Category: insider corruption

Categories
insider corruption national politics & policies partisanship

A Very Special Prosecutor

Hunter Biden, swamp, Washington DC, investigation, law, crime

You don’t send a salamander to put out a fire or a leech to drain a swamp. Similarly, you don’t appoint David Weiss as a special counsel to “investigate” the Hunter Biden case. 

Not if you want justice.

Weiss, who has been on the case since 2017, was responsible for the cushy plea deal that fell apart last month, in court. It was a novel, first-of-its-kind offering of immunity to all future prosecutions for unspecified charges. When pressed in court, the prosecutors had to admit it was “unprecedented.”

And the judge had to throw it out.

Now, with U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointing Weiss as special counsel, the questions mount:

  • Why Weiss — considering his track record?
  • What additional powers does he have — considering the AG’s past assurances that Weiss had everything he needed?
  • And why now?

To answer that last query, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) admitted on ABC’s This Week — amidst many accusations against former President Donald Trump — that Hunter Biden “did a lot of really unlawful and wrong things” and that Mr. Weiss, “with the collapse of the plea agreement that he had apparently worked out with Hunter Biden,” now “wants to be certain that he’s got the authority to go bring charges wherever he wants.”

Which only further begs the question. Weiss says he didn’t ask for it. And if he in fact lacked what was needed, why didn’t Garland give it before?

What’s really going on?

“The Biden Justice Department is trying to stonewall congressional oversight,” explains House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), “as we have presented evidence to the American people about the Biden family’s corruption.”

And as Jonathan Turley, the renowned George Washington University law professor, adds, “The initial impact is to insulate Weiss from calls for testimony before Congress.”

Republicans are looking this Democrat gift horse in the mouth. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption national politics & policies term limits

Nineteen Seconds and Counting

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

We witnessed the epitome of uber-experienced Washington, last week, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) froze mid-sentence during a press briefing, unable to utter a sound or make any movement for a seemingly interminable 19 seconds. 

The Republican leader, 81 years of age, the last 38 spent in the United States Senate, was eventually rescued by fellow Republican senators, led away from the microphones.

McConnell has plenty of company in Washington. There’s our doddering octogenarian president. And in Congress, incumbency leads to longevity, which leads to old age. The Senate, Newsmax notes, now “has the highest median age in U.S. history at 65.”

Americans were treated to another gerontocratic spectacle with 90-year-old Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), appearing confused at a committee hearing, and being told to vote “aye.” 

And sheepishly complying. 

I started to write, “If this is what experience leads to . . .” but there is no need for the “if.” It is.

And grist for a million memes. “Family Torn Between Placing Grandpa In Hospice,” runs a Babylon Bee headline, “And Having Him Run For Senate.”

Funny, sure. But this problem isn’t. Getting old isn’t always pretty. And even career politicians such as McConnell and Feinstein deserve better.

So do ‘We, the People’! 

Term limits would solve the problem and be better than age limits. Both are popular — 75 percent favor age limits, while over 80 percent want term limits. But with Congress having dodged the congressional term limits enacted in 24 states back in the 1990s, citizens in North Dakota, with help from U.S. Term Limits, have launched a ballot initiative for 2024 to place an age limit of 80 on their federal representatives.

Three decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly struck down state-imposed term limits, 5-4. Today, what will the High Court determine on age limits?

Inquiring minds want to know. And I really love the movement’s relentless agitation!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment insider corruption judiciary

Not Having It

Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, classified files, race, racism

U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika is not having it, as yesterday’s headlines indicate. The super-lenient “deal” that Hunter Biden’s lawyers made with the Department of Justice to let the president’s son off with barely a scrape stinks.

And she’s not signing off on it.

But there is a hitch, which Reason summarizes in its title to Jacob Sullum’s coverage: “Hunter Biden Shouldn’t Go to Prison for Violating an Arbitrary Gun Law.”

And Sullum is right. Sort of. 

And wrong. Really.

The letter of the law that Hunter most definitely ran afoul of is, as Sullum argues, definitely ill-advised and almost certainly unconstitutional. And, to add cream to the jest, had Hunter committed his lying infraction a little later, after his father signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act last year, he would have been in even deeper doo. 

“The fact that President Joe Biden stubbornly defends a policy that could put his own son behind bars,” Sullum concludes, “should not blind us to the injustice that would entail.”

True, but it’s not just about gun laws. It’s tax law, too, that Hunter defied.

The real problem, of course, is that Hunter Biden was engaged in an uber-corrupt shake-down operation — with his family, including his father — leveraging his father’s position in government. Letting Hunter off with a wrist-slap onlesser charges, allowing the statute of limitations to expire on various crimes, bestowing wide immunity, also lets President Biden andthe whole crime family off, thereby keeping a lid on a corruption scandal that makes Teapot Dome look like a child’s tea party.

Besides, shouldn’t the children of politicians be prosecuted to the fullest extent of their parents’ laws?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
incumbents insider corruption judiciary term limits

Term Limits for Thee

Nancy Pelosi, term limits, gerontocracy

Last Sunday, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, now with her own MSNBC program, asked Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) about packing the Supreme Court. 

Rep. Pelosi’s response was, shall we say, telling.

“It’s been over 150 years since we’ve had an expansion of the court,” Pelosi said. “It was in the time of Lincoln that it went up to nine. So the subject of whether that should happen is a discussion. It’s not, say, a rallying cry. But it’s a discussion.”

Ms. Psaki also asked about term limits for the justices, and Nancy eagerly endorsed the idea, insisting there “certainly should be term limits. There certainly should be and if nothing else, there should be some ethical rules that would be followed.”

Justices aren’t getting as rich as congressmen . . . but still.

“I had one justice tell me he thought the other justices were people of integrity, like a Clarence Thomas,” Pelosi went on. “I’m like, get out of here.”

This plays as comedy off the MSNBC channel, of course. Nancy Pelosi, introduced by Psaki as being in Congress for a long, long time (“first elected to the House when Roe v. Wade had been the law of the land for 14 years”) is herself a fit poster ch — er, octogenarian — for establishing legislative term limits. Highlighting the High Court’s dip in popularity, Pelosi scoffed that the 30 percent approval “seemed high.” Of course, congressional approval is ten percentage points lower, and has been consistently. 

Limits to power is something that applies to others, not oneself, I guess.

With permanent leaches at the teat of the State lingering year after year in office, like Pelosi, our attitude should be, like, get out of here.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption partisanship

The Precedentedness of It All

Washington, D.C., corruption, politicians, deep state

When Democrats impeached President Donald Trump for pushing Ukrainians to look into Hunter Biden’s Burisma deal, the outcry was Orange Man is prosecuting his political rival! The enormity! The unprecedentedness of it all!

Now, Trump is being prosecuted for mishandling classified documents upon leaving office, and only Republicans cry “prosecution of a political rival!”

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden just received something close to mere admonishment for his not paying taxes on his loot. And no charge for lying on a federal gun application. The Administrative State favors its own.

“The real difficulty, in my view, is trying to figure out how to hold people accountable for their conduct,” said former Special Counsel John Durham in his recent testimony to Congress. “It’s not a simple problem to solve.”

Durham was talkingabout the Russiagate panic that Democrats in government, media, and Congress exhorted for years. “If there was something that was inconsistent with the notion that Trump was involved in a ‘well-coordinated conspiracy’ with the Russians and whatnot, that information was largely discarded or ignored and I think, unfortunately, that’s what the facts bear out.”

Functionaries in the CIA, FBI and Department of Justice “investigated” — but merely to find evidence to bolster a pre-selected story that they could use to oust a president they did not like.

What to do?

Clean house: fire the worst offenders. 

Who can do that?

Any president could hire an Attorney General and directors of the FBI and CIA, each with broom in hand.

And Congress could actually do its job. You know, legislate in the public interest.

But we possess neither, and so we persist in the current stalemate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Big Guy, Little Guy

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ukraine

“Prosecutors are nearing a decision on whether to charge President Biden’s son Hunter with tax- and gun-related violations,” The Washington Post reports. 

Last October, the paper disclosed that, after a four-year investigation, federal agents had “gathered what they believe is sufficient evidence to charge him.”

Hunter Biden’s failure to honestly fill out the federal gun-purchase form, a felony, is punishable by up to ten years in prison. Poetically, that federal law, and penalty, was authored years ago by a certain U.S. senator from Delaware, his old man, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

The tax charges stem from Hunter’s massively lucrative business dealings with corrupt Ukrainian and state-connected Chinese companies — jobs for which Hunter seems to understand his main qualification was proximity to his pop, at that time Vice President of these United States, whom oligarchs and genocidal totalitarians desired to influence.

Both President Biden and his son Hunter deny they ever “discussed” Hunter’s business. But that explanation doesn’t fit even the rose-colored glasses vision of Joe Biden, family man. Plus, it is clearly and repeatedly contradicted by evidence of meetings and favors — and Hunter’s international trips on Air Force Two.

Hunter has complained bitterly about how much money he had to kickback to his father and in one deal records show Hunter asking specifically for 10 percent of proceeds to be held for “the Big Guy,” whom others have identified as his father.

Further, we have long known that Hunter has paid phone bills, house renovations and other expenses for his dad, without scaring up much interest amongst news outlets.

Now, two new whistleblowers emerge: 

  • The first, an IRS employee, tells House Republicans that the Department of Justice is engaging in “preferential treatment and politics” to block Hunter’s prosecution. 
  • The second whistleblower points to a document in the FBI’s possession alleging “a criminal scheme” where then-Veep Biden traded policy for payola from a foreign national.  

I would certainly like to hear more.

On Fox News Sunday, Juan Williams decried Republicans for “going after a relative and a child.”

Hunter is 53 years old. And this isn’t about young Hunter, but “the Big Guy.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts