunity to frame Donald Trump’s opponent. Perhaps one of Smirnov’s three ties to Trump and his people, including the financial ties to Economic Transformation Technologies, which in turn has ties to one of the construction companies that has partnered with Trump Organization in the Middle East, that are the subject of a second indictment against Smirnov, better explains it. That is, perhaps someone in Trump’s camp knew to send him.

Whatever the case, after Brady came calling, Smirnov claimed that at a meeting in 2017, Zlochevsky insinuated he was paying Hunter Biden as protection, from Joe, for himself. Smirnov further claimed that on a phone call the previous year (in 2019, around the time Rudy was expecting a Hunter laptop, and close to the time the investigation into Zlochevsky would be shut down), the Burisma head bragged about hiding his payments so well it would take ten years to find them.

Here was the bribery claim that Trump had first demanded a year earlier from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, all wrapped up with a bow in that Brady side channel!

Brady told Congress his investigators vetted Smirnov’s claims, which was, after all, the purported reason for his side channel. The Smirnov indictment repeatedly described how precisely the thing — Smirnov’s travel records — that Brady claimed he had used to validate Smirnov’s allegations instead debunked them. Jerry Nadler referred Brady for investigation for those false claims to Congress, an investigation that will presumably be killed after inauguration.

On October 23, 2020 — days after Trump personally yelled at Bill Barr about the investigation into Hunter Biden and on the same day that Tony Bobulinski, accompanied by a former Trump White House lawyer, claimed to have personally witnessed a key meeting with CEFC — David Weiss’ team was ordered by Richard Donoghue to receive a briefing on this allegation.

With the personal involvement of Bill Barr, PADAG Richard Donoghue and before him Seth DuCharme, and FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, Scott Brady found an informant who — if you believe the indictment — was willing to fabricate a bribery claim against Joe and Hunter Biden during an election year.

Don’t tell me that a second Trump administration will only prospectively use fabricated evidence, because it already happened, and the guy currently investigating how it happened was a witness to the process and one of the interviews in this case.

When DOJ ordered prosecutors to accept this alleged fabrication in 2020, AUSA Lesley Wolf reportedly treated it with the same skepticism she treated all the other dirt laundered through the side channel, and it went nowhere. But it didn’t go away. Republicans resuscitated it, in 2023, during their baseless effort to impeach Joe Biden. The FBI tried but failed to limit sharing of Smirnov’s FD-1023. Marjorie Taylor Greene promptly leaked details of it. Bill Barr started making public claims about it in response to Jamie Raskin’s accurate description of what happened in 2020. Then a “whistleblower” leaked the form itself via Chuck Grassley and James Comer. And amid that frenzy, Weiss reneged on his office’s previous assurances that there was no ongoing investigation, told Lindsey Graham that Smirnov’s FD-1023 was part of that ongoing investigation, and then obtained Special Counsel status, out of which the Smirnov false statements prosecution arose.

Yes, after the Smirnov allegation served as a precipitating factor in the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal, he too is now being prosecuted. But by all appearances, the fabrication and the way Republicans leveraged it nevertheless played a central role in the plight of Hunter Biden, a central role in prosecuting him with far more serious charges than originally planned. The fabrication had its effect, and the effect was to make Hunter a felon.

Update: On December 10, Alexander Smirnov signed a plea deal admitting his bribery claims against Joe Biden were fabricated.

The events Defendant first reported to the Handler in June 2020 were fabrications. In truth and fact. Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016 — in other words, when Public Official 1 could not engage in any official act to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office. Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.

2. Derek Hines narratively plants a crack pipe in Wilmington

Fabrication: AUSA Derek Hines repeatedly claimed that a line from Hunter Biden’s memoir set in February to March 2019 in New Haven happened in 2018 in Wilmington.

Resolution: None. Hines presented a version of this claim to jurors.

Prosecutors faced a number of challenges with charging Hunter Biden for the gun crime David Weiss had earlier decided to divert. They needed to defend against a vindictive prosecution claim that they had ratcheted up the gun charges against Hunter Biden because he didn’t accept the narrowed plea agreement after Weiss reneged on his June 19, 2023 assurances there was no ongoing investigation. Their plight was made worse because investigators had never taken the most basic investigative steps to pursue the gun charge: they had never obtained a warrant to search Hunter’s digital evidence for proof he was addicted when he owned the gun, and they had never done laboratory analysis on the pouch in which the gun was found. They did both those things after indicting Hunter for the gun crimes in 2023, after the statute of limitations had already expired.

The decision to charge Hunter with the gun crimes appears to have amounted to, “We know Hunter was an addict based on stuff obtained on the laptop and published in the right wing press” (indeed, one of Judge Maryellen Noreika’s decisions mistook stuff published by Murdoch rags for evidence before her).

Abbe Lowell has claimed that, at least in August 2023, prosecutors told him they had no need to rely on the laptop for evidence at trial. Prosecutors seem to have believed, incorrectly, that the laptop was an exact match of Hunter Biden’s iCloud. They similarly seem to have believed that Hunter’s memoir provided adequate proof that Hunter was doing drugs during the 11-day period in October 2018 he owned the gun. In fact, the memoir says almost nothing about that period.

Nevertheless, AUSA Derek Hines made a version of that argument — that the memoir reflected drug use during or closely after the period he owned the gun — over and over, at least seven times by my last count. Hines did so by claiming that his favorite line from the memoir — “It was me and a crack pipe in a Super 8, not knowing which the fuck way was up” — took place in fall 2018 in Wilmington, DE, and not in Hunter’s stopover in New Haven between the time he left Keith Ablow’s treatment in February 2019 and arrived back in Wilmington, before then moving back to Los Angeles permanently.

He simply moved the narrative reference to the crack pipe in a Super 8 from one crime scene to the one where he needed it to be, from 2019 to 2018, from New Haven to Wilmington. Just like a dirty cop moves an actual crack pipe from one location to another.

(This post includes the full memoir excerpt and a summary of Hunter’s spending around New Haven; it also notes that the claim he was staying in Super 8s was, as so much auto-biography is, embellishment.) The argument was absolutely crucial to Hines’ responses to Hunter’s selective and vindictive prosecution claims, falsely substantiating a defense of the prosecutorial decision to charge Hunter with the gun crimes (and even the tax crimes) because there was so much evidence against Hunter in the memoir, when in fact the memoir had a gap for the crucial period.

Hines sustained this fabrication with the jury by selectively presenting the memoir to exclude the discussion of leaving Ablow’s treatment and the way it exacerbated Hunter’s addiction. And when he walked his summary witness through the memoir, he again falsely insinuated that the line took place in 2018, not 2019.

Q. And how about any section in Chapter 9 or Chapter 10, the relevant time period for 2018?

A. No.

Q. And finally, page 208, continuing in the same chapter, after Mr. Biden describes full blown addiction, Exhibit 19, page 208, does Mr. Biden write “crack is a great leveler.” And then he goes on to say “just like in California.” Is that what he goes on to say here?

A. Yes.

Q. If you zoom out, above that, does he say in the first paragraph, “It was me and a crack pipe and a super eight, not knowing which the fuck way was up.” Are those his words?

A. Yes.

Q. And this is in the same chapter when he describes his return in the fall of 2018; correct?

To be sure: Hunter was also staying in cheap motels while he was in Wilmington in 2018, including the night before Hallie Biden found the gun. But those stays don’t appear in his memoir, and so prosecutors had little to no evidence that he was smoking a crack pipe while staying there. As noted, virtually nothing from those weeks in Wilmington appears in his memoir.

But that was true of the evidence against Hunter generally. While there was a great deal of evidence showing Hunter using drugs before and after the period he owned the gun, there was little definitive evidence showing him using in those 11 days.

Prosecutors charged a case for which they had very little direct evidence of drug use during the period in question. One way they won a conviction anyway was by misrepresenting the timing and location of this line in the memoir.

3. The gun shop also lied on the gun form

Fabrication: Sometime after reporting the gun purchase, the gun shop added a claim to the original form that they had asked Hunter for a second form of ID, in addition to his passport (which, because it lacks an address, would not suffice). 

Resolution: Judge Noreika prevented Hunter from presenting the doctored form to the jury or questioning specifically on the question (though Abbe Lowell did elicit closely related answers), thereby preventing Hunter from discrediting the gun shop practices generally or the proving Hunter’s lie on the gun form was not material. 

According to a contested Abbe Lowell filing, before the election in 2020, the guy who owned the gun shop from which Hunter bought a gun, Ron Palimere, and the State Trooper who first investigated the gun in 2018, Vincent Clemons, exchanged WhatsApp texts about how they could release the paperwork tied to the gun purchase in order to help beat Joe Biden.

[Vincent] Clemons was the Delaware State Police officer who first arrived at Janssens’ grocery store on October 23, 2018 when Hallie Biden threw a bag containing the handgun into a trash can in front of the store. It was Clemons who took statements about the handgun from both Hallie and Hunter Biden and was part of filling out an official police report on the issue. Two years later, he is in the communications with [Ron] Palimere about the Form 4473, one of which states: “Yep your side is simple – Hunter bought a gun from you, he filled out the proper forms and the Feds approved him for a purchase.” (emphasis added). Palimere later responded, “I’ll keep it short and sweet as well: Hunter bought a gun. The police visited me asking for verification of the purchase and that’s all I can recall from that day. It was over 2 years ago.” (TAB 6B, 10/26/20 Palimere-Clemons Texts at 4, 6.) The reference to filling out the “proper forms” is not lost on defense counsel given what transpired thereafter. And, despite the importance of Clemons (e.g., the person who actually took the statements), the Special Counsel is foregoing him as a witness to call two other Delaware officers instead.

As part of their effort to use Hunter’s gun purchase to hurt his father in the 2020 election, it appears that on October 22, 2020 they for the first time printed out the receipt recording Hunter’s purchase of the gun.

They would leak these materials, as well as the partisan write-up of the investigation penned after the fact by Clemons, to right wing propagandists.

Their reference to “proper forms” was important, Lowell argued, because some time after the original gun form was emailed to ATF after the gun had already been lost and recovered, it got altered, to falsely reflect that the gun shop obtained a second form of ID before selling a guy they knew to be Joe Biden’s kid a gun. (There’s no way this vehicle registration could have served as a second ID to supplement the passport, because Hunter was driving his father’s Cadillac, and so the registration would have been in Dad’s name.)

Hunter got evidence that these key witnesses tried to use these documents as part of a political hit job long after his selective and vindictive prosecution bids were rejected. And Judge Maryellen Noreika prohibited Hunter’s team from introducing either that the gun shop owner hated Joe Biden and also wanted to get Hunter out of his shop as quickly as possible and as a result sold him a gun without first getting the proper paperwork, or that they altered the form after the fact. Jurors were left with no explanation of why gun shop employee Jason Turner repeatedly claimed to have written “DE Vehicle Registration” on the form, but it didn’t appear on the form before them (see this post for more on the way the gun shop employees’ testimony materially conflicted).

The means by which prosecutors managed to cover up that the gun shop had also broken the law is fairly banal: They relied on secondary witnesses for key testimony rather than that of people more directly implicated in similar conduct as Hunter (the gun shop owner was immunized to sustain this case), and performed ignorance of details about this corruption at trial.

That happens all the time in criminal trials prosecuted by AUSAs who excel at prosecutorial dickishness. Judge Noreika’s decision to exclude a doctored gun form (and instead rely on a scan at trial) might have been a ripe issue for appeal. Certainly, by excluding evidence that the gun sale went through without proper paperwork, she excluded evidence that Hunter’s lie was not material.

But the larger issue is that Hunter Biden was prosecuted for lying on a gun form even while prosecutors covered up that the gun shop owner himself had an employee fabricate the form after the fact, possibly to hide his own role in leaking to the press and trying to push such a case against Joe Biden’s kid.

4. Tony Bobulinski[‘s FBI report] claims he saw a diamond pass hands

Fabrication: After Trump hosted Tony Bobulinski at a debate, the FBI recorded claims that Bobulinski personally witnessed a key CEFC meeting.

Resolution: After prosecutors deemed Bobulinski’s testimony unreliable and so avoided follow-up, IRS agents claimed prosecutors improperly withheld Bobulinski’s testimony, leading to his platforming of slightly different claims in a hearing purporting to support impeachment. Bobulinski accused FBI of misrecording his interview.

The day after being hosted by Donald Trump at one of the Presidential debates, Tony Bobulinski — represented by onetime White House Counsel and future January 6 witness attorney Stefan Passantino — went to the FBI and made certain claims about Hunter Biden’s ties to CEFC. Among other things, he claimed that he participated in a Miami meeting between Hunter Biden and CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming.

BOBULINSKI first met in person with members of the BIDEN family at a 2017 meeting in Miami, Florida. BOBULINSKI, GILLIAR, WALKER, HUNTER BIDEN, and YE all attended the meeting. Also in attendance was Director JIAN ZANG (“ZANG”), a CEFC Director involved in forming new businesses and capitalizing them at the request of CEFC. At the meeting, BOBULINSKI witnessed a large diamond gemstone given as a gift to HUNTER BIDEN by YE.

The work conducted by CEFC, GILLIAR, WALKER, HUNTER BIDEN, JAMES BIDEN and YE over the preceding two years was discussed in detail at the Miami meeting. In particular, CEFC was closing significant investment deals in Poland, Kazakhstan, Romania, Oman, and the Middle East during this period of time. CEFC had used its relationship with HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN – and the influence attached to the BIDEN name – to advance CEFC’s interests abroad. HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN did not receive any monetary compensation for their assistance in these projects. HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN did not receive any compensation because JOSEPH BIDEN was still VPOTUS during this time period.

He also claimed that when he met Joe Biden in May 2017, they discussed the business deal.

Further, BOBULINSKI met with JOSEPH BIDEN in person on May 2, 2017 at approximately 10:30 PM at the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel bar in Beverly Hills, California where they discussed SINOHAWK

In his congressional testimony, Bobulinski disclaimed several things recorded in his FBI interview report. He said he did not attend the meeting in Miami nor witnessed the transfer of a diamond to Hunter. He backed off his description of the substance of his meetings with Biden.

Not only did Joe Biden meet with me twice for an extensive amount of time — and we weren’t talking about the weather or niceties. We had an extensive discussion about his family, my family, my business career, where I was successful, the military background, and what I was doing with the Chinese. However, coached before that meeting to not go into a lot of detail by Hunter and Jim Biden. Okay?

The effect here is subtle. Bobulinski — who is furious that Hunter cut him out of this deal — is still trying to put Joe Biden at the center of it, he’s still trying to claim (contracts and finances notwithstanding) that the aspiring President got 10% of the deal. That’s the now partly-disclaimed story he told, allegedly presenting himself as a direct witness to more than he was, when he waltzed into the FBI fresh off his campaign event with Donald Trump.

5. Gal Luft claims Joe Biden met directly with CEFC Chairman Ye in 2016

Fabrication: Uncorroborated testimony that Hunter’s financial payments from CEFC started while Joe Biden was still Vice President.

Resolution: Public release of charges after Luft got House Republicans to claim a cover-up.

At a time when he would have known he was under investigation for his role in Patrick Ho’s influence-peddling scheme, March 2019 (for which he was charged and currently awaits extradition), Gal Luft met with investigators in Belgium for two interviews, one focusing on his role in Ho’s activities, another focused on Hunter Biden. At the latter, he claimed that Joe Biden had met with Ye when he was still President, in 2016, and Hunter had gotten paid in 2016 too.

LUFT is aware that YE met with BIDEN and HUNTER at the end of 2016 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.

The meeting at which Biden was present was later, in March 2017. Here’s how Rob Walker described it.

Walker: It was out‐of‐office.  Ah, we were in ah.., D. C. at the Four Seasons…

Soline: Hmph hmph. Walker: …and ah.., we were having lunch and he.., he stopped in…

Soline: Hmph hmph.

Walker: …then he’d ah, leave.

Wilson: Okay.

Walker: That was it.

Wilson: Just said hello to everybody and then…

Walker: Yes.

Wilson: …took off?

Walker: He literally sat down.  I don’t even think he drank water.  I think Hunter said um.., I may be tryin’ to start a company, ah, or tried to do something with these guys and could you.., and  think he was like “if I’m around”….and he’d show up.

So, too, was a $3 million payment that Luft said Hunter (actually, Rob Walker) received. Luft said it was paid in December 2016; it was paid in March 2017.

At the meeting, Luft “was directly asked to identify his CEFC CHINA ENERGY source(s) but refused to do so.”

Here’s how the tax indictment against Hunter (though not dissimilar to Bobulinski’s claims) described these ties.

8. In the late fall of 2015, the Defendant, Business Associate 1, and Business Associate 2 began to investigate potential infrastructure projects with individuals associated with CEFC China Energy Co Ltd. (CEFC), a Chinese energy conglomerate.

9. In or around December of that year, the Defendant met in Washington, D.C., with individuals associated with CEFC. During the next two years the Defendant, Business Associate 1, and Business Associate 2 continued to meet with individuals associated with CEFC, including in February 2017, with CEFC’s then-Chairman (hereafter “the Chairman”).

10. On or about March 1, 2017, State Energy HK, a Hong Kong entity associated with CEFC, paid approximately $3 million to Business Associate 1’s entity for sourcing deals and for identifying other potential ventures. The Defendant had an oral agreement with Business Associate 1 to receive one-third of those funds, or a million dollars. The Defendant, in turn, directed a portion of those million dollars to Business Associate 3.

On these topics, Luft’s testimony is subtle — just a temporal shift by a few months to make the sleazy Biden relationship with CEFC more damning (and put FARA charges that SDNY seems to have declined by the time Luft went public in 2022 back on the table).  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Luft slightly adjusted his claims about his testimony when he went to NYPost after his arrest, correcting the monetary amounts and timing focusing instead on the later event at which Biden was co-present with Ye.

Luft’s comments about Hunter Biden don’t appear in his own indictment. And indeed, there’s no evidence he wittingly lied himself; whereas Bobulinski had claimed firsthand knowledge of the Miami meeting, Luft was only claiming to have second-hand knowledge of this information. It could well have been an effort from his own sources to harm the Bidens. In his effort to allegedly disavow his own involvement in this influence peddling, Luft certainly had cause to want to shift CEFC’s attempt to recruit James Woolsey, likely sparked by Trump’s election win, to instead focus on what was surely a similar attempt to cultivate the Biden family, something that had less value after Trump’s win.

The files released by the disgruntled IRS agents show that by 2021, SDNY was no longer pursuing a FARA investigation against the Bidens with relation to CEFC, so whatever Luft claim, it has not (at least thus far) done lasting damage, which is the way investigations are supposed to work.

FBI enthusiastically welcomes “The Economist’s” claims

There are a range of Ukrainians who shared dirt on Hunter Biden that made it to investigators. The first two of those, by chronology, were Ukrainians who were briefly made informants by people in Los Angeles, but who were subsequently deemed to be part of an influence operation targeting Joe Biden.

As Johnathan Buma described it, the thumb drive Ukrainians he called Rollie and the Economist provided targeting Hunter Biden in early 2019 (which would have been almost immediately after the investigation into Hunter was opened in Delaware) largely focused on the sex and drugs that reflect Hunter’s addiction, as well as financial improprieties.

After receiving the presentation from ROLLIE and THE ECONOMIST, THE ECONOMIST provided me a thumb drive with some supporting documentation, much of which was in the Ukrainian language, which I do not speak. After I submitted my FD-1023 reports on this information, I was put in touch with two agents working out of the Baltimore office on a case based in Delaware involving Hunter. spoke on the phone with these agents, who were very interested in the information due to its relation to their ongoing investigation that was mostly involving allegations of Hunter’s involvement with drugs and prostitution. Information derived from ROLLIE and THE ECONOMIST had previously been found to be credible, so this was handled carefully and quickly transferred over to the agents in Baltimore and was serilized in their case file. While I transferred the information, I could not read the Ukrainian language, and it required translation in order to determine the viability of the electronic document’s presumed support of the allegations related to Hunter and Burisma, which were presented and summarized in a PowerPoint presentation created by THE ECONOMIST and serialized in the case file. I had no involvement in the subsequent investigation concerning Burisma and the Bidens and never received any update from these agents as to whether the information was corroborated, but later learned from the media that some of the allegations appeared to have been true. Based on the level of corruption and the RIS’ past usage of Ukraine for influence operations raw single-source information derived from Ukraine is always viewed with skepticism by members of the USIC with some specialty and experience in Ukrainian matters.

Buma went on to describe how, when he shared information about Rudy’s ties to Russian spies, his supervisor shut him down.

I’ve written why I am skeptical of Buma. It’s also worth noting that, in fact, in spite of four years of investigation, the FBI never managed to substantiate what he seems to suggest the claims were, so he’s likely wrong that the tips from Rollie and the Economist held up to scrutiny.

Given that, per Buma’s description, these two were quickly disqualified as informants, it seems likely that their information was deemed problematic. That is, it seems likely that this information was vetted and found wanting, which is (again, like the Luft allegations) precisely what is supposed to happen with potentially motivated informant information.

The Scott Brady side channel launders dirt Rudy Giuliani obtained from Russian agents

It’s what DOJ did with Rudy Giuliani’s information, obtained in part from known Russian agents trying to interfere in the election, that defies excuse.

By setting up the Brady Side channel (and related steps), Barr thwarted the SDNY investigation into whether Rudy was himself an unregistered agent of Ukrainian sources. SDNY did not then — and it appears, did not ever — get access to the interview Brady did with Trump’s personal lawyer about how he collected this information. And Brady attempted to intervene in the SDNY investigation to tell them they had gotten it wrong.

As noted above, at Barr’s direction, Brady also created a way that Smirnov could fabricate an allegedly false bribery claim against Joe Biden. He created a way to, effectively, spy on several ongoing investigations.

And, while his sole purpose was supposed to be vetting, his vetting process appears to have done nothing more than serve as a laundry service, insulating Rudy and his sources from investigators and parachuting his information in with the sanction of top DOJ personnel, as when Richard Donoghue ordered DE USAO to provide information about their investigation and accept information in exchange, into the Hunter investigation.

Q And did your AUSAs ever communicate to you issues they were having with Ms. Wolf?

A Not with Ms. Wolf specifically — well, no strike that.

There was an occasion with Ms. Wolf as well, but they would communicate to me the issues that we were having, our investigative team was having with both the FBI and with Delaware and with SDNY. Really the only office we didn’t have any issues with was EDNY. It was Rich Donoghue’s office.

Q Okay.

And so, before you communicated with the PADAG that you needed assistance, did you have an initiative to talk with Mr. Weiss?

A Yeah, I wouldn’t always run to the principal right away, right. I would try to go professional to professional, you know, U.S. attorney to U.S. attorney, and we would try to resolve things. And, only when we couldn’t, would we elevate it to the DAG’s office and involve the PADAG.

Mr. Rosen was never involved directly in our communications. It was always the PADAG.

Q Okay.

And what feedback was Mr. Weiss giving you during that time period before you had to involve the PADAG?

Mr. Lelling. Only in general terms.

Mr. Brady. Usually Mr. Weiss was in receiving mode and would say that he would talk to his team to try to resolve it?

Q At any point did you have to advise Mr. Weiss that you’ve been, you know, you’ve been charged by the DAG to collect this information, and part of your charge and your duty, and correct me if I’m wrong, is to analyze it and hand it off?

A That’s correct and to coordinate with other offices. And, yes, I reminded Mr. Weiss of that obligation that we have, of that requirement, and the FBI on a regular basis as well.

[snip]

Q And were you ever told that the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office did not want a briefing from your office?

A I believe I was. I don’t remember. But I know that we had trouble scheduling it.

Q Okay. And then, further down, it states AUSA Wolf’s comments made clear she did not want to cooperate with the Pittsburgh USAO, and that she had already concluded no information from that office could be credible stating her belief that it all came from Rudy Giuliani.

Were you ever made aware of Ms. Wolf’s processing and decisions regarding this briefing, and why she didn’t want the briefing?

A I was not. We did, however, make it clear that some of the information including this 1023 did not come from Mr. Giuliani.

We do not know what kind of information got laundered through this process. We do know that after four years of investigation, DE USAO did not charge any of the allegations that Rudy’s Russian spy buddies were pushing. Again, it looks like prosecutors in Delaware properly viewed this information with skepticism.

FBI makes Peter Schweizer their special Hunter Biden informant

But the import of that process shares a feature with another of the efforts to launder dirt into an investigation into Hunter Biden.

By 2020, even as Arkansas’ US Attorney’s Office was four years into an investigation of the Clinton Foundation predicated in three different venues at least partly on Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, some FBI agents in DC had not just used his writing, but made him a formal informant to report on Hunter Biden. It seems that Schweizer was at least partly repackaging allegations based on the laptop, because (according to testimony from retired FBI agent Tim Thibault), when FBI agents from Delaware asked to stop getting the information, they effectively said they already had it.

At the request of the Delaware investigators, Thibault shut down Schweizer as an informant, four years after Thibault had been one of the the three FBI agents who had chased the Clinton Foundation allegations based on Schweizer’s work.

But like the Brady Side channel, this privileged means of sharing dirt — of uncertain quality — on Hunter Biden became a means to discipline those who tried to protect the integrity of investigations by limiting the partisan shit dumped into them. As Lesley Wolf also did, Thibault faced an entire campaign of retaliation (including from two agents who were themselves firebreathing partisans, who claimed that Thibault shut good work down), including public humiliation in an oversight hearing with Chris Wray.

The threats that Wolf faced may have been worse than what Thibault faced. But unlike Wolf, Thibault is on the (dated) Kash Patel’s enemies list.

We don’t know what substance of information Schweizer share with the FBI; we know the investigative agents didn’t want it, at least in that form.

But a more important point is that Thibault’s efforts (at the request of the investigative team itself) to protect the investigation from partisan taint, just like Wolf’s, made him a target for professional and potentially dangerous retaliation.

Judge Maryellen Noreika admits a laptop that has never been indexed

Which brings us, of course, to the laptop (and accompanying hard drive, purportedly a copy of the laptop but the Cellebrite report from which was 62% longer).

There are a great deal of reasons to be skeptical about the laptop: the discrepancies between John Paul Mac Isaac’s story and the FBI’s, JPMI’s claim that the FBI tried to boot it up four days before the known warrant, the possibility that Bill Barr got sent a copy.

But the biggest caution has to do with its handling.

Immediately after the release by NYPost, Rudy ran his yap and said it didn’t really matter if Derkach was a Russian spy and that he regarded the hard drive copy of the laptop he had to be an “extension” of his efforts to collect dirt from Russian spies. (In congressional testimony, Scott Brady admitted that Rudy never told him about the laptop.)

Thanks to Gary Shapley, we know the panicked meeting that ensued, as the investigative team tried to justify the year that they had spent snooping in a laptop that might have, after all, had something to do with Russia’s information operation. And Shapley recorded in real time not just that prosecutors had an email, dated March 31, 2020, recording some kind of concerns “about quality and completeness of imaged/recovered information from the hard drive,” but that they would not share it with anyone who might have to testify at trial. He also described that, at the time of that October 22, 2020 meeting, the FBI had never checked when the files on the laptop got added when. They had never checked to see if someone had packaged Joe Biden’s son’s digital life up onto a laptop to be dealt to the FBI.

My suspicion is that, after that time, prosecutors decided they shouldn’t try to introduce the laptop at any trial, because they could never clean it of this stench (they don’t appear to have considered investigating that stench, which continues to baffle me to this day). But after brashly telling Abbe Lowell in August 2023 they didn’t need no fucking laptop to charge the gun case, a different set of prosecutors discovered they had almost no evidence showing that Hunter Biden was doing drugs in the 11 days he owned a gun. They discovered that the all-critical communications between Hunter and Hallie Biden from that period — saved from a phone he used until replacement phones for ones he lost days before he bought the gun arrived during this same period — existed only on that laptop which he did not yet possess.

And rather than going back and pretending they were the FBI, acting like the FBI — rather than going back and doing the index that would tell them whether the laptop really did reflect Hunter’s use of it or someone else packaging up the digital life of the then President’s son — they instead bulldozed through things like the dickish prosecutors they are.

They never indexed the laptop. Never.

They never Bates stamped their own exhibits.

They never provided the laptop in e-discovery format.

In fact, after Hunter’s team did their own extraction so they could do searches, prosecutors raised questions about the integrity of their own source, the laptop.

When Judge Noreika denied my request for the extraction reports that Derek Hines claimed authenticated the laptop, she admitted that she had never required a report that actually referred to the laptop by some kind of identifier. The laptop evidence came in with no formal validation whatsoever.

The only two pieces of authentication used to validate the laptop at trial were the fact it had accessed Hunter’s iCloud account (but Zoe Kestan testified at trial that so had her own laptop), and that JPMI had sent an invoice to Hunter’s public iCloud email.

That was it.

The laptop and the most damning evidence against Hunter all came in without the most basic kind of validation. And as a result, we still can’t say with certainty we know fuckall about its provenance. Nor can we say whether its existence as a collection of evidence was doctored by hostile players (who would just as likely be Republican rat-fuckers as Russian spies).

We simply don’t know, and anyone claiming they do, is lying or withholding reporting and testimony that could have come in as part of the trial.

So we still can’t say whether the most famous prop in this whole story involved fabrications or manipulations or merely the disordered digital life of a hopelessly addicted man.

Hunter has been pardoned from these convictions (though James Comer has promised to continue hounding him going forward). Even still, these nine instances of dodgy evidence used against the President’s son provide lessons — none pretty — about what we should expect going forward.

You Can’t Pardon America’s Way Out of Trump’s Assault on Rule of Law

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The NYT has matched Jonathan Martin’s reporting that Biden’s aides are considering pardoning some subset of the people who will be targeted by Trump.

Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

The conversations were spurred by Trump’s repeated threats and quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats, though not by those seeking pardons themselves. “The beneficiaries know nothing,” one well-connected Democrat told me about those who could receive pardons.

Smart lefty commentators are embracing the concept.

With the possible exception of Mark Milley, I think this is an exceedingly stupid idea. It’s the kind of magical pony thinking that led people to demand Merrick Garland, with no effort from them, make Trump go away, thereby ceding the ground for Trump to claim he was prosecuted in a witch hunt.

And it won’t work.

Biden’s pardon won’t even save Hunter Biden

Start with the fact that Biden’s pardon won’t even save his own son.

Sure, it’ll save him from going to prison for the crimes for which he was convicted.

But it might not even insulate him and his team from further harassment. That’s true, first of all, because prosecutors have continued to pursue an investigation — no doubt facilitated by the House investigation into Hunter — into whether Kevin Morris’ support for Hunter in 2020, as he was trying to sustain sobriety, amounted to a campaign benefit for Joe Biden.

While pursuing the false allegations of foreign-influence wrongdoing led nowhere, the Special Counsel seems to have given in to other demands to expand his investigation of Hunter, his family, and those close to them. Throughout 2024, Special Counsel prosecutors have sought information about financial support Hunter received in 2020 and 2021 around the time of the 2020 presidential election and questioned whether such support could be deemed improper political contributions. This latest inquiry is the exact demand that the disgruntled IRS agents alluded to in their statements to congressional committees and the media.92 The results of this investigation expanding—the theory of which was rejected in the case of former Senator John Edwards93—are nevertheless likely to be a focal point of any final report the Special Counsel prepares for Congress, which will no doubt result in more demands for baseless charges against Hunter.

Nothing in Hunter’s pardon protects Morris or, through him, Abbe Lowell. Indeed, I expect this prong of the investigation is one reason prosecutors fought to terminate Hunter’s prosecution, rather than dismiss the indictment: because it would make it easier to use the prosecution to show some benefit.

Plus, as far as I know, David Weiss will still have his Special Counsel report to write up, and because Alexander Smirnov has his existing false statement charge and a new tax indictment ahead of him (to say nothing of an appeal of David Weiss’ Special Counsel appointment under the same argument via which Trump got his own documents case dismissed), the report will go to Pam Bondi and not Merrick Garland. So Hunter can expect to be dirtied up some more in that report.

More importantly, House Republicans have already floated bringing Hunter in for more testimony. In recent years, the House GOP has spun entirely free of gravity and facts, so it would (and did, particularly in their referral of Hunter’s uncle Jim) take little to refer Hunter for prosecution on false statements.

Nothing about Hunter’s pardon will prevent Republicans from inventing new crimes going forward.

That’s true of anyone on a list. If you pardon Anthony Fauci, nothing prevents Congress from calling him to testify again to invent some new reason to prosecute him.

There are too many targets to play whack-a-mole

Another reason pardoning your way out of this problem won’t work is because there is an infinite supply of potential targets, but a finite attention span with which to protect them. As I noted, the Kash Patel enemies list on which the discussion is focused is dated; it excludes three of the names — Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, and (even!) Anthony Fauci — that, per NYT, are at the center of the discussion (Adam Schiff and Mark Milley are on there). Mike Flynn has his own list. Random mobs of MAGAts also have their own.

Olivia Troye, Kash’s current focus, is (as far as I know) on none of them.

Much of this discussion simply disappears most of the people who’ve already gone though this, who will continue to be targeted so long as there’s utility to it.

Importantly, the more invisible or easily dehumanized targets are, the easier they will be to take down.

Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, Mark Milley? They’re all people that some very powerful people will fight for, or at the very least be discomforted as they watch passively. Those would be the easiest cases to defend.

There are legal privileges to protect

One reason, for example, that Adam Schiff”s targeting might discomfort those who absolutely loathe him is because, to punish him for his imagined sin — speaking openly of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in 2016 and daring to pursue him in impeachment after impeachment — would solidly be protected by Speech and Debate. The same is true of Liz Cheney.

To go after Adam Schiff for his imagined crimes, you’d have to rely on litigation approaches that might make — say — Mitch McConnell queasy.

Which may be one reason Schiff told Politico he thinks the whole idea is unnecessary.

“I would urge the president not to do that,” Schiff said. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”

Plus, the opinion via which Scott Perry protected many of the communications from his phone was signed by Karen Henderson, Greg Katsas, and Neomi Rao, the latter of whom are Trump appointees.

The same is true for Jack Smith (or Jay Bratt, whom Republicans also want to target). As prosecutors, they have broad immunity for their actions. That may have its drawbacks. But a whole lot of people who would be reporting to Pam Bondi have a lot invested in defending them.

If you pardon the easiest, highest profile, easily defended targets, you’ll leave weaker targets unprotected.

It would forestall the long overdue defense of rule of law

There’s this fantasy — assisted by shoddy legacy media coverage — that this kind of retaliation didn’t happen in the first Trump Administration.

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page would beg to differ with you.

Andrew McCabe would beg to differ with you.

Marie Yovanovitch would beg to differ with you.

Alexander Vindman would beg to differ with you.

Michael Cohen would beg to differ with you.

Michael Sussmann would beg to differ with you.

Igor Danchenko would beg to differ with you.

Dis- and misinformation researchers would beg to differ with you.

51 spooks who exercised their First Amendment rights would beg to differ with you.

John Bolton would beg to differ with you.

Hunter Biden would beg to differ with you.

Some of these cases got a lot of attention. Michael Cohen has done a superb job of making himself the center of attention; he knows what he’s dealing with. Many got the wrong kind of attention; certain outlets sent rabid packs of 20 journalists to cover the Hunter Biden legal case, without sending a single journalist interested in rule of law.

But Trump’s efforts have been most successful when they didn’t, when all the same people screaming we need to do pardons looked away.

What this moment requires is not a magical pony, some gimmick that will protect the strongest targets while ceding moral high ground, but a return to the work of actually defending rule of law day to day, especially those who are easy to isolate or demonize. This moment also requires actual journalism. I shouldn’t be the only one who cares about Hunter Biden’s due process rights more than his ickiness.

And yes, I realize that means that people will continue to get hurt, just as they’ve been getting hurt going back to 2017. Trust me, like many other people, I’m doing my own risk mitigation for the days ahead.

Pardoning the highest profile likely current targets of Trump capitulates to Trump’s narrative that there is no rule of law, there’s just one party against another. Instead defending the conduct of the people Trump targets takes a lot more work, a lot more courage. But without that work, Trump has won the fight.

Mark Milley’s defense of the Constitution

For most of the targets in question, the story you’d tell would be precisely the one Trump wants you to tell. If you pardon Cheney and Schiff because they investigated Trump, for example, you condone his narrative that that’s a crime.

It’s not.

If you pardon Fauci because he made difficult health insurance according to the best — albeit imperfect — science, you condone the pack of cranks Trump plans to install in every health-related agency.

But Mark Milley is different.

He’s different because the reason why Republicans would target him is that he upheld the Constitution, rather than Trump.

He’s different because he did something crucial — reaching out to his counterparts overseas to deescalate threats of nuclear catastrophe. Republicans want to spin that vital work as treason.

He’s different because a prosecution of Milley will be used as an excuse to deprofessionalize the military officer corps.

And he’s different because Trump might try to target Milley via military justice or might seek penalties not on the table for his other targets.

I don’t know if Milley wants that protection or if, like Schiff, he would prefer to defend his own actions. That’s his business.

The point though is nothing Biden can do will eliminate the risk that Trump will keep doing what he has been doing for eight years. Someone or someones will be that target, and imagining we can make that risk go away, it’ll only lead people to look away again instead of giving the attention the focus that it has lacked.

If we don’t find the solution to that problem, if we seek instead a quick fix, then it’ll get continually harder to defend rule of law as Trump stacks the courts and guts the guardrails at DOJ.

You can’t pardon your way out of Trump’s attack on rule of law. It’s going to take much harder work than that.

Update: Ian Millhiser makes the same argument about the inefficacy of pardons, noting as well that pardons can’t prevent lawsuits or state retribution.

Devlin Barrett Makes Shit Up about Hunter Biden, Again

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Because I want to address how we move forward when both law and journalism will increasingly fail to tell the truth, I want to address this weird 3-paragraph Devlin Barrett … um, blog post? … that NYT chose to publish earlier this week. Devlin picks a big ol’ straw man and carries it across the line for his right wing fans.

Here’s how it works:

  • Headline: Judge Scuppered Hunter Biden Plea Deal, Not Political Pressure
  • ¶1: President Biden blamed “political pressure” for the collapse of Hunter’s plea deal
  • ¶2: The plea deal fell apart in spectacular fashion [linking this article] because Judge Noreika rejected the structure of the deal
  • ¶3: The collapse of the plea deal because of its structure “is a far cry from the president’s suggestion that the deal for Hunter Biden to avoid prison time and a felony conviction collapsed because of political pressure”

Now, as a threshold matter, Devlin oversimplifies what happened in the plea hearing, which I reconstructed here. Two things happened and Maryellen Noreika had two concerns. Yes, there was the way the plea deal (which she had authority to reject) invoked the diversion agreement (which Probation refused to sign after having previously approved it, and which Noreika repeatedly complained she should get to approve but legally should not). Devlin’s right that that was an issue, but Noreika’s complaints extended to areas she had no authority, the scope of immunity the government offered.

But there was also the confusion about the scope covered by the agreement. And that confusion arose because, after David Weiss’ First AUSA had told Chris Clark on June 19 that, “there was not another open or pending investigation” into Hunter, Leo Wise asserted at the July 26 hearing that there was an ongoing investigation, one he later suggested might pertain to FARA.

Don’t take my word for this, though: Here’s what the linked article that Devlin pretends backs his argument says:

Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump appointee, repeatedly informed the two sides that she would be no “rubber stamp.” She picked apart the deal, exposing substantial disagreements over the extent of the immunity provision.

Mr. Clark said the deal indemnified his client not merely for the tax and gun offenses uncovered during the inquiry, but for other possible offenses stemming from his lucrative consulting deals. Mr. Wise said it was far narrower — and suggested the government was still considering charges against Mr. Biden under laws regulating foreign lobbying.

Poor Devlin couldn’t even get the plea hearing right.

But the plea hearing is a straw man. Devlin gets there by misrepresenting what Joe Biden said about the prosecution.

Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted. [1] Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. [2] Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.

[3] The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. [4] Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.

[5] No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough. [my brackets]

Biden made these assertions:

  1. A false statement on a gun form is not normally charged unless there are aggravating factors
  2. Addicts who fail to pay their taxes usually can resolve that civilly (note: This is the claim to which Mark Scarsi, with merit, objected, partly because Hunter waited months after he filed to actual pay his taxes, and partly because Hunter also pled guilty to evading his 2018 taxes, not just failing to pay)
  3. The charges only came about after Republicans instigated them to attack him
  4. A carefully negotiated plea deal unraveled and “a number of my political opponents in Congress [took] credit for bringing political pressure on the process”
  5. No reasonable person can doubt that Hunter was singled out [the comment to which Scarsi objected to without merit]

Joe Biden made absolutely no claim about why the plea deal unraveled in the hearing!! Devlin simply made that up. Rather, Biden observed factually that “a number of my political opponents in Congress [took] credit for bringing political pressure on the process.” [my emphasis]

The words, “political pressure,” are about Republicans claiming credit, not about what led David Weiss to renege on the earlier assurances there was no ongoing investigation or led Noreika to complain about the scope of the diversion immunity (it remains unanswered what led Weiss to renege and what led Noreika to complain about the scope, much less what led Weiss to refuse to fix any of the flaws Noreika pointed out, but to instead ratchet up the charges).

And Biden’s opponents did take credit.

James Comer took credit that same day. Jason Smith took credit when David Weiss got Special Counsel status. The disgruntled IRS agents claimed credit in … the very article Devlin linked.

“It appears that if it weren’t for the courageous actions of these whistle-blowers, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, Hunter Biden would never have been charged at all,” a team of lawyers for one of the I.R.S. agents said in a statement, adding that the initial agreement reflected preferential treatment.

Where Biden does say those same Republicans had a role in the case is in the charges being filed in the first place. “Several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them.”

The record is less certain on that claim. Hunter’s attorneys provided a bunch of evidence that Weiss equivocated throughout May and June 2023, as Republicans in Congress, Donald Trump, Bill Barr, and the disgruntled IRS agents claimed that prosecutors had stymied the investigation (a claim not backed by the very documents the IRS agents released).

But one place you might look to measure that claim is, again, the story Devlin claims backs his false claims. That story famously describes that Weiss told someone he didn’t want to bring any charges (which someone who might be Weiss “forcefully” denied).

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.)

It also describes, in a story about the pressure from House Republicans, how Weiss changed the terms he was willing to offer.

On Tuesday, May 23, after four days of silence, Ms. Wolf delivered unwelcome news. Mr. Weiss had revised what he wanted in the deal, now demanding that Mr. Biden plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes. It crossed a red line for Mr. Clark.

The article that Devlin links claiming it supports his incomplete representation of the plea hearing (the straw man Devlin uses to make false claims about what Biden said) actually supports both of Biden’s claims about political pressure: the pressure led to charges in the first place, and those who applied the pressure claimed credit for killing the plea deal.

All Devlin did with that link is prove that Biden, not Devlin, made claims that match the public record.

And yet NYT published his little blog post as if it — and not the reported article which it claims to rely on — were true.

Judge Mark Scarsi’s Umbrage: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

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I think that Hunter Biden’s two prosecutions are gone. After he submitted notice of a pardon and David Weiss’ prosecutors complained, Judge Maryellen Noreika issued an order terminating all proceedings.

ORAL ORDER: Having reviewed the parties’ submissions (D.I. 272, 274, 276 ) and in the absence of binding precedent and whereas pursuant to the Executive Grant of Clemency signed by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on December 1, 2024, Defendant Robert Hunter Biden has been pardoned for, inter alia, the offenses for which a jury rendered a verdict in this case (D.I. 275 ), IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that all proceedings in this case are hereby terminated. ORDERED by Judge Maryellen Noreika on 12/3/2024.

Judge Mark Scarsi … did something else. He issued a blistering opinion suggesting Hunter’s pardon was partly defective (because the President issued the pardon through the day he issued it, suggesting it attempted to grant four hours of prospective immunity), but that he would terminate the case once someone from the Executive Branch gave him a certified copy of the pardon. Mostly, though, Scarsi accused President Biden of impugning him personally and rewriting history by claiming that Hunter was prosecuted only because he was Joe’s son.

According to the President, “[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.” But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President. (Order on Mots. to Dismiss 32–55); Mem. Opinion 6–19, United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN (D. Del. Apr. 12, 2024), ECF No. 99. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.

In short, a press release is not a pardon. The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.

This is why I would have preferred Biden not have pardoned his son — because I wanted these verdicts, including Scarsi and Noreika’s rulings that Hunter wasn’t selectively or vindictively prosecuted, to be appealed to judges less intemperate than Scarsi.

Not least because there are several problems with Scarsi’s rant.

First, Scarsi, Weiss’ prosecutors, and Noreika (in her original opinion) are all engaged in navel-gazing. All argued, to one degree or another, that this prosecution could not be political because Biden and his selected Attorney General oversaw it. There were enormous problems with that argument: the degree to which Biden’s adversary was permitted to elicit threats against the prosecutorial team, the unwise retention of David Weiss for a second term, the role that Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to criminally frame Joe Biden played in David Weiss’ decision to first obtain Special Counsel status and then ratchet up charges against Joe Biden’s son. But ultimately, prosecutors argued and judges adopted the claim that because Joe Biden was in charge, the prosecution could not have been political.

But since all that went down, John Roberts rewrote history and vested all the authority over prosecutions in the executive power of the President.

Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1

[snip]

The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.

Under Roberts’ logic, if the President, exercising his executive authority at its zenith, deems this prosecution political, then it was.

Moreover, Scarsi wildly misrepresents the nature of Biden’s comment. The legal opinions that Scarsi cites address whether Hunter’s case met the very narrow legal definitions of selective or vindictive prosecution, as he himself laid out.

Proving selective prosecution “is particularly demanding.” Reno v. Am.-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm., 525 U.S. 471, 489 (1999). Because “[a] selectiveprosecution claim asks a court to exercise judicial power over a special province of the Executive,” “in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, courts presume that [prosecutors] have properly discharged their official duties.” Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 464 (internal quotation marks omitted).

[snip]

“Particularly when a vindictiveness claim pertains to pretrial charging decisions, the Supreme Court urges deference to the prosecutor. Deference is appropriate for pretrial charging decisions because, ‘in the course of preparing a case for trial, the prosecutor may uncover additional information that suggests a basis for further prosecution.’” United States v. Brown, 875 F.3d 1235, 1240 (9th Cir. 2017) (citation omitted) (quoting Goodwin, 457 U.S. at 381). “[J]ust as a prosecutor may forgo legitimate charges already brought in an effort to save the time and expense of trial, a prosecutor may file additional charges if an initial expectation that a defendant would plead guilty to lesser charges proves unfounded.” Goodwin, 457 U.S. at 380. Thus, “in the context of pretrial plea negotiations vindictiveness will not be presumed simply from the fact that a more severe charge followed on, or even resulted from, the defendant’s exercise of a right.” Gamez-Orduno, 235 F.3d at 462 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted).

Deference to the prosecutorial decision to bring charges, notwithstanding significant pretrial negotiations between the parties to avoid them, is warranted.

Of course, once you adopt Roberts’ logic, then if the President overrides the original prosecutorial judgment of prosecutors, then his view must hold sway. If President Biden says the decisions were unfair, then they were.

Sure. That’s wildly problematic. Welcome to Roberts’ Calvinball.

But as Barb McQuade laid out, whether a prosecutorial decision meets the very narrow definition of selective or vindictive prosecution and whether a prosecution was an unwise exercise of prosecutorial discretion are two different things.

I disagree with McQuade about whether there was evidence of selective or vindictive prosecution. After all, as I noted, Scarsi misrepresented what the record on the comparator of Roger Stone said. Again, that’s why I wanted these cases to be appealed.

But it is also the case that a whole series of events related to this prosecution — Trump’s demand for such an investigation from both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and publicly, DOJ’s laundering of dirt Trump’s personal lawyer obtained, including from a known Russian agent, into this case, efforts by Trump’s debate guest to introduce misleading evidence into this investigation, the way a key witness in the gun case leaked information to affect the 2020 election, and Bill Barr’s subsequent pressure for a prosecution — that were excluded from both judges’ rulings altogether. Both judges simply ignored that David Weiss reneged on his assurances to Hunter’s team that there was no ongoing investigation before he entered into the deal, a detail that was central to any vindictive prosecution analysis. Neither judge addressed how Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to criminally frame Biden himself played into the prosecutorial decisions (I am not sure that was formally before Scarsi, though it was before Noreika).

So while it is a fact that two judges credited the arguments made by prosecutors whose claims Biden has now overridden on the selective and vindictive prosecution issue, it is also a fact that a great deal of evidence of politicization was excluded from all consideration. Biden’s judgment incorporated a great deal of things specifically and surgically excluded from the selective and vindictive prosecution analysis.

Finally, though, there are the ways that Scarsi himself rewrote history to get to his selective and vindictive prosecution decision.

As I laid out here, Scarsi made much of errors that Abbe Lowell made in his selective and vindictive prosecution argument. For example, after pointing out that Lowell misquoted coverage of David Weiss’ comments about threats elicited by political pressure on the case, Scarsi simply ignored the role of threats on prosecutorial decisions, because those “significant threats” were not publicly described as death threats. Importantly, as Noreika did in her opinion, after (correctly) catching Lowell misstating the timeline, Scarsi himself fiddled with the timeline so as to permit himself only to look at the prosecutorial decision in December 2023, not the decision to renege on the plea agreement in June and July 2023.

Scarsi’s treatment of this passage from Hunter’s motion deserves closer consideration:

Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to the tax misdemeanors, but when the plea deal was made public, the political backlash was forceful and immediate. Even before the Delaware court considered the plea deal on July 26, 2023, extremist Republicans were denouncing it as a “sweetheart deal,” accusing DOJ of misconduct, and using the excuse to interfere with the investigation.13 [2] Leaders of the House Judiciary, Oversight and Accountability, and Ways and Means Committees (“HJC,” “HOAC,” and “HWMC,” respectively) opened a joint investigation, and on June 23, HWMC Republicans publicly released closed-door testimony from the whistleblowers, who, in the words of Chairman Smith, “describe how the Biden Justice Department intervened and overstepped in a campaign to protect the son of Joe Biden by delaying, divulging and denying an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes.”14 Then, one day before Mr. Biden’s plea hearing, Mr. Smith tried to intervene [4] to file an amicus brief “in Aid of Plea Hearing,” in which he asked the court to “consider” the whistleblower testimony.15

13 Phillip Bailey, ‘Slap On The Wrist’: Donald Trump, Congressional Republicans Call Out Hunter Biden Plea Deal, USA Today (June 20, 2023), https://www.usatoday.com/.

14 Farnoush Amiri, GOP Releases Testimony Alleging DOJ Interference In Hunter Biden Tax Case, PBS (June 23, 2023), https://www.pbs.org/.

15 United States v. Biden, No. 23-mj-00274-MN (D. Del. 2023), DE 7. [brackets mine]

Here’s how Scarsi treats this passage laying out what happened between the publication of the plea and the failed plea hearing:

The putative [sic] plea deal became public in June 2023. Several members of the United States Congress publicly expressed their disapproval on social media. The Republican National Committee stated, “It is clear that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is offering Hunter Biden a sweetheart deal.” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform, “The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket.’” Phillip M. Bailey, ‘Slap on the wrist’: Donald Trump, congressional Republicans call out Hunter Biden plea deal, USA Today (June 20, 2023, 11:17 a.m.), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/06/20/donald-trump-republicans-react-hunter-biden-plea-deal/ 70337635007/ [https://perma.cc/TSN9-UHLH]. 28 On June 23, 2023, the Ways and Means Committee of the United States House of Representatives voted to publicly disclose congressional testimony from the IRS agents who worked on the tax investigation. Jason Smith, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, told reporters that the agents were “[w]histleblowers [who] describe how the Biden Justice Department intervened and overstepped in a campaign to protect the son of Joe Biden by delaying, divulging and denying an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes.” Farnoush Amiri, GOP releases testimony alleging DOJ interference in Hunter Biden tax case, PBS NewsHour (June 23, 2023, 3:58 p.m.), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/gop-releases-testimony-alleging-dojinterference-in-hunter-biden-tax-case.29 One day before the plea hearing in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, Mr. Smith moved to file an amicus curiae brief imploring the court to consider the IRS agents’ testimony and related materials in accepting or rejecting the plea agreement. Mem. of Law in Support of Mot. for Leave to File Amicus Curiae Br., United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-mj-00274-MN (D. Del. July 25, 2023), ECF No. 7-2; Amicus Curiae Br., United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-mj-00274-MN (D. Del. July 25, 2023), ECF No. 7-3.30

28 This source does not stand for the proposition that “extremist Republicans were [1] . . . using the excuse to interfere with the investigation.” (Selective Prosecution Mot. 5–6.) Of Mr. Weiss, Mr. Trump also wrote: “He gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence. . . . Maybe the judge presiding will have the courage and intellect to break up this cesspool of crime. The collusion and corruption is beyond description. TWO TIERS OF JUSTICE!” Ryan Bort, Trump Blasts Prosecutor He Appointed for Not Giving Hunter Biden ‘Death Sentence,’ Rolling Stone (July 11, 2023), https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-suggests-hunter-bidendeath penalty-1234786435/ [https://perma.cc/UH6N-838R].

29 This source does not stand for the proposition that several leaders of house committees “opened a joint investigation.” (Selective Prosecution Mot. 6.) [3]

30 The docket does not show that the Delaware district court resolved the motion, and the Court is uncertain whether the court considered Mr. Smith’s brief. [brackets mine]

First, Scarsi uses an ellipsis, marked at [1], to suggest the only reason Lowell cited the USA Today story was to support the claim that Republicans moved to intervene in the investigation, when the sentence in question includes three clauses, two of which the story does support. The sentence immediately following that three-clause sentence [2] makes a claim — OGR, HWAM, and HJC forming a joint committee, that substantiates that claim. Scarsi’s complaint at [3] is not that the cited article does not include Jason Smith’s quotation; rather, it’s that Lowell has not pointed to a source for the formation of a joint investigation (a later-cited source that Scarsi never mentions does include it). Meanwhile, Scarsi applies a measure — whether Judge Noreika considered Smith’s amicus, not whether he tried to file it — that Lowell doesn’t make (and which is irrelevant to a vindictive prosecution motion, because Noreika is not the prosecutor); Smith did succeed in getting the amicus unsealed, including the exhibits that Hunter claimed include grand jury materials. Whether or not Judge Noreika considered the content of the amicus, that Smith filed it is undeniable proof that Smith tried to intervene, which is all Hunter alleged he did.

Meanwhile, Scarsi relegates Trump’s Social Media threats — which Scarsi later corrects Lowell by noting that they came during precisely this period — to a footnote.

Here’s one thing I find most interesting. Scarsi’s two most valid complaints about Lowell’s filing are that, in one part of his timeline but not another, he misrepresented Trump’s pressure as happening after the plea failed, and that Lowell claimed that Weiss testified he had gotten death threats when instead the cited source (and the Weiss transcript I assume Lowell does not have) instead say that Weiss feared for his family. He acknowledges both those things: Trump attacked Weiss, and Weiss got threats that led him to worry for the safety of his family.

But he never considers Weiss’ fear for his family’s safety in his consideration of what happened between June and July. He never considers whether those threats had a prejudicial [e]ffect on Hunter Biden.

And aside from that correction regarding the safety comment, nor does Scarsi consider the most direct aspect of Congress’ intervention in the case — that Congress demanded Weiss testify, and he did so just weeks before he filed the charges actually before Scarsi.

In other words, Scarsi accuses Lowell of making a post hoc argument, claiming that he is simply pointing to prior events to explain Weiss’ subsequent actions. Except he ignores the impact of the two most direct allegations of influence.

And in Scarsi’s own fiddling with the timeline, he found a way to ignore how Donald Trump’s threats and direct intervention by Congress may have infected the decision to renege on the plea deal, and instead focused solely on the later decision to indict.

We’re in a post-truth world and Scarsi’s intemperate rant will certainly get the attention of those looking for Trump judges to promote.

But the fact of the matter is that Scarsi did precisely what he accuses the President of, rewriting the history of the Hunter Biden prosecution.

Joe Biden Pardons Hunter

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According to NBC, in the face of Trump’s vows of retaliation, Biden has changed his mind about pardoning his son.

President Joe Biden has decided to issue a pardon for his son Hunter and is expected to announce it Sunday night, according to a senior White House official with direct knowledge of the decision.

The decision marks a reversal for the president, who has repeatedly said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence. The pardon comes ahead of Hunter Biden’s Dec. 12 sentencing for his conviction on federal gun charges. Hunter Biden also is set to be sentenced in a separate criminal case on Dec. 16, after pleading guilty in September on federal tax evasion charges.

Such a pardon would still be insufficient to protect Hunter against the ongoing witch hunt into him — there’s the referral of the false claims claim from the House, for example.

Update: Here’s Biden’s statement. As I suspected, NBC’s view of the pardon was too narrow. It covers any crimes committed before today.

Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted. Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.

The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.

For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.

ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN

A Full and Unconditional Pardon

For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions) by Special Counsel David C. Weiss in Docket No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware and Docket No. 2:23-CR-00599-MCS-1 in the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF I have hereunto signed my name and caused the Pardon to be recorded with the Department of Justice.

As a reminder, here’s LOLGOP’s Ball of Thread on Rudy’s role in setting Hunter Biden up.

Update: Abbe Lowell has filed a notice of pardon in both Delaware and Los Angeles.

Ball of Thread: Rudy’s Hunter Biden Witch Hunt

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Nicole Sandler and I are taking another week off. But LOLGOP finished the next installment of our Ball of Thread series — this one tracing Rudy Giuliani’s effort to frame Joe Biden.