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Special Counsel Indictment Looks Just As Bad For David Weiss As The Charged FBI Informant

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

On Thursday, Special Counsel David Weiss unsealed an indictment charging a longtime confidential human source (CHS) with making false statements. But it wasn’t Christopher Steele, the CHS who threw the country into turmoil for four years by peddling the fraudulent Steele dossier. Former CHS Stefan Halper, who helped further the Russia-collusion hoax, also wasn’t the subject of the indictment. Nor was CHS Rodney Joffe, who sought to destroy the Trump presidency with the Alfa Bank hoax.

No, it was the CHS who, on June 26, 2020, told his handler that the owner of Burisma claimed he had paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes in exchange for protection from being investigated by the Ukrainian prosecutor.

Thursday’s indictment revealed the name of that CHS for the first time — Alexander Smirnov — and alleged that Smirnov’s aforementioned statements, which were memorialized in an FD-1023 report, were false.

False Statements Allegations

Since news first broke of the existence of that FD-1023 last summer, House Republicans championed the CHS’s reporting as further evidence of Biden family corruption, while Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley focused on the Department of Justice’s apparent failure to investigate the veracity of the FD-1023 as part of their probe into Hunter Biden’s business affairs.

Weiss’s indictment presents a powerful case that Smirnov lied on June 26, 2020, when the CHS told his handler he’d had conversations with Burisma executives in 2015 and 2016: An investigation by Weiss’s team concluded Smirnov did not meet the Burisma executives until March 1, 2017, meaning the earlier conversations could not have occurred. The indictment references introductory emails that established the alleged accurate timing of events, as well as travel records of other individuals, which contradict Smirnov’s claims. That evidence, the special counsel’s office concluded, was sufficient to charge Smirnov with making false statements and creating a false record.

If Smirnov lied to his handler in June 2020 about his conversations with Burisma executives, the indictment is well deserved. Not only did Smirnov’s alleged lies violate the federal criminal statute that prohibits false statements, but they also proved especially damaging to society as a whole by interfering in the House’s impeachment inquiry.

The harm here is not merely that investigators wasted time chasing apparently false leads, or that Hunter and Joe Biden suffered from Smirnov’s allegedly false accusations, but also that Smirnov’s lies may overshadow the other unrelated — and substantial — evidence implicating the Bidens in a pay-to-play scandal, rendering it more difficult to obtain justice.

What About Other CHS Lies?

Smirnov, however, is but one CHS whose alleged lies have created havoc for our country.

Consider the lies peddled in the Steele dossier to our FBI. CHS Christopher Steele represented his sourcing as trusted, reliable, and well-placed when it was none of those things. That dossier led to the DOJ obtaining four unconstitutional surveillance warrants against an innocent American, resulted in our government spending millions investigating a hoax, and impaired the functioning of the Trump administration. Yet even after Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham referred the matter to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation, Steele reaped no consequences for the lies he sowed.

Then there was CHS Stefan Halper who, according to an electronic communication, told the FBI the Russian-born Svetlana Lokhova had “latched” onto Michael Flynn at a Cambridge academic gathering and then, after the dinner, “surprised everyone and got into [Flynn’s] cab and joined [Flynn] on the train ride to London.” Halper, however, never attended the dinner, so he could not have witnessed any of the happenings, and the supposed cab ride was completely fictional.

The FBI’s summary of his debriefing also memorialized Halper claiming Trump volunteer Carter Page asked Halper during a July 18, 2016, meeting whether he “would want to join the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser.” In an exclusive interview with The Federalist in 2020, however, Page, “unequivocally denied asking Halper ‘to be a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign.’”

Add to those two sources Rodney Joffe, the CHS who helped concoct the Alfa Bank hoax. That fairytale went that the Trump organization had a secret communication channel with Putin operating through the Russian-based Alfa Bank. Joffe peddled that tale to the FBI and, with the help of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, pushed the CIA to investigate this second Russia hoax just as the Trump presidency was beginning.

As I wrote in 2022: “Justice Won’t Be Served In SpyGate Without John Durham Investigating More Confidential Human Sources.” But alas, Durham’s investigation ended without any reckoning for Steele, Halper, or Joffe.

Weiss Must Go

While the double standard is infuriating, assuming the allegations against Smirnov are true, charges are eminently justified. Also justified? Impeaching David Weiss.

Thursday’s indictment established that no one in U.S. Attorney Weiss’s office investigated Smirnov’s serious claims against Hunter and Joe Biden until after Grassley released a copy of the FD-1023 on July 20, 2023. It would be over a month later before FBI investigators would speak with Smirnov’s handler about the FD-1023. And, according to the indictment, it was not until Sept. 27, 2023, that the FBI interviewed Smirnov. That timeline confirms the incompetence of Weiss in handling the investigation into Hunter Biden because in October 2020, Weiss’s Delaware office received “a substantive briefing” concerning the FD-1023 from the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office.

In the run-up to the 2020 election, then-Attorney General William Barr tasked then-Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney Scott Brady with screening evidence related to Ukraine. Last year, Brady testified before the House Judiciary Committee about that screening process, including how his team handled the FD-1023.

Brady explained the Pittsburgh FBI office sought to corroborate anything they could from the FD-1023, but he noted that his office lacked the authority to use a grand jury for the screening process. Brady’s team nonetheless succeeded in obtaining travel records of the CHS and “interfaced with the CHS’s handler about certain statements relating to travel and meetings to see if they were consistent with his or her understanding.”

What they were able to identify, Brady testified, was consistent with the CHS’s representations in the FD-1023. Additionally, the CHS was a longtime source for the FBI and considered “highly reliable” — something the indictment confirms given his length of service and the government authorizing Smirnov to commit crimes while operating as a CHS.

Brady further testified that his office had vetted the FD-1023 and the CHS “against known sources of Russian disinformation.” To conduct that analysis, his team worked with the Eastern District of New York. “It was found that it was not sourced from Russian disinformation,” Brady told the House Judiciary Committee.

Then when his team finished screening the FD-1023 and other evidence related to Ukraine, a Pittsburgh assistant U.S. attorney briefed Weiss’s office on the evidence, explaining how they had screened it, and noting they concluded it had “some indicia of credibility” and should be investigated further.

Thursday’s indictment of Smirnov suggests the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office sat on the FD-1023 for nearly three years, until after Grassley released a copy to the public. Instead, Weiss’s office offered Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea agreement, which fell apart only because the federal judge assigned to the case inquired into the strange arrangement that appeared to give Hunter Biden blanket immunity in a pretrial diversion agreement — something she had never seen before.

Special Counsel Weiss clearly knows how bad this looks because, in the indictment, he tried to spin the assessment into the FD-1023 as being closed out by the Pittsburgh FBI office, implying that is why his office did not conduct any further investigative steps.

“By August 2020, FBI Pittsburgh concluded that all reasonable steps had been completed regarding the Defendant’s allegations and that their assessment, 58A-PG-3250958, should be closed,” Weiss wrote. “On August 12, 2020, FBI Pittsburgh was informed that the then-FBI Deputy Director and then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States concurred that it should be closed.”

However, as former Attorney General Barr has made clear numerous times, the Pittsburgh office was merely charged with screening the evidence, and the investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.”

“On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”

No further investigation occurred, however. That alone should justify Weiss’s removal — and not merely for what he failed to do, but also because the country can’t trust that his special counsel team will follow all the leads, including the ones we don’t know about.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Joe Biden’s Classified Docs Provide More Evidence Hunter’s Pay-To-Play Was A Family Affair

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 12, 2024

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The special counsel report on Joe Biden’s unauthorized removal and disclosure of classified documents exposed much more than our president’s mental deficits and the breadth of his irresponsible handling of top-secret and classified information. The report revealed a close nexus between Hunter Biden’s influence peddling and his father’s responsibilities and access to intel during the elder’s term as vice president.

On Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur released the results of his investigation into the president stemming from the discovery of top-secret and classified documents at Biden’s D.C.-based Penn Biden Center, his private Delaware home, and the University of Delaware. While the specific details in the recovered documents remain unknown, the nearly 400-page report provided an extensive enough summary of the materials to confirm an overlap in the timing and topics of Joe Biden’s vice presidency and Hunter Biden’s “business” enterprises.

Ukraine Overlap

Appendix A of the report provided a table summary of the documents recovered. Many of the top-secret and classified documents concerned Ukraine during the time frame when Hunter Biden acted as an intermediary between Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and the vice president. Recall that Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee that in early March 2014, he met Zlochevsky while in Moscow. And soon after, he and Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, receiving $83,000 per month.

The following month, Hunter Biden sent Archer an email dated April 13, 2014 — one week before Joe Biden would travel to Ukraine and meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Referring to “my guys upcoming travels,” Hunter then elaborated on “22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s ‘destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk,’” according to the New York Post.

Among the material recovered from President Biden’s unauthorized storage locales were several top-secret and otherwise classified or confidential documents discussing Ukraine. One undated document discussed issues related to Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Another, dated Sept. 17, 2014, consisted of a “Memorandum for the Vice President from staff members, with subject ‘U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine.’” Also dated Sept. 17, 2014, was an “event memo” from a vice-presidential national security staffer, titled, “Lunch with Ukrainian President Poroshenko,” which was scheduled for the following day.

The overlap between Joe Biden’s Ukraine-related work and Hunter Biden’s Burisma profiteering became more pronounced in 2015. On Dec. 2, 2015, the lobbying firm Blue Star Group, which Hunter Biden had arranged to work with Burisma, wrote to Burisma that it had “participated in a conference call today with senior Obama Administration officials ahead of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine next week.” The memorandum provided a summary of the conference call, telling Burisma that “Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden’s Special Advisor for Europe and Russia, and Dr. Colin Kahl, the Vice President’s National Security Advisor, presented the agenda for the trip and answered questions about current U.S. policy toward Ukraine.”

Two days after receiving this memorandum, Burisma executives Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharskyi, on Dec. 4, 2015, pushed Hunter Biden to call his father. The Burisma executives, according to Archer, expressed concern over the pressure they were under from Ukrainian investigators.

Shokin’s Firing

During Biden’s visit to Ukraine the following week, the vice president threatened to withhold U.S. loan guarantees from the country unless the Ukrainian president fired the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. Shokin was later fired, and Biden bragged about his role in the termination.

Last week, the special counsel reported recovering documents classified as “secret,” dated circa Dec. 12, 2015, “setting forth the purpose and talking points for a call with Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk.” A transcript of the call between Biden and Yatsenyuk was attached, with a handwritten post-it note showing the then-VP had directed his executive assistant: “Get copy of the conversation from Sit Rm for my Records please.”

That transcript, labeled “CONFIDENTIAL” and “EYES ONLY DO NOT COPY,” according to the special counsel, included “pleasantries” exchanged between the two, “and the Prime Minister heaped praise upon Mr. Biden for his December 9, 2015 speech to Ukraine’s parliament.”

In that speech, Biden told Ukrainian lawmakers, “[I]t’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”

A Change in U.S. Policy

Biden continues to maintain that his demands to Ukraine to fire the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, represented U.S. policy. But that policy seemed to have made a sharp turn from just months earlier. For instance, according to the House Oversight Committee, in “June 11, 2015, then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland wrote Prosecutor General Shokin, applauding his office’s progress in anti-corruption efforts.”

Then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt would likewise publicly state in September 2015, “[W]e want to work with Prosecutor General Shokin so the [Prosecutor General Office] is leading the fight against corruption.” That same month, “the Interagency Policy Committee asserted Prosecutor General Shokin had made sufficient progress in combating corruption to warrant a third guarantee of a $1 billion loan,” according to House Oversight Chair James Comer.

As part of its impeachment inquiry, the House Oversight Committee has been seeking records to establish how American policy shifted from supporting Shokin to demanding his firing. And now that Special Counsel Hur’s investigation into Biden has ended, Comer is demanding “unfettered access to these documents to determine if President Biden’s retention of sensitive materials were used to help the Bidens’ influence peddling.” As Comer stressed, in addition to the Ukraine-related documents, top-secret and classified documents connected to China — another key source of Hunter Biden’s millions — were recovered.

Comer had previously asked Hur whether any of the classified records “were related to the countries that his family conducted business with,” but the special counsel’s office refused to provide details on the seized material. Comer told The Federalist that “[w]hile the Justice Department has closed its investigation, the Oversight Committee’s investigation continues.”

More to Probe

“Important questions remain about the extent of Joe Biden retaining sensitive materials related to specific countries involving his family’s influence peddling schemes that brought in millions for the Bidens,” Comer told The Federalist. “We will continue to provide the transparency and accountability owed to the American people.”

The key here, however, is not whether Joe Biden retained the documents to further Hunter Biden’s selling of access, but whether he shared details he had learned from his position as vice president with Hunter. Given the thousands of emails VP Biden exchanged using pseudonyms, the fact that he had no problem sharing classified information with his ghost writer, and that he has lied repeatedly about his involvement with Hunter Biden’s business affairs, it isn’t a stretch to believe he shared confidential information with his son to advance Hunter’s pay-to-play scheme.

But the special counsel’s report makes one more thing clear: Joe Biden will never face a jury — not because he is innocent, but because he lacks the mental competence. Attorney General Merrick Garland apparently concurred in that assessment, as he approved Hur’s report. So surely then, Garland, as a member of the Cabinet, is discussing with his fellow cabinet members, the need to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment… Right?

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Hunter’s Painting Foray Had All the Classic Earmarks of a Biden Family Influence-Peddling Operation

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JANUARY 19, 2024

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

Hunter Biden’s “Sugar Bro,” Kevin Morris, testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on Wednesday. A readout of Morris’ testimony, when considered in tandem with the testimony provided last week by Hunter Biden’s gallerist, suggests Hunter was setting up another front for the family influence-peddling racket when the plan collapsed due to public scrutiny.

On Thursday, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer issued a statement following the committee’s transcribed interview of Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris. In his press release, Comer revealed that Hollywood producer Lanette Phillips introduced Morris to Hunter Biden during a campaign event at her Los Angeles home for Joe Biden in the winter of 2019. One week later, Phillips called Morris to discuss what Morris apparently framed as an “entertainment” issue. Morris later visited Hunter at his home in L.A., according to the press release.

According to Comer, Morris testified he began providing money to Hunter Biden in January 2020. Then on Feb. 7, 2020, Morris emailed Hunter’s advisers and tax accountants, writing, “We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in.” Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden filed his long-overdue 2017 and 2018 tax returns, although he didn’t pay his hefty tax bill at the time. Around Oct. 18, 2021, Morris paid some $2 million in overdue taxes for the president’s son.

In addition to paying Hunter’s taxes, Morris also paid for many of his living expenses and bought 13 of Hunter Biden’s paintings — two from before Hunter retained a gallerist and 11 after, with Morris paying $875,000 for the set purchased from the gallerist.

The Gallerist

That gallerist, George Berges, testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last Tuesday concerning his knowledge of Hunter Biden’s profiteering from his newfound career as a painter. Berges, the owner of the Soho-based George Berges Gallery, told the committee that he served as the “gallerist” for Hunter Biden beginning in December 2020. As Hunter’s gallerist, Berges acted as the exclusive agent, selling Hunter’s paintings. In that role, Berges had firsthand knowledge of the money flowing into Hunter’s bank account from his newest business venture.

Berges’ testimony pales in comparison to some earlier witnesses who revealed details of Hunter Biden’s dealing with Burisma and Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business dealings. Yet, when studied in its entirety, the gallery owner’s testimony paints a picture of an attempt to launch a new enterprise to provide cover for a continuation of the Biden family’s pay-to-play scheme. Morris’ testimony this week adds further definition.

First, we have the gallerist’s testimony that Lanette Phillips also introduced him to Hunter in 2019, telling Berges that Hunter was an artist. Next, there is the fact that in December 2020, Hunter and Berges executed a contract appointing the gallery owner as his exclusive representative, with Berges receiving a commission of 40 percent on sales. That contract, Berges testified, included a provision that required the gallerist to disclose to Hunter the identity of the purchasers of his paintings.

As Berges explained, that was not a typical contract term; he had never included a similar clause in any of his other contracts. “Normally, the gallerist does not let the artist know who the collectors are,” Berges confirmed, adding that of the 15 or so artists he currently works with, none ask to know who purchased their artwork. Berges elaborated, stating, “It’s my collector base,” and you don’t want “your artists to circumvent you if they know your collectors.”

While the contract required Berges to tell Hunter the names of the purchasers, Berges explained during the interview that he never did, and because Hunter didn’t push for their identities, his instinct was not to share the information. Nonetheless, Hunter learned the names of several of the purchasers — for instance, Elizabeth Naftali.

Again, Lanette, the same Hollywood producer and Biden-booster who introduced Hunter to Morris and Berges, introduced Berges to Naftali. Naftali purchased two of Hunter’s paintings, the first in February 2021, shortly after his father’s inauguration. She later purchased another painting, spending a total of $94,000 for the pair.

During the committees’ questioning of Berges, they noted that on July 1, 2022, President Biden appointed Naftali to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. A committee lawyer added that while Joe Biden was vice president he had also arranged for Hunter Biden’s then-business partner Eric Schwerin to be appointed to the same board.

In addition to Naftali, Hunter Biden also knew the identity of Morris, who on Jan. 19, 2023, purchased, in the name of his LLC, Kuliaky Art, 11 paintings for $875,000. Berges explained that Morris had seen the paintings at Hunter’s exhibit in California in October 2021 and then negotiated the January 2023 sale with him by telephone.

Berges further explained that Morris did not pay the galley for the paintings, but instead paid Berges his 40 percent commission and then paid Hunter (or reduced his loan balance) separately.

Comer notes in his readout from the interview of Morris that it was only after he purchased those paintings from Hunter that he scored a visit to the White House. But there is a bigger smoke cloud surrounding those purchases than Joe Biden welcoming his son’s benefactor to the White House.

Something Doesn’t Add Up

Why would Morris purchase paintings from Berges at all? As Berges testified, the reason gallerists don’t share the names of their buyers with the artists is so they aren’t cut out of the deal. Morris, however, likely didn’t want to ruin Hunter’s relationship with Berges, Berges reasoned. But that doesn’t explain why Morris wouldn’t have purchased art from Hunter before he had a gallerist.

Here we run into an interesting detail: Morris testified he had purchased two pieces of art from Hunter Biden before he had a gallerist. Why then wait for Hunter to enter a contract with Berges before purchasing more art? And why wait until January 2023, when he saw the art during an October 2021 exhibit? (It is also noteworthy that Berges got the impression from Hunter that he had never sold any artwork before retaining him as a gallerist.)

Morris’ $875,000 represented a huge chunk of Hunter Biden’s total sales of $1.5 million. In fact, Morris’ purchase represented such an “outlier,” as Berges put it, that the Soho gallery owner hasn’t renewed his contract with Hunter and is considering dropping him as a client.

“I look at the totality,” Berges explained. “If I look at the whole picture of this artist objectively, I would say, okay, this is great that we got someone to do a major acquisition, but let’s look at the general response and what the value is.”

“It’s not that impressive,” he concluded.

Morris negotiating with Berges over the price of the pictures, however, sidesteps questions of whether he overpaid for the art to make a then-taxable gift to Hunter Biden. Morris’ purchase also creates the impression that his friend’s art is worth the high price Berges was asking, even though “the general response,” without Morris, was “not that impressive.”

One must wonder, though, if the lack of interest in Hunter’s high-priced paintings stemmed from the spotlight on what appeared to be the latest pay-to-play scam scaring off the target audience for the artist: those seeking favors or access to the now-president.

A Plan Foiled?

Without media coverage, it was a perfect plan: Hunter Biden reemerges as an artist and sends those he or his family want to shake down to Soho to buy his paintings from a gallerist who has independently set the prices of the paintings. Berges’ testimony indicates he is truly independent, for while he explained he has become friends with Hunter, much to his chagrin, he was forced to acknowledge donating multiple times to President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. Berges even hinted that he had voted for Trump and not his client’s father in 2020.

Hunter, in fact, even ensured he could learn the identity of the purchaser to confirm the transaction, although it soon became clear that wasn’t necessary; the buyer could just tell him or show him the artwork. But then the press got ahold of the story and, unlike the laptop scandal, this time they didn’t bury it. By the summer of 2021, the White House was forced to do damage control, claiming it was working on a deal with Hunter’s gallerist to ensure the identity of purchasers of his paintings remained anonymous.

Berges testified he was surprised to hear that from the White House since he had never spoken with anyone there about his contract with Hunter Biden. Nonetheless, at Hunter’s request, Berges removed the disclosure requirement and replaced it with a provision prohibiting the gallery owner from disclosing the identity of the purchasers. They then entered a new contract on Sept. 1, 2021.

Other than Morris’ large purchase last January, there seems to be little demand now for the paintings — leaving one to wonder if, without his target audience, Hunter’s art is as worthless as his board member skills.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Willfully Blind David Weiss Pinky Promises Political Favoritism Didn’t Affect Hunter Biden Probe

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | NOVEMBER 13, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

Politics absolutely, positively had no bearing on the Hunter Biden investigation, Delaware U.S. Attorney-turned-Special Counsel David Weiss assured the House Judiciary Committee last week. Yet Weiss also acknowledged it would be a “problem” if someone had warned Joe Biden’s transition team of FBI agents’ impending plan to interview the president-elect’s son, as whistleblowers say occurred. Weiss just didn’t bother to ask anyone about the leak or any other concerns of political favoritism, showing the federal prosecutor has opted for willful blindness over oversight of the Hunter Biden criminal probe — even after his appointment as special counsel.

On Tuesday, Weiss sat for an interview before the House Judiciary Committee. A transcript of Weiss’s testimony, which The Federalist has reviewed, shows the special counsel faced several questions about claims that political favoritism infected the Hunter Biden investigation.

But even before the questioning began, in a brief opening statement, Weiss declared that “political considerations played no part in our decision making.” Rather, the Delaware U.S. attorney, doing double duty as special counsel, assured the committee that “throughout this investigation, career prosecutors on my team and I have made decisions based on the facts and the law.”

Weiss repeated that mantra several times during questioning about specific steps his team took — or didn’t take — in the Hunter Biden investigation. “Again, I’m not going to comment on any aspect of the investigation or a prosecution, and from my perspective, the prosecutors who participated in this case followed the law and the facts. That was the motivation.”

Of course, that was Weiss’s “perspective” because, even after the IRS whistleblowers provided concrete examples of the politicization of the Hunter Biden investigation, the U.S. attorney buried his head in the sand rather than inquire about the veracity of the claims. The totality of Weiss’s testimony confirms this reality, but it is best exemplified in an exchange about the warning given to President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team that agents intended to interview Hunter Biden.

IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley had previously testified that the day before their Dec. 8, 2020 “day of action,” when agents planned to interview a host of relevant witnesses, he learned someone had tipped off Joe Biden’s transition team of the plans to interview Hunter Biden and another 10-plus witnesses. “This essentially tipped off a group of people very close to President Biden and Hunter Biden and gave this group an opportunity to obstruct the approach on the witnesses,” Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee.

The House Judiciary Committee asked Weiss if he knew “who made the decision to tip off the presidential transition team about the day of action, and that the investigators wanted to try to speak with Hunter Biden.” Weiss initially responded that it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to comment on the matter but that he would address the question in his special counsel report.

A Concerning Connection

However, additional questioning soon reviewed a concerning connection between the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office and the Biden transition team, in the person of Alexander Mackler, whom Weiss acknowledged had been one of his assistant U.S. attorneys from 2016 through about mid-2019. According to the committee’s questioning, Mackler had at one point served as Joe Biden’s press secretary, had been Beau Biden’s campaign manager during his reelection campaign, and from 2014-2016 served as deputy counsel to then-Vice President Biden. While Weiss testified, he knew Mackler had worked for Biden, he said he didn’t know many of those specifics. However, Weiss acknowledged learning that Mackler had been named to Biden’s transition team, although he said he couldn’t remember when or how he had learned of that fact.

The House Judiciary Committee then pushed Weiss on whether he or anyone else from his office had any communications with Mackler while he was working with the transition team. While Weiss stated he was “very confident” he “had no conversations” with Mackler about the latter’s work on the transition team or about the Hunter Biden case, Weiss said he had “no idea whether anyone else has spoken to Alex Mackler period or about the case.”

Weiss further testified that he was actually unaware of whether the transition team had been tipped off, as IRS whistleblowers claimed. But if so, Weiss confirmed it would be “a concern” and “a problem” and that “it shouldn’t happen.” Yet when pushed on what he would do to address the problem if he “found out that something like that did occur,” Weiss refused to answer the question, saying it was “a hypothetical” that he would not “speculate on” other than saying that “as a general matter, it’s problematic.”

Willful Blindness

On first blush, Weiss’s non-answers about the tip-off to the transition team seem like inconsequential, unhelpful responses that merely lead to a dead end. But Weiss’s acknowledged ignorance is explosive news: The man that Attorney General Merrick Garland named as special counsel to supposedly ensure independence in the investigation and prosecution of the president’s son failed to inquire of his team about whether someone had leaked to the transition team details about the impending questioning of Hunter Biden. In fact, according to Weiss, he didn’t even bother to confirm the tip-off had occurred — much less seek to determine who bore responsibility for the leak — even though he knew that a former Delaware assistant U.S. attorney served on the Biden transition team.

Weiss’s failure in this regard was not an aberration. Rather, throughout his House Judiciary Committee testimony last week, Weiss confirmed he has ignored the whistleblowers’ claims of politicization. For instance, when asked whether “any of the attorneys on your team, whether it’s a Special Counsel team or before the Special Counsel team was stood up, have any ties which you would consider close to the Biden family,” Weiss said he doesn’t “delve into those kinds of things,” but that he is “unaware of any such thing.”

Weiss’s failure to inquire about his staff’s relationship with the Biden family may have made sense initially but given the two whistleblowers’ detailed allegations of political favoritism, not asking some basic questions to ensure an unbiased staff is inexcusable.

Weiss’s failures extend much further, however, with his Tuesday testimony confirming he has not reviewed his staff’s handling of the investigation in light of the whistleblowers’ testimony that there were “politically-motivated decisions made in the Hunter Biden case.” Specifically, while Weiss acknowledged the whistleblowers’ claims, his responses to questions show he disregarded the claims without any inquiry. For instance, when asked, “If an investigator or prosecutor makes what is believed to be a politically-motivated statement or decision, how is that reviewed in your office?” Weiss responded that he was “not aware of such a situation.”

The House committee pushed the special counsel more on this point, asking: “For example, on the Hunter Biden case, if one of your assistant United States attorneys was exhibiting favoritism towards the Biden family or towards Hunter Biden, and that was brought to your attention, what would be the process to sort that out?”

“My office has no process or protocol for dealing with something like that. It’s not something we have engaged in, participated in, or that I have experienced,” Weiss countered. Weiss held firm under additional questioning, stating he was “not aware of any such reviews.”

“I’ve told you. I have no such process. We haven’t experienced it in our office,” Weiss insisted.

Head in the Sand

This testimony establishes that Weiss has done nothing to review his team’s handling of the Hunter Biden investigation for possible political bias, notwithstanding the whistleblowers’ detailed claims of such favoritism. No wonder then that Weiss can say he has confidence in his prosecutors and believes they acted “in a professional and unbiased manner without partisan or political considerations.”

Ironically, if this were a criminal case in which federal prosecutors needed to establish the defendant’s knowledge of some sort of “shady dealings,” the U.S. attorney’s office would seek what is collegially called the “ostrich instruction.” The “ostrich instruction” informs the jury that a deliberate effort “to avoid guilty knowledge is all the guilty knowledge the law requires,” and that a defendant who knows or strongly suspects “he is involved in shady dealings” cannot avoid criminal liability by making sure “he does not acquire full or exact knowledge of the nature and extent of those dealings.”

While there is no suggestion that Weiss is a co-conspirator in some criminal enterprise, he is similarly burying his head in the sand when it comes to the politicization of the Biden investigation exposed by the IRS whistleblowers and congressional oversight committees. Thus, his assurances that “political considerations played no part in our decision making” are meaningless.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Grassley’s Bombshells Show House Investigators Exactly Where to Aim Their Next Biden Subpoenas

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | NOVEMBER 09, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The chair of the House Oversight Committee issued a slew of subpoenas on Wednesday, including to Hunter Biden and James Biden. Additional subpoenas, as well as requests for transcribed interviews, were served on other Biden family members and business associates. These investigative steps are solid, but the House committees charged with the Joe Biden impeachment inquiry need to issue subpoenas for the witnesses and documents Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, not-so-subtly suggested late last month.

“I’ve obtained the names of 25 DOJ and FBI personnel to interview at a future date,” Grassley wrote in a late-October letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray concerning the latest details the Iowa senator uncovered related to obstruction of the Biden-family corruption investigation. While the House Oversight Committee is understandably focused on unraveling the extent of foreign influence-peddling, the House should not ignore the second half of the scandal: the DOJ, FBI, and now the Biden administration’s cover-up of the scandal and their cover-up of the cover-up.

Grassley has been focused on that aspect of the scandal for several years, raising concerns “about political considerations infecting the decision-making process at the Justice Department and FBI.” Having heard from several whistleblowers about the scope of the obstruction, Grassley has said that if their allegations are true, it would establish the DOJ and FBI have been “institutionally corrupted to their very core.”

The House has followed several leads Grassley developed. The most significant was related to the FD-1023 summary of a “highly credible” confidential human source’s (CHS) reporting that Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes, which Grassley released earlier this year.

More recently, Grassley revealed that the Foreign Influence Task Force used an assessment opened by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten to mine FBI field offices for derogatory information related to the Bidens. The FBI then falsely branded the derogatory information as Russian disinformation, closing out the sources. That revelation was but one of many contained in the seven-page letter the Iowa senator penned to the AG and FBI director on Oct. 24, noting he had a list of some 20-plus agents to interview.

The House committees charged with overseeing the impeachment inquiry need to dissect that letter for leads relevant to the investigation into Biden-family corruption and also to unravel the DOJ and FBI’s corruption.

Foreign Influence Task Force

Among other things, that letter revealed the complicity of the Foreign Influence Task Force in falsely branding the reporting of confidential human sources from several different field offices as Russian disinformation. As Grassley noted, it was also the Foreign Influence Task Force that “improperly briefed” him and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., about their investigation into the Biden family. That briefing served solely as a precursor to a media leak to spin the Republican senators’ investigation as contaminated by foreign disinformation.

Every member of the Foreign Influence Task Force should be questioned by the House, and every communication between the Foreign Influence Task Force, Brian Auten, and the various FBI offices involved in wrongly closing out sources should be subpoenaed. The House should likewise subpoena the materials made part of that assessment and especially any sources or reporting closed out as Russian disinformation.

FBI Field Offices

Here, Grassley helpfully highlighted in his letter several relevant field offices. In noting that the FBI tried to improperly shut down the FD-1023, Grassley emphasized that the claim that the CHS’s bribery report was Russian disinformation was “highly suspect and is contradicted by other documents my office has been told exist within the Foreign Influence Task Force, FBI Seattle Field Office, FBI Baltimore Field Office, and FBI HQ holdings.”

The House should focus its investigative efforts there first. The FBI Seattle field office is a new thread to pull, as it has not been previously raised as relevant to the Biden investigation. A review of the underlying FD-1023 also suggests the Cleveland FBI field office merits attention, as the CHS who reported on the alleged bribes to the Bidens noted that he was introduced to the Burisma executives by Alexander Ostapenko. And the FD-1023 included a notation that the CHS’s reporting on Ostapenko was maintained at the Cleveland field office.

In seeking materials from these field offices and the Foreign Influence Task Force, the House should ask for all records using the terms “Russian disinformation” or “foreign disinformation” from January 2019 to the present. Why? Because that is what Grassley asked the AG and FBI director to provide. And when the Iowa Republican asks for something, he usually knows precisely what the DOJ has secreted away.

DOJ and FBI Documents

Likewise, the House should seek the other documents Grassley identified in his October 2023 letter because the Republican-led House can follow up with subpoenas if the DOJ refuses to comply, whereas Grassley can’t. In total, the Iowa senator named 15 different categories of materials he sought from the DOJ and FBI, and the House should mirror those requests.

Of particular importance are the communications between the U.S. attorneys’ offices for the Western District of Pennsylvania and the Eastern District of New York relating to Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden, and the FD-1023, as the Eastern District of New York had apparently concluded the FD-1023 did not match any known Russian disinformation. Subpoenaing FBI reports dating to Jan. 1, 2014, and referencing Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden, or Joe Biden will likely also turn up relevant information.

Naming Names

In addition to subpoenaing these witnesses and the related documents, Grassley’s letter provides the names of several other individuals deserving of questioning. Significantly, the letter indicates that the individuals named had knowledge of Joe Biden’s potential complicity in his son’s money-laundering scheme. But Grassley also named individuals from FBI headquarters, the Washington field office, the Baltimore field office, Delaware FBI agents, and FBI management personnel.

Finally, the House should take note of Grassley’s repeated references to Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault and the various documents he requested that connect to Thibault. Those references should give House investigators pause because Grassley’s apparent focus on Thibault strikes an odd note given the tune Thibault played in his transcribed interview: that he was new to the job and was only on the periphery of decisions to close out sources.

Why then, would Grassley seek “[a]ll records derived from reporting on derogatory information linked to Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden, and their foreign business relationships that was overseen under the approval, guidance, and purview of ASAC Thibault from January 1, 2020, to his last day at the FBI”? And why would Grassley ask for a copy of “[a]ll opened and closed cases initiated by the Washington Field Office under the purview of ASAC Thibault that were ordered closed by ASAC Thibault and/or denied for opening by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and/or the United States Attorney Offices in the District of Columbia and Eastern District of Virginia”?

Grassley may not be able to force the DOJ and FBI to provide answers or those documents, but the House can — and it should, stat.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Follow $40,000 From Communist China Directly to Joe Biden’s Bank Account

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | NOVEMBER 01, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

Joe Biden received $40,000 from Chinese communists, funneled through his son and brother and their businesses, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer revealed Wednesday morning.

“Where’s the money?,” President Joe Biden quipped over the summer when asked by a reporter to comment on the House’s investigation into the bribery scandal swirling around his family. Comer continues to answer that question for the country, with a press release and video detailing the House Oversight Committee’s latest discovery from subpoenaed bank records that establish Joe Biden directly profited from his family’s influence-peddling.

A 12-page memorandum from the Oversight Committee’s staff to the majority members of the committee, which The Federalist has reviewed, details the latest development Comer summarized in his video and press release. The bottom line is a $40,000 check from Sara and James Biden’s personal checking account written to Joe Biden on Sept. 3, 2017, claiming to represent a “loan repayment.” But following that money upstream reveals it originated from the Chinese “business” partners Hunter Biden had threatened a little over a month earlier in a WhatsApp message.

Hunter Biden had sent that WhatsApp message on July 30, 2017, to Raymond Zhao, an associate of CEFC, the Chinese energy giant Hunter and James Biden began courting in 2016, while Joe Biden was vice president. After Joe Biden left office at the end of the Obama administration, according to one of Hunter Biden’s business partners, the Chinese communist-connected CEFC sent them a $3 million wire in March of 2017 as a “thank you” for the Bidens’ assistance in furthering their business interests.

But CEFC had committed to investing another $10 million, which an email recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop indicated would be used to form a joint venture. CEFC’s founder and chairman, Ye Jianming, was to hold 50 percent interest in the company, and Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, and some of their business associates would hold the other 50 percent. That email noted Hunter Biden would own a 10 percent interest in the holding company for “the big guy,” a moniker used for Joe Biden.

However, as of the end of July 2017, the $10 million cash infusion had yet to materialize, prompting Hunter Biden to text Zhao on WhatsApp, telling him to “Please have the director call me- not James or Tony or Jim- have him call me tonight,” with the “director” being an apparent reference to the executive director of CEFC, and James and Tony being business partners, along with Jim Biden. The text continued:

I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. I am very concerned that the Chairman has either changed his mind and broken our deal without telling me or that he is unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand. And now means tonight. And Z if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang (sic) or the Chairman I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. All too often people mistake kindness for weakness — and all too often I am standing over top of them saying I warned you. From this moment until whenever he reaches me. It I [sic] 9:45 AM here and i assume 9:45 PM there so his night is running out.

The Oversight Committee memorandum then detailed how in a WhatsApp message on July 31, 2017, Zhao responded, “CEFC is willing to cooperate with the family.” Hunter later followed up with a text to another CEFC associate, Gongwen Dong, stating, “The Biden’s [sic] are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnershipn [sic]. Please let’s not quibble over peanuts.”

The money soon began flowing, with Hunter Biden first opening a bank account on Aug. 3, 2017, for a new company, Hudson West III, which would serve as the joint venture between Hunter Biden and CEFC’s Gongwen Dong. Hunter Biden’s business, Owasco P.C., owned 50 percent of Hudson West III, and Dong’s company, Hudson West V, owned the other 50 percent.

On Aug. 8, 2017, financial records show Hunter Biden’s new business venture with CEFC received a $5 million wire from the CEFC-connected business Northern International Capital. That same day, Hunter Biden transferred $400,000 out of Hudson West III and into his corporation, Owasco P.C. From those funds, Hunter purchased a Porsche and transferred funds to other of his personal or business accounts.

Then on Aug. 14, 2017, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 from his Owasco account to the Lion Hall Group — the company owned by James and Sara Biden. Two weeks later, Sara Biden “signed a withdrawal ticket for $50,000 from the Lion Hall Group bank account,” and on the same day deposited that $50,000 into her and James’ joint personal checking account. Soon after, on Sept. 3, 2017, Sara Biden signed the $40,000 check payable to Joe Biden.

The House Oversight staff memorandum provides a clear narrative of these transactions and copies of the relevant bank records. The memorandum also added this graphic to further crystalize the money trail:

Significantly, the House memorandum also established that the $40,000 used to supposedly repay a loan to Joe Biden came solely from funds the communist China-connected CEFC paid to Hunter Biden to “cooperate with the family.” The House Oversight staff’s memorandum made that point clear by detailing, in addition to the flow of funds from CEFC to Joe Biden, the balances in the various accounts prior to the receipt of those funds.

For instance, before Sara Biden transferred $50,000 into their personal checking account from which they paid Joe Biden $40,000, their balance was $46.88. And before Hunter Biden transferred the $150,000 into the Lion Hall Group bank account, that account showed a balance of $1,964.62.

So, whether James and Sara Biden actually owed Joe Biden $40,000 is irrelevant because the money they used to repay the supposed loan came from the Chinese company that Hunter and James groomed to serve as the family cash cow during Joe Biden’s vice presidency. And CEFC only provided that capital after Hunter Biden — saying he and his father were sitting there trying to understand why the promised $10 million hadn’t yet materialized — threatened their Chinese counterparts.

It’s also interesting to note that the $40,000 Joe “the Big Guy” Biden received was exactly 10 percent of the $400,000 Hunter Biden received from CEFC.

With Wednesday’s release of a copy of the $40,000 check paid to Joe Biden, Comer has provided two examples of the now-president directly benefitting from his son and brother’s selling of his political influence. Earlier this month, Comer released evidence establishing James Biden paid Joe $200,000 in funds the president’s brother obtained from the since-bankrupted Americore.

Wednesday’s news, however, proves even more scandalous because the funds originated from individuals connected to the Chinese Communist Party who first partnered with Hunter and James Biden while Joe Biden was vice president — and the payment followed Hunter Biden’s threatening text message, which invoked his father’s name (and presence) and warned of his wrath.

But to Joe Biden apologists, this will likely remain “no evidence” of corruption.

This article has been updated since publication.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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7 Ways DOJ Obstructed The U.S. Attorney Investigating Biden Family Corruption

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | OCTOBER 27, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney charged with screening evidence of Ukrainian corruption before the 2020 election testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Monday about the bureaucratic obstruction his team faced. The roadblocks detailed by former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady over the course of the six-hour hearing were so outrageous that at one point a lawyer for the minority party asked whether he was speaking in hyperbole. He wasn’t.

The situation Brady faced was also much worse than the media have reported to date, as the full transcript of the interview, reviewed by The Federalist, establishes. Here are the seven most shocking details revealed during Monday’s hearing.

1. FBI Drags Its Feet While Tying Brady’s Hands

Monday’s closed-door hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the DOJ and FBI’s handling of the probe into Biden family corruption, opened with Brady explaining that in early January 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr tapped him to vet evidence related to Ukrainian corruption. While he immediately moved to open a matter in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Brady testified that he didn’t believe the FBI opened its assessment until late March. Part of the problem, Brady explained, was that the FBI maintained it had to operate under the framework of the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) and that there was no procedure for handling a vetting assignment such as Barr assigned to the Pittsburgh office.

So, as Brady explained, he had a discussion with the Pittsburgh FBI agents about “how, in their administrative process, it should be characterized.”

“I said, ‘Well let’s all sit together around a table and talk this out; could you please share with me your DIOG,’” Brady testified, explaining the DIOG “is the FBI’s bible for their processes and procedures.”

The local FBI agents told Brady that someone from FBI headquarters directed the local agents not to share the DIOG with the U.S. attorney’s office. Brady’s response, as he relayed to the committee, perfectly crystalized the madness: “I’m a presidentially appointed United States attorney. We’re on the same team, part of the Department of Justice. What do you mean you can’t share your DIOG with me?”

“That’s what we were told, so we can’t, sir,” the local Pittsburgh FBI team replied, in his telling.

And they never did share the DIOG with him, the former federal prosecutor testified, explaining he instead resorted to finding an older redacted version online, and then referenced those standards when discussing with the FBI team how to open the investigation.

2. 17 Approvals Needed — and That’s Not Hyperbole

The FBI eventually opted to open an “assessment” for the material on Ukraine provided by the Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney’s office. Under the DIOG, an “assessment” could only last for 30 days, after which it would need to be reauthorized. That meant every 30 days, the Pittsburgh FBI office needed to re-up the assessment, which normally wouldn’t be an issue, Brady testified, because a special agent’s immediate supervisor, a supervisory special agent (SSA) at the local field office could reauthorize an assessment.

But not in the case of the Ukrainian corruption vetting.

“In this case,” Brady testified, “it required 17 different people, including mostly at the headquarters level to sign off on it before the assessment could be extended.” Consequently, Brady explained, at times the FBI agents “had to go pens down sometimes for 2 or 3 weeks at a time … because they were still waiting on, again, on someone within the 17-chain signoff to approve.”

The ridiculousness of a 17-person approval was clear to even the Democrat attorney questioning Brady. After noting he had made reference to “17 layers of approval,” she asked: “Was that an actual number, or was that just hyperbole? Were there 17 boxes to check?”

“So it was our understanding, related by someone on the FBI team in Pittsburgh, that that was an actual number, that there were 17 approvals that were required to extend the assessment an additional 30 days.”

3. FBI Headquarters Had To Sign-Off on Everything.

Not only did more than a dozen individuals need to approve the renewal of the assessment, including many out of FBI headquarters, but Brady testified that FBI headquarters was required to “signoff for any investigative steps that FBI Pittsburgh was asked to take by” the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office.

Brady reiterated this point, testifying: “It was my understanding that they could not take any steps absent the approval, the review and approval of FBI headquarters, not just the leadership of FBI Pittsburgh.” And later, when asked to elaborate on challenges with the FBI, Brady noted: “It was my understanding that FBI headquarters had to sign off on every assignment, no matter how small or routine, before they could take action.”

This level of signoff by headquarters was not normal, Brady confirmed, noting that in his experience, even in a sensitive investigation, the investigation is usually contained within the field office, with an SSA approving requests, or maybe an assistant special agent in charge or on occasion even the special agent in charge. But never in his career had Brady seen anything like this.

4. FBI Reluctance in Investigating

The former U.S. attorney’s testimony also made clear the FBI was reluctant to assist their investigation.

“It was a challenging working relationship,” Brady noted, saying he believed “there was reluctance on the part of the FBI to really do any tasking related to our assignment … and looking into allegations of Ukrainian corruption broadly and then specifically anything that intersected with Hunter Biden and his role in Burisma.”

When pushed on where the problems originated, Brady said, “It was somewhere at FBI headquarters,” but he “had no visibility into where that choke point was.” But it was somewhere below the deputy director and principal assistant deputy attorney general because whenever the FBI refused to cooperate, forcing Brady to elevate the issue to FBI headquarters or the DOJ, the issues were resolved by the various high-level officials.

Unbeknownst to Brady, that also proved to be the case when it came to his office briefing the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office on the results of his assessment. Brady testified that he had been trying for some time to arrange a briefing with the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, only to learn later that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf had not wanted to take the briefing. IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley recently revealed that the meeting only came about after Main Justice ordered Delaware to meet with Brady’s team to be briefed on the results of their vetting.

5. FBI Headquarters Tells Pittsburgh Agents to Play Coy

“Reluctance” appears to be an understatement, though, as Brady further testified that a member of the Pittsburgh FBI team relayed that FBI headquarters had directed them “not to affirmatively share information” but rather “only to share information with [Pittsburgh] if we asked them a direct question relating to that information…”

That “is not typically how the investigative process goes,” Brady added.

That the FBI agents had directions only to share information with the U.S. attorney’s office if asked a direct question seems to explain Brady’s later testimony. The former U.S. attorney later testified that when the Washington field office discovered an older FD-1023 report that included a discreet statement mentioning Hunter Biden’s service on the Burisma Board, the Pittsburgh office requested to see the FD-1023. Apparently, relying on the FBI to convey relevant information to the prosecutors was not an option. In this case, that FD-1023 led to the confidential human source providing extensive additional information about the Bidens’ involvement and alleged bribe-taking from Burisma, so it is a good thing Pittsburgh asked to see the actual document.

When it came to the Hunter Biden laptop, however, Brady and his team of prosecutors didn’t know what they didn’t know, so they never asked whether the FBI had seized any of Hunter Biden’s electronic devices. With “don’t ask, don’t tell” being Delaware’s protect-Biden policy, the Delaware office opted against informing the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office of the existence of the laptop. Rather, Brady testified that he first learned of the laptop’s existence when the New York Post broke the story in mid-October.

6. Delaware Refuses to Play Nice

Not only did Brady testify about the challenges of working with the FBI, but he also faced issues with the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office.

“[I]t was regularly a challenge to interact with the investigative team from Delaware,” Brady testified. “There was no information sharing” or “very limited” information sharing, from Delaware. In fact, “at one point, the communication between our offices was so constricted that we had to provide written questions to the investigative team in Delaware, almost in the form of interrogatories, and receive written answers back,” Brady testified.

“This was very unusual,” Brady continued, noting that “typical U.S. attorney to U.S. attorney office communications, even on sensitive matters, is fairly clear and transparent.” “We’re all professionals,” Brady explained.

Yet, with Delaware, the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office had to resort to submitting a list of written questions to U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s team, which the Delaware prosecutors then responded to in writing, much as interrogatories are served on opposing parties in litigation.

Jim Jordan, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, asked Brady if he had ever seen anything like this during his time as an assistant U.S. attorney or U.S. attorney.

“Not where an office had to submit written interrogatories to another office for permission,” Brady said.

7. Lying About Brady

Another challenge he faced, Brady explained, was false representations being made to senior FBI leadership about what the U.S. attorney’s team was or wasn’t doing. “There was information that was being shared up that chain at the FBI that was incorrect,” Brady explained, and it rose all the way up to AG Barr.

Brady noted that while they resolved the issue, it presented an unnecessary challenge to handling the vetting process.

Of course, some of the same people likely used that same tactic by lying about the Pittsburgh vetting process to the press. And more recently, Democrats such as Jamie Raskin resorted to peddling falsehoods, such as that Barr’s handpicked prosecutor, Brady, had closed the assessment into the FD-1023.

During his Monday testimony, Brady also confirmed that Barr had accurately described the true scenario — that the FD-1023 had been passed on to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office for further investigation — and that Raskin was lying, at I reported here in The Federalist.

But what else could a Biden apologist do but lie — after whistleblowers exposed the DOJ and FBI’s obstruction and the evidence of the president’s corruption?

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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James Biden’s Role In The Biden Access-For-Hire Operation Shows It Was A Family Affair

BY: ELLE PURNELL | OCTOBER 04, 2023

Author Elle Purnell profile

ELLE PURNELL

VISIT ON TWITTER@_ETREYNOLDS

As the Biden family’s corruption scandals tumble out into the open, corporate media badly want you to think the only story here is about Hunter Biden, a struggling drug addict who may have made some unwise decisions while grieving the loss of his brother. The more evidence — from whistleblower testimony to documentation — of President Joe Biden’s involvement arises, the more frantically they shout “no evidence!” and insist the elder Biden was only involved to the extent that he loves his son and talks with his wealthy foreign friends about the weather.

But setting aside the evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in the access-for-sale scheme — of which there is an abundance — there’s another central figure in the operation. The participation of James Biden, Hunter’s uncle and Joe’s brother, shows just how much of a family affair the scandal is, with Joe Biden, the family’s “only asset,” at the top.

So what exactly do we know about James Biden’s involvement?

Payments from CCP-Linked Energy Firm

Chinese energy company CEFC, a state-backed firm that is “effectively an arm of the Chinese Government,” paid the Biden family and their associates millions — presumably for “access” to Joe Biden — funneling the cash through Robinson Walker LLC, an account run by Biden family associate Rob Walker. After receiving a $3 million payout from CEFC, Robinson Walker LLC wired two $50,000 payments to an account belonging to James Biden on April 3, 2017, another $120,000 on April 20, $125,000 on April 24, and $15,000 on May 18, bringing James Biden’s total receipt from CEFC in that exchange to $360,000.

Later, James also received money via his consulting firm, Lion Hall Group. “Between Aug. 14, 2017 and Aug. 3, 2018, [Hunter Biden’s company] Owasco sent 20 wires totaling $1,398,999 to the Lion Hall Group, a consulting firm that lists James Biden and his wife, Sara Biden, on the bank account,” Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley reported in 2020. The transfers started days after CEFC wired millions to Hudson West III, a joint venture between Hunter Biden and CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming, which began sending money to Owasco. After the transaction into the Lion Hall Group account was flagged “for potential criminal financial activity,” the bank “submitted the account for closure.”

In August 2017, around the time those payments started, James Biden was made a manager at Hudson West III, to be paid $65,000 a month.

Hudson West III also sent a total of $76,746 directly to Lion Hall Group in 2018.

On top of that, James, his wife Sara, and Hunter went on a $101,291 spending spree with credit cards opened by Hunter and Kevin Dong, who “served as ‘Chairman Ye[’s] CEFC emissary’ in the United States.” The three Bidens purchased “extravagant items, including airline tickets and multiple items at Apple Inc. stores, pharmacies, hotels and restaurants.”

Two years later, The Washington Post confirmed Johnson and Grassley’s discoveries, admitting “the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle.”

On Thursday, House investigators subpoenaed bank records for both Hunter and James Biden after additional records revealed “the Bidens and their associates have received over $20 million in payments from foreign entities.”

Meetings and Communication with Hunter Biden’s Foreign Associates

Documents released by the House Ways and Means Committee last week show dozens of WhatsApp communications involving James Biden, including direct communications between Hunter and James, as well as group messages between Hunter, James, and associates like Tony Bobulinski, Rob Walker, and James Gilliar, and group messages between Hunter, James, Kevin Dong, and Mervyn Yan, whom IRS investigators described as one of the “U.S. managers for CEFC related to the Hudson West entities” along with Dong.

On Aug. 27, 2017, Hunter Biden discussed a luncheon with Kevin Dong, telling him that James would be bringing Joe Biden along for an appearance. “My uncle will be here with his BROTHER who would like to say hello to the Chairman,” Hunter wrote.

On Sept. 27, 2017, James Biden messaged Hunter, Yan, and Dong that a meeting between them was “set” at “The Carlyle Hotel Madison Ave at 76th.” “We will meet you in the room, I’m here … Hunter will be arriving shortly,” James wrote. The following day, he sent details for a meeting at a Ritz Carlton in Atlanta to the same group.

In an interview with IRS investigators, James Biden admitted to attending a luncheon in Romania with Hunter, Walker, and Gilliar — a luncheon which James “understood … to be a side deal.”

He also told the IRS he had met with Chairman Ye Jianming of CEFC “once,” along with “the Director” (presumably CEFC Director Bo Zhang), in New York City at Hunter Biden’s request. James even showed Ye’s wife around the city, taking her to private schools where she might enroll her children, he told investigators.

Furthermore, when Patrick Ho — whom Hunter had described as the “spy chief of China” — was arrested by the DOJ for “his role in a multi-year, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC,” James Biden was his first call. (James claims to believe Ho was actually looking for Hunter.)

James’ Role in the ’10 Held By H for the Big Guy’ Email

In October 2020, the New York Post published a May 2017 email that was sent to Hunter Biden discussing “remuneration packages” that included a provision of “10 held by H for the big guy?” — whom involved parties have confirmed is Joe Biden.

The email described a “provisional agreement” splitting up “equity” in an unnamed venture, with numbers indicating percentages. Twenty percent each would go to people identified as H, RW, JG, and TB — abbreviations that correspond, the Post noted, to the names in the email thread: Hunter, Rob Walker, James Gilliar, and Tony Bobulinski. In addition to the “10 held by Hunter for the big guy,” another 10 would go to “Jim,” which almost certainly referred to James Biden.

James and Hunter Discuss Money, ‘Protecting Dad,’ and Getting ‘Help’ From Joe

Despite telling the IRS “that he recalled not being involved with anything beyond 2017,” James Biden sent a message to Hunter in February 2018 that he was “in a near panic” because “we got nothing in Feb! … Did K [likely Kevin Dong] cut us off in Feb? I thought you had said that $ were wired into your account , 82.5 was on its way. We can’t find any record that was sent. Did I miss something?”

James continued to frantically try to reach Hunter for answers, texting weeks later that “I also have something at stake as well.”

In March 2018, Hunter asked James to let him know in writing if James “no longer [wished] to be involved” and expressed regret that “you’ve been drawn into something purely for the purpose of protecting Dad”:

If YOU NO LONGER [W]ISH TO BE INVOLVED IN THIS VENTURE REGARDLESS of how tangentially I need it in writing. Because [as] you have pointed out over and over again- you cannot be my uncle or my protector and counsel if you don’t have all the information. … we can talk later but you’ve been drawn into something purely for the purpose of protecting Dad- and I know any of the BS money is mine ultimately- Well you’ve done your job and he f-cking but only is true to form but even more so why be so horribly angry over nothing g but being duped. You both ha[v]e said it’s bigger than me a
family …

“I am no dupe for anyone. If you see me as an agent for my brother, there is something seriously wrong,” James Biden responded later, before continuing to talk business.

Nearly a year later, after Hunter Biden sent James a message on Dec. 29, 2018, complaining that “I can’t pay alimony w/o Dad or tuitions or for food and gas,” James wrote back, “This can work, you need a safe harbor. I can work with you father alone!! We as usual just need several months of his help for this to work.”

A History of Financial Wheeling-and-Dealing

Unrelated to his role in international influence-peddling, James Biden is “under ongoing investigation by federal authorities in Western Pennsylvania over a series of hospital deals struck under Americore Health,” a scandal The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway reported on in 2020. Americore’s former CEO Grant White accused James Biden of fraud and racketeering, in documents prepared for a lawsuit that was eventually settled.

James also has a history of leveraging the Biden name to get private loans, and even left-wing outlet ProPublica admitted that “on occasion, as Jim pursued opportunities, Joe met with his potential clients or partners, at Jim’s request.”

Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.

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EXCLUSIVE: FOIA Turns Up Zilch on The ‘Full Authority’ Garland Claims He Gave Weiss Over Hunter Biden

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | SEPTEMBER 07, 2023

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MARGOT CLEVELAND

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Emails obtained by the Heritage Foundation following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, and shared exclusively with The Federalist, reveal a glaring gap in the documentation maintained by the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office: There is nothing memorializing the authority Attorney General Merrick Garland claims he gave U.S. Attorney David Weiss for the Hunter Biden investigation.

For more than a year, Garland represented to Congress that Weiss held ultimate authority over the Hunter Biden investigation — which the eventual appointment of Weiss as special counsel contradicted. But now there is more evidence — or rather a lack of evidence — indicating the claimed authority was always a charade.

The Friday before the long holiday weekend, the DOJ provided the Heritage Foundation with the second batch of documents it was ordered by a federal court to produce in response to Heritage’s FOIA lawsuit. This installment concluded the DOJ’s production of the non-exempt documents in Weiss’s custody which concerned his authority for investigating Hunter Biden. But none of the documents produced addressed Weiss’s authority or any authority promised by Garland.

Mike Howell, the director of the Heritage Oversight Project and a co-plaintiff in the FOIA lawsuit against the DOJ, stressed the significance of this omission to The Federalist.

“The DOJ lives on paper.” Anything as important as granting Weiss ultimate authority over an investigation or promising to give him authority to bring charges in another venue, if necessary, “would have been written down,” Howell explained. To Howell, this last batch of documents constitutes an admission by Garland that “there was nothing written down at the DOJ and sent to Weiss, indicating Weiss had any of the authority that Garland claimed he did.”

“We’re beginning to understand why Biden’s DOJ is throwing everything and the kitchen sink at us to fight the release of these records in federal court, all paid for by the taxpayers of course,” Howell told The Federalist.

While the DOJ withheld some documents from the production, claiming various exemptions from FOIA, it is difficult to fathom what FOIA exemption would permit the DOJ to withhold a communication granting Weiss the authority Garland publicly discussed on multiple occasions. When asked why Garland had not memorialized his supposed grant of ultimate authority to Weiss, the DOJ did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiry.

The lack of any materials documenting such authority raises more questions about the statements both Garland and Weiss made to Congress. As far back as April 26, 2022, the attorney general told Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty that the “Hunter Biden’s investigation … is being run by and supervised by the United States attorney for the District of Delaware,” and that Weiss “is in charge of that investigation.”

Then on March 1, 2023, Garland unequivocally testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in response to questioning by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, that “the U.S. attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary.”

Garland maintained that position even after IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley testified that during an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting, “Weiss stated that he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.” Specifically, after news broke of the whistleblower’s testimony, Garland said during a press conference that Weiss was assured he could “make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.”

Weiss would later write to Congress to confirm Garland’s position, stating:

I want to make clear that, as the Attorney General has stated, I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the Principles of Federal Prosecution, and Departmental regulations.

After the transcript of Shapley’s testimony was released, however, Weiss would walk back his claims by clarifying that what he meant was that Garland had promised him that he would be granted ultimate authority to make charging decisions — not quite the same thing as having that ultimate authority.

Either way, one would presume that if Garland had granted Weiss full authority over the Hunter Biden investigation and promised to authorize him to file charges in other venues, there’d be some documentation to back up the claim. But there was none in the FOIA production.

Of course, after the sweetheart plea deal — footsied out between one of Weiss’s top assistant U.S. attorneys, Lesley Wolf, and Hunter’s attorneys — imploded, Garland named Weiss special counsel. So, the federal prosecutor now has the requisite authority to charge the president’s son in whatever district he wants.

But that belated appointment isn’t a grant of absolution for misleading Congress, which is precisely what appears to have happened. And the documents that weren’t suggest as much.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Evidence Of Biden Burisma Corruption Is Overwhelming

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | AUGUST 01, 2023

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A key associate of Hunter Biden reluctantly admitted details about how the Biden family business was run — and those details are shocking.

Devon Archer, a longtime business partner and close friend of Hunter Biden’s, told congressional investigators Monday that at a meeting in Dubai on Dec. 4, 2015, top executives of Ukrainian energy concern Burisma asked Hunter Biden and himself for help from D.C. At the time of the meeting, Hunter Biden’s dad, Joe Biden, was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president as well as his point person on Ukraine. Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, a Burisma executive, wanted to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired as he was investigating the company for corruption, Archer told members of Congress.

Hunter Biden put Zlochevsky and Pozharski on a call with “D.C.,” Archer said, noting he was not part of the phone call so couldn’t possibly know who exactly was on the other end of the line. Joe Biden did meet and speak more than 20 times with various business associates who were paying for access to the Biden family, Archer admitted.

In this case, Burisma was paying Archer and Hunter Biden as much as $83,000 a month to serve on the Ukrainian energy concern’s board, despite the fact that neither man had relevant experience or expertise for the job outside of their frequent meetings and contact with the then-vice president. The two were hired the same month that the U.K. had opened an investigation into company officials. The money was well spent.

A mere five days after the Dubai meeting and phone call, Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech to the Ukrainian Rada, its parliament in Kyiv, attempting to lay the groundwork for firing Shokin.

It took just a few short months before Shokin was fired. Joe Biden bragged in a public speech in January 2018 that he was personally responsible for getting that firing accomplished so quickly. In fact, he claimed he had bullied the Ukrainian government into firing the investigator by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee unless he got what he wanted. Seriously:

And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t. So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said — I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired.

What an amazing series of events that led to Joe Biden personally fulfilling what Burisma was paying Hunter Biden to accomplish. What are the odds?

Not the Weather

After Archer’s transcribed interview, Rep. Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York who previously ran some of the Russia-collusion hoax as a congressional staffer, ran to the cameras to cushion the blow of the explosive new information.

For years, the corporate press and other Democrats had uncritically accepted Biden’s preposterous claim that he had never spoken with his son or his son’s business partners about the Biden family business. Even when Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski described — in detail, on the record, and with supporting evidence — how Joe Biden served as the “chairman” of the family business, the media largely ignored the explosive claims. With Archer echoing Bobulinski’s claims, and further noting that the business wouldn’t have worked without Joe Biden’s “brand,” Goldman and others like him had to concede that Biden did in fact speak with Hunter’s business associates. In fact, they had to admit he spoke with them frequently. However, Goldman claimed, they were only talking about the weather.

While no one actually thinks Joe Biden has a secret interest in meteorology that he only shares with corrupt foreign oligarchs who happen to be in business with his son, the claim is ridiculous for another reason.

As conservative broadcaster Larry O’Connor wrote, “Understand this: Hunter getting Joe on speakerphone WAS THE DELIVERABLE. It literally doesn’t matter what was discussed. Showing that he could get the Vice President of the United States on the phone was all Hunter had to show his clients to seal the deal. He was selling ACCESS not policy. Getting The Big Guy to pick up the phone demonstrated his ability to deliver that access. Case closed. Impeach.”

Otherwise, why would Joe Biden get on the phone with his business associates at all? Why would Barack Obama’s point man in Ukraine be talking to Ukrainian officials under suspicion of massive corruption who were paying large sums of money to his son? What was the point, exactly, if not as chairman of the family business?

We know Burisma was paying Biden family members for help getting powerful people in D.C. to get investigators off its back. We know Biden was the top official in D.C. related to Ukraine. Five days after Burisma made the request, Biden was laying the groundwork for the firing. And he has publicly bragged about getting the prosecutor fired.

n 2019, President Donald Trump was impeached for raising the issue of a potential corruption scandal involving Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Burisma. At that time, scores of corporate media and other Democrat activists asserted without evidence that Shokin was not investigating Burisma and that it was a lie to suggest otherwise. For instance, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post wrote in 2019, “Trump has falsely claimed that Biden in 2015 pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, because he was investigating Ukraine’s largest private gas company, Burisma, which had added Biden’s son, Hunter, to its board in 2014. There are two big problems with this claim: One, Shokin was not investigating Burisma or Hunter Biden, and two, Shokin’s ouster was considered a diplomatic victory.”

Since that false “fact” “check,” investigators in the House and Senate have shown that the Biden family business involves oligarchs and other powerful figures from Russia, Romania, China, and even France and other countries. Joe Biden reportedly met and spoke with his son’s employers from across the globe. The corporate press and other Democrats will fight disclosure about the Biden family business every step of the way, but Archer’s transcribed interview shows how important it is to reveal the truth of that business to the American people.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

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Are The DOJ And Hunter Biden Attempting to Commit Fraud in Federal Court?

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 31, 2023

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One sentence — 13 words — out of the thousands spoken last Wednesday over the course of the three hours that federal prosecutors, defense attorneys, Hunter Biden, and Judge Maryellen Noreika discussed the president’s son’s plea agreement suggests the Department of Justice and Hunter Biden are attempting to commit fraud on a federal court.

On Wednesday, Hunter Biden appeared before a federal court in Delaware prepared to enter a guilty plea on two misdemeanor tax counts. The hearing, however, did not go as planned when Judge Noreika, rather than rubberstamping the sweetheart deal the Biden administration had entered into with the president’s son, quizzed the attorneys and Hunter Biden on the terms of the agreement and their respective understanding of the government’s promise not to further prosecute Hunter.

When Noreika questioned Hunter Biden about the $1 million Patrick Ho paid Owasco LLC on March 22, 2018, purportedly for legal representation, the president’s son was cornered. With the government and the defendant both telling the court that money represented fees for legal services, Hunter Biden had to explain how: “I think Owasco PC acted as a law firm entity, yeah.” That’s how Hunter replied initially, but then immediately equivocated: “I believe that’s the case, but I don’t know that for a fact.”

Hunter’s hedge was a tell that what he had just told the court was not the truth. But it was imperative that the president’s son caveat his prior statement that his law firm entity was retained to provide legal services for Ho because the judge had made clear that Hunter Biden was under oath and that “any false answers may be used against [him] in a separate prosecution for perjury.”

While Hunter’s backtracking may have saved his backside from a perjury conviction, it may well blow up his plea deal because it highlighted that the “Statement of Facts” the government incorporated into the plea agreement contained a near-certain false representation: that the $1 million Patrick Ho transferred to Hunter Biden was “payment for legal fees.”

Statement of Facts?

While the government did not file the plea agreement or the exhibits incorporated into that deal on the public docket, during last week’s hearing the prosecutor and the court read excerpts on the record. Among other things, in the plea agreement, Hunter Biden “admits to the information contained in the Statement of Facts,” which was attached as Exhibit 1. And the Statement of Facts, as read by the prosecution, declared:

On or about March 22, 2018, Biden received a $1 million payment into his Owasco, LLC bank account as payment for legal fees for Patrick Ho, and $939,000 remained available as of tax day. Over the next six months Biden would spend almost the entirety of this balance on personal expenses, including large cash withdrawals, transfers to his personal account, travel, and entertainment.

After commenting that having the U.S. attorney’s office read the Statement of Facts “into the record” “is not common in my experience,” Judge Noreika proceeded to question Hunter Biden on the facts to which he was admitting, engaging in this colloquy:

COURT: All right. In the third paragraph, which is actually the second full paragraph, it says on or about March 22, 2018, you received a million-dollar payment into your Owasco bank account as payment for legal fees for Patrick Ho.

DEFENDANT: Yes, Your Honor.

COURT: Who is that payment received from, was that the law firm?

DEFENDANT: Received from Patrick Ho, Your Honor.

COURT: Mr. Ho himself?

DEFENDANT: Yes.

COURT: Were you doing legal work for him separate and apart from the law firm?

DEFENDANT: Yes, Your Honor. Well —

MR. CLARK: That wasn’t through Boies Schiller, Your Honor, Mr. Biden was engaged as an attorney.

COURT: Right. So that’s why I asked. You were doing work for him —

DEFENDANT: My own law firm, not as counsel.

COURT: So you had your own law firm as well?

DEFENDANT: I think Owasco PC acted as a law firm entity, yeah.

COURT: OK.

DEFENDANT: I believe that’s the case, but I don’t know that for a fact.

The court then moved on to the next section of the Statement of Facts, and the hearing continued. It shouldn’t have, however. Rather, Judge Noreika should have questioned Hunter Biden more fully to ensure the representation attested to by both the government and the defendant and incorporated into the plea agreement — that Ho paid Hunter $1 million as payments for legal fees — was true. For the overwhelming evidence indicates that was a lie and that the money, at best, represented payment for influence peddling and, at worst, was a bribe.

Doesn’t Add Up

Of course, President Biden’s DOJ didn’t tell that to Judge Noreika nor provide her any evidence related to the $1 million payment. Instead, the DOJ declared the payment was for “legal fees,” and Hunter’s legal team enthusiastically nodded. But that’s not what the evidence indicates.

First, there’s the problem that the $1 million payment on March 22, 2018, was made not to Hunter Biden’s law firm, Owasco PC, but to Owasco LLC. And if you are going to pay $1 million for legal representation, you kinda want to pay the law firm supposedly providing those services.

Second, not only did Ho not pay Hunter’s law firm, Owasco PC, Ho didn’t even pay Owasco LLC. Rather, Ho paid Hudson West III LLC $1 million on Nov. 2, 2017 — mere weeks before federal prosecutors charged Ho with bribing foreign officials to advantage the Chinese communist energy company CEFC. Then on March 22, 2018, Hudson West III LLC transferred that $1 million to Owasco LLC with a notation that it was for “Dr Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation.”

According to a U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs finance report, Hunter “Biden stated that the incoming wire amounting to $1MM on 11/2/2017 from CEFC Limited foundation should have gone to Owasco LLC, however, he provided the wrong wire instructions, and due to the large amount the transaction was not corrected until 3/22/2018, which consisted of an outgoing wire for the same amount benefiting Owasco LLC.”

The Senate report further explained that Biden had stated that “Boies Schiller Flexner is co-counsel for Dr. Patrick Ho’s case. Hudson West III LLC has no involvement with Patrick Ho Chi Ping[’s] case and won[’t] expect further transaction related to Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping trail [sic] for Hudson West III LLC. Owasco LLC and co-Counsel Boies Schiller Flexner will represent Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping [at] trial.”

But again, Owasco LLC was not Hunter Biden’s law firm; Owasco PC was. And even in hedging to the court last week, Hunter Biden claimed, “Owasco PC acted as a law firm entity.”

Saying he made a mistake during last week’s plea hearing and that it was actually Owasco LLC that acted as the law firm, however, won’t extricate Hunter Biden from the mess. As the president’s son stated in response to the court’s question of whether he was “doing work for [Ho]”: “My own law firm, not as counsel.”

So, who was part of Hunter Biden’s Owasco LLC law firm at the time, if Hunter did not serve as counsel? And how did Owasco LLC pay its lawyers given that the government said over the next six months Biden would spend almost the entirety of the $1 million “on personal expenses, including large cash withdrawals, transfers to his personal account, travel, and entertainment?”

Then there is the Attorney Engagement Letter reportedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, dated September 2017, between Patrick Ho and Hunter Biden, which provided for a $1 million retainer for legal representation. Significantly, this agreement was not entered into between Ho and any of the Owasco entities, but with Hunter Biden personally. Yet on Wednesday, Biden told Judge Noreika his law firm was doing the work for Ho. But what law firm that was, Biden seemed not to know.

Of course, Hunter didn’t know because no “legal” representation was provided to Ho and none was expected. Yet that’s precisely what the government and Hunter Biden represent as true in the Statement of Facts, and they may have gotten away with the deception had Judge Noreika accepted the plea agreement without question. But she didn’t.

Instead, the judge asked the parties to brief the issue of whether the government could include its promise not to prosecute Hunter Biden for other crimes in a side diversion agreement, stressing she needed to make sure the plea agreement got Hunter Biden what he believed it got him, but also to make “sure that I do justice as I’m required to do in this court.”

There will be no justice, however, if the court allows the government and Hunter Biden to pretend the $1 million payment from Ho was for legal representation. At the next hearing, Judge Noreika must question both Hunter Biden and the government on this representation — because if it is false, as the overwhelming evidence indicates, it would be a fraud on the court and the country to accept the plea agreement.

In advance of that hearing, the House of Representatives should consider filing a supplemental brief detailing the above evidence because the U.S. attorney’s office has proven itself unwilling to provide an honest assessment of the evidence to the court. While neither the legislative nor the judicial branch has the power to force the executive branch to charge Hunter Biden with any specific crimes, the executive branch also lacks the power to force the judicial branch to blindly accept a false plea agreement.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated since publication

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Biden Family Scandals Are So Much Bigger Than Hunter’s Hookers And Burisma Bribery

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 26, 2023

Joe Biden at his desk talking on the phone in black and white

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When the New York Post broke the news that documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, the corporate media — to the extent they didn’t frame the story as Russian disinformation — pretended the reporting solely concerned Hunter Biden’s personal life. The scandal, however, was never about Hunter’s sordid sex life and history of drug abuse. Rather, it concerned Joe Biden’s abuse of power as vice president for financial gain. But now it reaches much further — including 10 distinct scandals.

Saturated in Scandal

1. The Many (Uncharged) Crimes of Hunter Biden

While the current scandals swirling around the laptop are unrelated to Hunter Biden’s sex life or drug abuse, the president’s son features in the first scandal: Evidence indicates Hunter Biden committed numerous crimes, including felonies. Evidence suggests Hunter Biden acted as an unregistered foreign agent for, at a minimum, Ukraine and China in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The confidential human source’s (CHS) reporting suggests Hunter also accepted bribes from Burisma or alternatively helped extort $10 million from the Ukrainian oil and gas company for himself and his father.

IRS whistleblowers and federal prosecutors also believed the evidence supported multiple felony tax counts. Lying on a federal firearm application is a serious felony as well.

The evidence that the president’s son likely engaged in extensive criminal conduct for over a decade is a huge scandal, but it also bred a separate scandal: the DOJ and FBI’s efforts to protect him, No. 7 below.

2. Joe Biden’s Business Lie

Hunter Biden’s laptop also exposed the reality that Joe Biden lied to the American public, dating back to September 2019. During a campaign stop, the then-Democrat presidential candidate snapped at Fox News’ Peter Doocy, claiming: “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

More than two years later, after The Washington Post and New York Times belatedly confirmed the authenticity of the emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, Doocy asked then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether “President Biden still maintains he never discussed overseas business deals with his son Hunter,” to which Psaki replied, “Yes.”

While Biden and his team stuck with that lie for two-plus years, his current press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is attempting to snuff out that scandal by reframing Biden’s denial. “I’ve been asked this question a million times. The answer is not going to change. The answer remains the same: The president was never in business with his son,” Jean-Pierre said on Monday.

Moving the goalposts won’t erase the lie.

3. Joe Biden’s Corruption

The much more serious scandal, however, concerns extensive evidence of Joe Biden’s widespread corruption. Bank and corporate records, suspicious activity reports, emails and text messages recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, travel records, reporting from a “highly credible” CHS, and testimony and expected testimony from Hunter Biden’s business partners indicate that Joe Biden, while vice president, exchanged political favors for payments to his family members — with a cut of the cash coming to the “Big Guy.”

People and/or organizations from Romania, Ukraine, Russia, and China, among others, all paid Biden-related business entities millions of dollars, with evidence indicating the now-president received a cut of the bribes. The evidence indicates that in exchange, the individuals received access to the then-vice president. In the case of Ukraine, Biden forced the firing of the prosecutor general who was investigating Burisma, the company where Hunter held a board seat and which allegedly paid Joe and Hunter Biden each $5 million in bribes.

The evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption is bad enough, but the scandal deepens when one considers the president has supplied Ukraine with cluster bombs and billions in American tax dollars.

Cover-Ups

While the first three scandals involve misconduct and likely criminality by Hunter and Joe Biden, there are at least twice as many distinct scandals that flow from cover-up efforts to protect the Bidens.

4. FBI’s Interference in the 2020 Election

By December 2019, the FBI had authenticated the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. Yet, knowing the laptop was real and contained spectacularly damaging details implicating Joe Biden in corruption, the FBI spent the months leading up to the November 2020 election grooming tech giants to believe a “hack-and-leak operation” was imminent. The FBI also pushed social media companies to change their terms of service to prohibit the posting of so-called hacked materials.

These combined efforts prompted social media companies to censor the New York Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 blockbuster article, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad.” After the story broke and after initially confirming its authenticity to Twitter, the FBI refused to comment on whether the material had been hacked or was Russian disinformation, leading to its continued widespread censorship. Not only did the FBI improperly protect Joe Biden and prompt the censorship of true political speech, it interfered in the 2020 election and likely handed Biden the White House.

5. Intelligence Agencies’ Interference in the 2020 Election

Former and current members of intelligence agencies soon joined the FBI in interfering in the 2020 election. The House Intelligence and Weaponization Committees previously detailed evidence of that interference in their report titled, “How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.”

That report established that the infamous October 2020 letter, which was signed by 51 former intelligence officials and falsely framed the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, was concocted by Biden-campaign officials, including now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who served as a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. Then-candidate Joe Biden would cite that letter in his final debate with Donald Trump to lie to the American people (again), telling the country the laptop was Russian disinformation.

It is scandalous that scores of former intelligence officials would use their prior positions and reputations to deceive Americans in a way that likely affected the 2020 election. That any of those individuals retained security clearances adds to the scandal, as does the role of the Biden campaign and the involvement of at least one CIA employee in soliciting signatories for the statement.

6. Intel Agencies’ Failure to Protect America Against Foreign Influence

Not only did intelligence agencies interfere in the 2020 election, but in their efforts to protect Joe Biden, they likely also failed to provide necessary defensive briefings, putting Americans at risk.

To protect our country, intelligence officials must have frank discussions with leaders (and candidates) about the risks of foreign malign influence. Given how hard the FBI and intelligence agencies tried to bury the news of the laptop, it seems likely they omitted any reference to the laptop and details contained on it in briefings to then-President Trump, then-candidate Biden, and the Biden campaign.

To date, this scandal has been overlooked and merits further inquiry to determine whether the intelligence apparatus fulfilled its duty to the country or omitted inconvenient facts in briefings to protect Joe Biden. Of particular concern is whether intelligence agencies assessed and warned about the risk that the Russians had stolen a second Hunter Biden laptop that contain materials the Biden son believed rendered him susceptible to blackmail.

7. DOJ and FBI’s Handling of Biden Investigations

When it comes to how the DOJ and FBI handled investigations into Biden family corruption, the evidence of potential misconduct is overwhelming.

Broadly, this scandal includes conflicts of interest between Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys — including the Pennsylvania U.S. attorney handling an investigation into the Jim Biden-connected company Americorp, and the California and D.C. U.S. attorneys who reportedly refused to bring felony charges against Hunter Biden. Likewise, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s conflict of interest proves scandalous given the numerous efforts by the DOJ and FBI headquarters to interfere in the investigations.

Beyond conflicts of interest, the IRS whistleblowers and another whistleblower who’s provided information to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have revealed numerous instances of DOJ and FBI procedural violations, the burying of evidence such as the FD-1023, the false labeling of derogatory evidence as disinformation, and limits on the investigative steps agents could take. Consequently, the DOJ charged Hunter Biden only with misdemeanors and one firearm felony that could be dropped, and to date it appears no investigation has occurred into Joe Biden or his brother, Jim Biden, on allegations of bribery and money laundering.

While Democrats counter the growing evidence of corruption by wrongly claiming it has not been corroborated, that fact does not vindicate the Bidens: It implicates the DOJ and FBI in a separate scandal.

Cover-Ups of the Cover-Ups

8. DOJ and FBI’s Cover-Up of Failure to Investigate Bidens

Once whistleblowers began exposing the Biden administration’s interference in the family’s pay-to-play investigation, the DOJ and FBI began to cover-up the cover-up. We saw this most clearly when Garland professed that there was no political interference in U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s investigation into Hunter Biden. Garland stressed that, as a Trump holdover, Americans could trust Weiss’s independence.

Garland’s testimony cannot be squared with the extensive interference coming from FBI headquarters and the limitations the DOJ placed on investigative techniques. When Grassley pushed on the point, Garland maintained that Weiss had ultimate charging authority. According to an IRS whistleblower, however, Weiss said otherwise, claiming he wasn’t the ultimate decision-maker.

Here, the cover-up of the cover-up began in earnest, with Garland and Weiss writing a series of letters and making public statements that attempted to obscure the ultimate question of whether Weiss had ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden and whether DOJ or FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation. This scandal has yet to be unraveled. But on Monday, the DOJ sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee offering up Weiss to testify — indicating Biden’s Justice Department might be preparing to throw Weiss under the bus.

9. Democrats Lying to Protect Joe Biden

Many Democrats are also wrapped up in lying to protect Joe Biden. Some of these lies predate the election when they spun the laptop as Russian disinformation. But more recently, we saw Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin lying to the American public about the FD-1023 form. Had former Attorney General William Barr not gone on the record to correct Raskin’s falsehood, the public would have been none the wiser.

Seeking to protect Joe Biden from damning bribery claims, Raskin falsely claimed that Trump appointees Barr and U.S. Attorney Scott Brady had reviewed the CHS’s reporting contained in a June 2020 FD-1023 form and closed out the investigation. Raskin also portrayed the CHS’s reporting as connected to Rudy Giuliani.

But as The Federalist first reported, Barr unequivocally said that Raskin’s claim was “not true.” The investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.” “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.” Likewise, Barr explained the CHS’s reporting was unrelated to Giuliani.

10. Press Acting as Biden-Run Media

When the Post broke the laptop story, the legacy media either silenced it or framed it as Russian disinformation. Even two years later, after belatedly authenticating the material recovered from Hunter Biden’s computer, the corporate media refused to cover the implications — that the emails, documents, and texts indicated Joe Biden was involved in a massive corruption scandal. The corrupt press still refuses to cover the news fairly, opting instead to brand the evidence as a conspiracy theory.

The media’s refusal to seek and report the truth proves the most dire of all the scandals because without a free press checking government corruption, the corruption will only grow.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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6 Ridiculous Narratives Democrats Tried In Response To IRS Whistleblowers’ Damning Biden Testimony

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 20, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler’s testimony Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee about the political interference in the Biden investigation proved so unimpeachable that Democrats resorted to a shotgun attack on everything except the facts. Here are the top six themes the left hammered during the hearing.

1. Orange Man — and His Family And Associates — Bad

Wednesday’s hearing began promptly at 1:00 with opening statements by Republican Chair James Comer and Democrat Ranking Member Jamie Raskin. From the get-go Raskin set one theme Democrats would continue to peddle over the course of the next six hours: Donald Trump is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad man.

Trump was impeached and is under indictment. His daughter was under investigation, and her husband sold out to the Saudis. Trump’s cronies — Manafort, Stone, Flynn, and Cohen — committed crimes, and Trump pardoned them. On and on they went, pointing to Trump to turn the focus from the whistleblowers’ testimony: that the evidence indicates Hunter Biden committed felonies and now-President Joe Biden may have been complicit in the illegality. Democrats likewise used this misdirection to avoid confronting the overwhelming evidence that the DOJ and FBI interfered in the investigation and protected the Biden family.

2. How Dare Republicans Say ‘Two-Tier Justice System’

A second prevalent tactic on display during Wednesday’s hearing was Democrats feigning outrage over Republicans’ complaints of a “two-tier justice system.”

According to Democrats on the committee, that phrase belongs to the civil rights movement and may only be invoked to condemn systemic racism. Some representatives ran so hard with this theme that they spent their allocated time highlighting decades-old hate crimes rather than asking the IRS whistleblowers questions concerning their testimony.

One representative even quizzed Shapley on his knowledge of the racial disparity seen in the prosecution of tax cases. Shapley said he was unaware of the statistic. The Democrat lawmaker then cited the relative percentages for the IRS agent, while remaining oblivious to the fact that Shapley was complaining of favoritism bestowed on the white, privileged Hunter Biden.

3. Never Mind the Whistleblowers, Let’s Talk About Rudy and the Arms Dealer

Democrats also sought to distract from the whistleblowers’ testimony by framing the evidence detailed by the two experienced and well-credentialed IRS agents as flowing from Rudy Giuliani. But as Ziegler testified, he launched the investigation into Hunter Biden after evidence implicating him was discovered pursuant to a separate criminal investigation. None of the evidence Ziegler and Shapley developed came from Giuliani.

Nor did the allegations that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5 million in bribes from Burisma, as reported by an FBI confidential human source and summarized in the FD-1023, come from Giuliani. The IRS agents never saw the FD-1023 in any event.

House Democrats likewise attempted to minimize the whistleblowers’ testimony by pretending that, beside Giuliani, the only evidence of misconduct came from a witness charged with being an arms dealer, namely Gal Luft. Whether Luft has credible evidence of Biden-family corruption, however, has nothing to do with Ziegler and Shapley’s claims.

4. Merely a Misunderstanding

In their less hysterical moments, the Democrats offered a gentler spin, framing the House’s hearing as much ado about a misunderstanding. It also came down to the whistleblowers not grasping the difference between a special counsel and a special attorney, several Biden apologists suggested.

But as Shapley made clear, he had documented U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s statement — that the DOJ had denied Weiss special counsel authority — soon after Weiss made that representation, and thus while Shapley’s memory was clear. In any event, according to Shapley, Weiss had also said during that meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, that he was not the final decision maker on whether to bring charges against Hunter Biden. That fact makes the distinction between a special counsel and a special attorney irrelevant.

Raskin also suggested Shapley was confused about Weiss’s authority, claiming the Delaware U.S. Attorney made clear in his letters to Congress he had ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden.

Both whistleblowers decimated that line of argument by highlighting what Weiss actually said, which was that he lacked charging authority outside of Delaware. In fact, if anything, Raskin hurt his cause by highlighting the contradictions between Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s statements, establishing the necessity for both DOJ bigwigs to testify before Congress to resolve the inconsistencies.

5. Just a Difference of Opinion

A related theme Democrats peddled during Wednesday’s hearing centered on prosecutorial discretion. The left side of the aisle painted the whistleblowers’ testimony as merely a professional disagreement between the IRS agents and Weiss.

But there was no disagreement in opinion, Shapley and Ziegler stressed: Both the IRS and Weiss agreed that Hunter Biden should be charged with multiple felony counts. Weiss, however, lacked the ability to bring charges in D.C., and it was the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney there, as well as in California, that kept the Delaware U.S. attorney from filing criminal felony charges against the president’s son.

Further, that the D.C. and California U.S. attorneys thwarted efforts to bring felony charges against Hunter Biden proved especially rich given the Democrats continued references throughout the hearing to Weiss being Trump’s “hand-picked U.S. attorney.” Beyond the obvious point that being a Trump appointee establishes nothing, under the Democrats’ standard, the involvement of the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys removes this case from the “difference of opinion” scenario.

6. There’s No Evidence, I Tell You, No Evidence

A sixth narrative Democrats pushed during the Oversight hearing was that there’s no evidence of misconduct or favoritism. But to paraphrase Shapley’s line, just repeating the same lie multiple times doesn’t make it true. And to say there’s no evidence of misconduct or favoritism is a whopper of a lie.

The evidence of misconduct by the Bidens exists in the form of texts, emails, chat messages, bank records, suspicious activity reports, the FD-1023 report, and statements made by former business partners such as Tony Bobulinski. The public record is also replete with evidence of DOJ and FBI favoritism, including the extensive testimony of these two whistleblowers, parts of which a third whistleblower has already corroborated.

The Democrats may not like the evidence or want to talk about it, but to say none exists is about as believable as the Secret Service’s claim that they cannot determine whose cocaine was recovered in the White House.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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7 Things the House Oversight Committee Should Ask IRS Whistleblowers

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 18, 2023

one of the IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The IRS whistleblowers who exposed the Department of Justice and FBI’s interference in the investigation into Biden family corruption will publicly testify on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.

The duo, Gary Shapley and a man known now only as Whistleblower X, had previously sat for transcribed interviews with the House Ways and Means Committee. And while some details from that closed-door testimony should be reiterated during the on-camera congressional hearing, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer should corral Republicans before Wednesday to coordinate the questioning of the whistleblowers so the country learns the depth of the scandal.

Here’s what they should ask Shapley and the soon-to-be-named second whistleblower and how they should do it.

1. Let the Whistleblowers Do the Talking

Because the legacy press will be poised to present Wednesday’s hearing as a Republican witch hunt and their supposed continued hounding of Hunter Biden, the representatives on the right side of the aisle should save the grandstanding for another time and let the agents speak for themselves.

As experienced agents, both Shapley and Whistleblower X know how to testify in a clear and understandable way. They also know how to respond to a hostile cross-examination, which unfortunately will be what they face from Democrats. Republicans should ask the agents open-ended questions that call for narrative responses and allow the whistleblowers’ words to convey to America the protect-Biden scandal they witnessed.

2. Start with Preliminaries, Not the Most Salacious Details

While it is understandable that the House Oversight Committee will want to strike hard and fast with the most devastating testimony, Republicans must remember the media blackout over this scandal means most Americans remain ignorant of many of the basics of the Hunter Biden investigation and how it connects to now-President Biden. Many Americans likely also know little about the two witnesses and may even believe the Democrats’ defamatory branding of the whistleblowers as “bought and paid for” by extreme MAGA Republicans.

For these reasons, before delving into the details, Republicans should ensure the country learns of the whistleblowers’ extensive and impressive professional background. Comer should also ensure the whistleblowers come clean about any political leanings they have, which appears to be none or, if any, leaning more to the left than the right. The whistleblowers’ opening statements will likely cover these preliminaries to some extent, but providing another minute for each witness to briefly remind Americans of your experience with the criminal investigation division of the IRS and explain to the country where you stand politically would be wise.

3. Begin Big-Picture Before Hitting the Details

The committee should then move to the origins of the investigation and the big picture of the scandal. More detailed questions will follow, but could you first broadly explain why and when the investigation began? Can you summarize the staffing of the investigative team and how the FBI field offices, FBI headquarters, the IRS criminal division, and the U.S. attorneys’ offices interacted at the beginning of the investigation, and then later throughout the investigation?

Again, let the whistleblowers tell their story, using follow-up questions to draw out more details, if necessary, but from a big-picture perspective. And once the whistleblowers explain how the investigation proceeded, broadly speaking, ask: Was that staffing and interaction, especially with the DOJ and FBI, the norm?

4. Evidence and Interference

With the above backdrop established, the committee should focus next on two main lines of questioning: the evidence uncovered of potential criminal conduct and the interference the agents faced when investigating the case.

The most effective and efficient way to present this testimony will be by requesting the whistleblowers walk the committee through the chronology of the investigation, identifying at each stage what evidence was uncovered and how, and whether there was any interference in the investigation.

Follow-up questions for each leg in the investigative journey should inquire of any witnesses or evidence they know of to corroborate their testimony and what steps they normally would have taken absent the interference.

Because the committee has the transcript of the whistleblowers’ previous closed-door testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, the staffers should be able to easily sequence the questioning to ensure it is accessible to ordinary Americans.

5. Weiss’s Weasel Words and Garland’s False Ones

While the whistleblowers’ prior testimony revealed scores of ways in which the DOJ and FBI interfered in the investigation, equally concerning is U.S. Attorney David Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s attempts to cover up that interference.

For instance, Shapley testified about the D.C. and California U.S. attorneys’ refusal to file charges against Hunter Biden, and Weiss’s inability to indict the president’s son in those venues without permission from the Department of Justice — permission Weiss allegedly claims had been denied him. According to Shapley, Weiss made that statement during an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting and said he was “not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.”

Neither Weiss nor Garland has expressly denied Shapley’s claims, but both made statements that cannot be reconciled with Shapley’s testimony. Garland, for his part, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss “has full authority” to bring cases in another jurisdiction if he deemed it necessary. Weiss similarly claimed in a letter to Congress that “he had been granted the ultimate authority” over the Biden investigation, but the Delaware U.S. attorney quickly clarified in a second letter that he didn’t have that authority yet but had been assured he would be granted it if necessary.

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee should ask Shapley to retell the events of the Oct. 7 meeting because the IRS agents’ testimony implicates Weiss and Garland in a cover-up. Republicans should also ask Shapley whether it is possible Weiss said during that meeting that he had been denied a request to be appointed a special attorney as opposed to a special counsel, as some Democrats are suggesting Shapley misunderstood Weiss. A quick follow-up here, however, will also make clear that no matter which “special” appointment Weiss said he was denied, the U.S. attorney clearly said he wasn’t the decisionmaker.

6. Evidence Seen or Not Seen

The DOJ and FBI also interfered in the investigation by withholding evidence from Shapley and his investigative team. For instance, both Shapley and Whistleblower X stated they were not aware of the FD-1023 form that summarized a confidential human source’s claims that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5 million in bribes from Burisma. Shapley also testified that he was prevented from seeing all the evidence on the Hunter Biden laptop, even after the FBI had removed documents potentially protected by attorney-client privilege. The committee should elicit testimony from Shapley and Whistleblower X concerning this withheld evidence.

Republicans should then attempt to learn what other evidence may have been secreted from the investigative team. The committee should read off a litany of the evidence it has and ask the whistleblowers if they were familiar with that evidence. Similarly, the committee should provide a list of witnesses with likely knowledge of the pay-to-play scandal and ask whether the whistleblowers knew of those individuals’ potential involvement and whether they were questioned.

This line of questioning may reveal new areas of inquiry — something the whistleblowers may not have known of previously. But in that case, the whistleblowers may not be able to respond to the questions because only the House Ways and Means Committee has the authority to receive protected tax information. The right questions, though, will give the whistleblowers the opportunity to convey that they have not seen the particular evidence referenced and therefore cannot respond to the query in this setting, but would be happy to provide the Ways and Means Committee a supplemental affidavit.

7. Anything More That Could Be Done

The whistleblowers have already made clear the statute of limitations ran out on potential felony tax charges against Hunter Biden because the Delaware U.S. attorney lacked the authority to indict the president’s son in another state. But what about the allegations contained in the FD-1023 or the other banking records recovered by the various House committees? Does that evidence indicate additional crimes have been committed for which the statute of limitations has not yet expired?

The whistleblowers should be asked: What potential crimes? What investigative techniques would you recommend? Given the international scope of these potential crimes, does the Baltimore FBI field office have the expertise to investigate adequately? Do you and your team have the ability to investigate this evidence and determine if there is a there, there?

Ending the hearing thusly will send a message that Weiss may have called off the investigation, but that doesn’t mean the case of corruption against the Biden family is dead.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Breadcrumbs From a Buried FBI Source May Lead to a Bigger Biden Scandal

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 31, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

ALL EMPHASIS ARE BY ME – Jerry Broussard WDYS

After a confidential human source claimed then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions, FBI agents used what’s called an FD-1023 form to record the allegation. Now FBI Director Christopher Wray is defying a May 3 congressional subpoena to provide this form. On Tuesday, in response to Wray’s refusal to hand over the documents, Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer announced the House will move to hold the FBI director in contempt of Congress.

It isn’t that announcement — or even the other explosive ones released over the past year by Comer’s Senate colleague, Chuck Grassley — that prove the most telling, however. Rather, it is the combination of all the details, big and small, that suggests the scandal set to unfold over the coming weeks will be bigger than anyone imagined.

The Dirt Is in the Details

Take recent big news from whistleblower disclosures revealing that the Justice Department and the FBI have the unclassified FD-1023 form spelling out Biden’s alleged criminal behavior. Then combine that with other known information to discover the bigger picture.

For instance, in response to Wray’s failure to comply with the subpoena, Grassley, who had previously noted the FD-1023 form was five or six pages long, indicated that the confidential human source (CHS) was “an apparent trusted FBI source.” This is huge because Grassley wouldn’t make that claim unless the whistleblower had. That means the source is not some random guy walking in off the street, but rather an existing “trusted” CHS, which is why the FBI used the FD-1023 form.

In response to Wray’s stonewalling, Comer likewise revealed some significant details, clarifying late last week that the CHS reporting document was dated June 30, 2020, and referenced “the amount of money the foreign national allegedly paid to receive the desired policy outcome” as “five million.” These details could only have come from a whistleblower with deep knowledge of the investigation, meaning the whistleblower’s characterization of the CHS as “trusted” carries more weight. Likewise, the whistleblower’s claim that the FD-1023 “includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose,” is more credible given the whistleblower’s knowledge of other details.

Comer’s reference to “five million” is also intriguing. In a letter to Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, Grassley had previously revealed a promise by a Chinese communist government-connected enterprise to funnel $5 million to “Hunter and James Biden to compensate them for work done while Joe Biden was vice president.” Records released by Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., also confirmed a $5 million payment to James and Hunter Biden from another Chinese-connected business.

The date of the FD-1023 form, June 30, 2020, also proves significant when read in conjunction with Grassley’s letter to Wray in July 2022. In that letter, Grassley said the whistleblower had claimed that “the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” but “that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by a FBI Headquarters (‘FBI HQ’) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”

The whistleblower further alleged that in September 2020, the FBI HQ team that handled the Auten assessment, after concluding the reporting was disinformation, placed the information in a restricted access sub-file that only the particular agents who uncovered the CHS’s information could access.

Several points merit mention here: First, Auten is the same agent responsible for some of the shenanigans in Crossfire Hurricane. Second, Grassley’s letter indicates Auten did not open the “assessment” on Hunter Biden or other members of the Biden family. The senator’s correspondence actually suggests the assessment may have been opened on the CHS.

Here’s the relevant language:

The basis for how the FBI HQ team selected the specific information for inclusion in Auten’s assessment is unknown, but in more than one instance the focus of the FBI HQ team’s attention involved derogatory information about Hunter Biden.

The whistleblower also reportedly told Grassley that FBI HQ later closed sources after branding their info as disinformation. Given the timing of the assessment (August 2020) and the date of the CHS report (June 2020), it seems likely the FBI used the CHS report as part of the “assessment” and that the “assessment” was of the CHS.

This leads to the next significant point: According to the whistleblower, Auten’s assessment led to the “improper discrediting” of the verified and verifiable derogatory information about Hunter Biden. Worse, based on several hints dropped by Grassley over the last year, FBI headquarters conducted little to no investigation on the CHS and other derogatory info before labeling it “disinformation.”

The timing of the CHS report in June 2020 also proves conveniently coincidental to the decision by Democrat Sens. Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Rep. Adam Schiff to send a letter just two weeks later, on July 13, 2020, to the FBI claiming Congress was being subjected to a foreign disinformation campaign. On July 16, 2020, the then-ranking members of two congressional committees asked the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — the same one that handled the “assessment” that branded the Hunter Biden intel as disinformation — to give the committees a defensive briefing. News of that “Russian disinformation” briefing soon leaked to the press.

What About a Recording?

Grassley’s correspondence and statements over the last year hint at one more possibility: The FBI had at least one recording that implicated members of the Biden family in a criminal enterprise and buried that evidence. Specifically, in one letter to the bureau, Grassley said other FBI records “shed light on Hunter Biden’s business and financial relationship with Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky,” and those “documents include specific details about conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden.” Grassley had previously requested interview summary forms that referenced Zlochevsky, and in seeking FBI records, the senator’s letter made clear that “records” included “recorded or graphic material,” including “recordings of verbal communications.” This possibility fits with the whistleblower’s description of “an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” that FBI HQ shut down in October 2020 “in furtherance of Mr. Auten’s assessment,” even though, according to the whistleblower, the intel could have been verified by use of search warrants.

A follow-up question Grassley asked Wray further suggests the possibility of recorded conversations implicating the Bidens: “Does the Justice Department have a specific policy regarding the use of materials and information related to U.S. citizens who reside in the United States provided by foreign governments, including the fruits of surveillance carried out by a foreign state’s intelligence service?”

Whether these possibilities pan out remains to be seen, but what should be clear to all now is that the whistleblower knows where the evidence is buried — and Grassley and Comer have brought their shovels.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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All Biden Has To Do Is Explain Why Foreign Governments Paid His Family $10 Million — But He Can’t

BY: SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | MAY 17, 2023

If Republicans had a spine or a brain — only one is required for this task — they would relentlessly pursue President Joe Biden for his long-standing cash-for-influence scheme, both during and beyond the 2024 presidential election.

During a May 10 press conference, the House Oversight Committee confirmed that since at least 2009, Joe Biden and his family received a minimum of $10 million from foreign entities. As The Federalist reported, this money entered the Bidens’ coffers through a complicated scheme of layered transactions deposited into multiple bank accounts.

Biden could make this entire story go away if he had a good reason for why his family received $10 million from foreign entities. Surely, if they weren’t corrupt, if this money came from non-sketchy and actually legitimate means, he could explain where this money came from and what services or goods his family exchanged to attain it. But this isn’t the case, as we continue to learn, so he cannot explain away the money.

Why did the Bidens receive this comically large sum of money? Well, no one really knows. But it probably has something to do with the fact that their last names are “Biden” and their family patriarch, the incumbent president, is one of the longest-serving federal officials in American history and has been able to avoid any meaningful public scrutiny for much of his career. As such, it increasingly appears the Bidens used their family’s political and corporate connections to engage in an elaborate foreign influence peddling scheme.

But as was the case with Hunter Biden’s role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where he was handsomely paid despite having zero energy sector experience, the corporate media continues to downplay the first family’s blatantly corrupt business dealings. “House Republicans ramp up claims Biden family received money from foreign contacts,” reads one headline from NPR. “Comer releases Biden family probe update without showing link to president,” declares one from Politico. CNN whitewashed the Biden family’s corruption by writing, “The latest report does not show any payments made directly to Joe Biden, either as vice president or after leaving office.”

And regardless of whether or not “the big guy” who benefited from the foreign business ventures of Biden family members is the current president, there remain glaring ethical and political issues about influence peddling — which House Republicans are continuing to pursue as they prepare to introduce legislation banning influence peddling — and a slew of potential legal issues arising from tax negligence.

Considering the federal government, for at least the short and medium terms, simply will not touch the Biden family, this rules out most legitimate risks of prosecution they might face, even if House Republicans federally criminalize influence peddling. This means that, realistically, the only way to hold them accountable is through utilizing political mechanisms. As such, the GOP should make the Bidens’ foreign benefactors central to their 2024 campaign messaging.

It’s obvious to everyone with functioning eyes and ears that Joe Biden is neurologically compromised, and it’s obvious to everyone paying attention that he and his family are financially compromised, as well.

Until there is a prosecutorial path forward, the GOP must proceed with political means and fill the airwaves in 2024 battleground states with messages amplifying how Joe Biden and his family sold out the country to enrich themselves.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.

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9 Questions Corporate Media Should Ask Biden About Latest Corruption Evidence But Won’t

BY: JORDAN BOYD | MAY 12, 2023

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Corrupt corporate media outlets love scandal but when it comes to questions about whether President Joe Biden sold out the U.S. to enrich his family, they deliberately turn a blind eye.

There are plenty of questions ripe for the asking about the Biden family’s dealings with people tied to some of the nation’s biggest foreign adversaries. Republicans have spent months searching for answers, but every piece of evidence of corruption they uncover simply raises more questions. Meanwhile, press outlets that usually busy themselves with aiding Democrat investigations of this nature either deny the evidence or remain silent altogether.

Here are nine questions the corporate media should ask POTUS about his latest scandal but likely won’t.

1. What Exactly Is the Biden Family Business?

Perhaps the biggest question the American people deserve to know an answer to is: What exactly does the Biden family do to warrant massive payments from foreign nationals? Outside of spending decades influencing U.S. domestic and foreign policy, nobody seems to know.

“We know what [Trump’s] businesses were. I’m not saying whether I agreed with what he did or not but I actually know what these businesses are. What are the Biden businesses?” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer asked during a press conference this week.

2. Why Did Your Unqualified Grandchild Get Paid?

Joe Biden’s son Hunter receiving checks from foreign energy moguls makes some sense if you overlook his suspect rise to fame in the international energy sector. Why at least one of Biden’s grandkids, some nieces or nephews, and even an ex-daughter-in-law are all on the receiving end of funds from foreign nationals is unexplainable.

Despite having no formal experience or education that would qualify them to receive payments from foreign energy companies or “legal fees,” bank records show that at least nine people, between Biden family members and their lovers, spent decades getting rich on at least $10 million from people associated with some of the United States’ biggest foreign adversaries.

3. How Many More Bidens Received Money from Foreign Nationals?

If Hunter’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle profited off of deals she claimed to have “my head buried in the sand” about, it’s more than fair to ask the president just how many more members of the Biden circle benefitted from these international deals.

4. Why Dilute Payments from Foreign Nationals?

Payments to the Bidens were diced up and transferred to a spread of Biden associates before hitting the family’s bank accounts. These transactions often occurred within weeks of significant political action by the then-vice president in the country of the transactions’ origins.

“It’s very hard to come up with any legitimate business reason to conduct transactions in this type of complex way,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong noted during a recent Oversight Committee presser. “Why would separate payments go to Hunter Biden’s business and to himself individually? Why would Walker transfer money from his business account to his personal account before distributing the money? Why are other Biden family members receiving any of these payments?”

These are fair questions, based not on speculation but on the pure facts outlined in the Biden family bank records. If the Bidens’ multimillion-dollar “business” is legitimate, the president shouldn’t have a problem answering basic questions about the complexity of transactions from Chinese, Romanian, and other companies.

5. How Many More Biden Bank Accounts and Shell Companies Are There?

Republican investigators say they’ve looked into four of at least 12 apparently Biden-linked bank accounts and have discovered “a web” of more than 20 companies that were “formed during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.” The question of how many more are out there has yet to be determined but could be helped with clarification from the president.

6. Why Did You Repeatedly Lie about Your Knowledge of Hunter’s Dealings?

During a presidential debate in October 2020, Biden told the nation that neither he nor any of his family members profited from overseas business deals with companies connected to communist China.

That is completely false. It’s also evident that Biden knew about his family’s dealings.

In fact, visitor logs show that Hunter’s associates visited the White House more than 80 times while the elder Biden was vice president. During some of these meetings, several of Hunter’s closest assistants and business partners met with Biden and Biden aides and even attended VP briefings. Vice President Biden also welcomed Hunter on several official trips on Air Force Two, which Hunter appeared to use to secure deals that would enrich his family.

Why would the president go to great lengths to lie over and over and over about it?

7. Should Presidents’ Families Make Money off of People Associated with Our Top Foreign Enemy?

The White House maintains Biden’s hands are clean. Yet, even if Republicans do not find a direct link between the president and the millions sustaining his family’s lavish lifestyles, as corporate media repeatedly and hypocritically demand, he is at least eligible for scrutiny just for his closeness to the alleged corruption.

Biden’s approval with Americans is already low. His proximity to the national security threat his family transactions pose only serves to further hurt that low trust.

8. Have You Instructed the DOJ to Avoid Taking Action against You and Your Family?

Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C. both apparently blocked the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden, according to one IRS whistleblower. The Department of Justice also gave potentially false statements about information on the Bidens’ business in China. And the FBI, which falls under the DOJ’s authority, has refused to turn over records that allegedly implicate Biden in a bribery scheme, despite a congressional subpoena. What’s stopping the DOJ from continuing to do what’s politically favorable for the president and his family by ignoring the issue at hand? Certainly not Biden.

9. How Many Media Outlets Have You Asked to Defend You amid the Investigation?

Comer asked Democrats this week “Do you want to continue covering up the Bidens’ influence-peddling schemes when the evidence is being placed right in front of you?”

The same can be asked of the corrupt corporate media which, since before the 2020 election, offered the president and his family not scrutiny but defense. From the moment House Republicans officially launched an investigation into Biden’s corruption, the press inaccurately asserted there was “no evidence of wrongdoing.” In addition to repeatedly taking the White House’s assertions of innocence at face value, the press tried to distract from the Biden family’s scandals by conflating that corruption with the Trump family’s conduct and blacked out coverage of Comer’s ongoing supply of evidence.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Bidens Made Millions Exchanging Political Favors For Foreign Money, Then Tried To Cover It Up: Oversight Report

BY: JORDAN BOYD | MAY 10, 2023

Rep. James Comer and Oversight Committee detail Biden corruption

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President Joe Biden and his family are at the center of an influence-peddling scheme in which they traded the patriarch’s decades of time in political offices to line their own pockets and then tried to cover up their profiteering with a myriad of complicated transactions and accounts, the House Oversight Committee confirmed during a press conference on Wednesday.

With the help of whistleblowers and congressional subpoenas, Republicans are confidently reporting that the Bidens received at least $10 million worth of diluted payments from foreign companies during and after the president’s time in the Obama White House.

These payments were diced up and transferred to a spread of Biden bank accounts within weeks of significant political action by the then-vice president in the country of the transactions’ origins.

“These complicated and seemingly unnecessary financial transactions appear to be a concerted effort to conceal the source and total amount received from the foreign companies,” the Oversight Committee’s latest memo warns.

At least nine Biden family members including the president’s son Hunter Biden, his brother James Biden, James’s wife, Hunter’s ex-girlfriend who is also his brother Beau Biden’s widow, Hunter’s ex-wife, Hunter’s current wife, and at least one grandchild and a couple of nieces and/or nephews profited from the funneling of funds.

“That’s odd,” Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said. “Most people with grandchildren, who work hard everyday, doesn’t get a wire from a foreign national or anything like that.”

The latest round of records, obtained by the Oversight Committee from four of the Bidens’ 12 apparent banks, detail yet another round of these payments — this time from China and Romania to the Bidens.

One $3 million payment came from the company of Gabriel Popoviciu, who is the subject of a criminal corruption probe in Romania, to the accounts of Biden family associate Rob Walker mere weeks after Biden, then-vice president, welcomed Romanian leaders to the White House to discuss “anti-corruption efforts” and just more than a year after Biden lectured in Romania about the threat corruption poses to national security. Those transactions were quickly funneled to Owasco (one of Hunter’s 15 companies), a Biden associate’s company, one of Hunter’s personal bank accounts, Hallie Biden, and “an unknown Biden bank account.”

The Romanian payments, the Oversight Committee alleges, further prove that the Bidens’ influence peddling operation was in full swing while Biden facilitated foreign policy discussions, especially in Eastern Europe, during the Obama administration.

The newest Romanian payment dilution strongly resembles how the Bidens appeared to use their more than a dozen companies to coordinate with Chinese nationals suspected of close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and “engage in financial deception.”

“The purpose of all these companies being created is to conceal money that the Biden family has been gaining because Joe Biden has been sitting at the upper echelon of our politics for almost five decades. That is the entire purpose here,” Rep. Byron Donalds explained on Wednesday.

These companies receiving funds from foreign nationals, the Republican asserted, serve no legitimate purpose other than enriching the president, his family, and his business associates.

“Joe Biden has no business, except his position in politics,” Donalds concluded.

“If it looks complicated and sounds complicated, it was intentionally made to be complicated so you could not follow the money,” Republican Rep. Nancy Mace added during her talking time. “What we’re trying to do today is show you how to follow the money.”

During a presidential debate in October 2020, Biden told the nation that neither he nor any of his family members profited from overseas business deals with companies connected to communist China.

“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China. I have not had—The only guy who made money from China is this guy [Donald Trump]. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China,” Biden said.

COMER: “President Biden has claimed since the 2020 election that his family has not received money from China. That was a lie in 2020 — and he continues to lie to the American people now.”

pic.twitter.com/Cq4lRTPk9P
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 10, 2023

Despite the fact that the Oversight Committee has repeatedly proven Biden’s denials wrong with bank records detailing millions of dollars worth of transactions from foreign shell companies to the president’s family, the White House refuses to do anything but double down on the lie.

“House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is loudly and proudly broadcasting a press conference today to continue his long pattern of making absurd claims that President Biden has made governing decisions not in the interest of America, but of the Chinese Communist Party, using baseless claims, personal attacks, and innuendo to try to score political points,” White House spokesman Ian Sams told Fox News, after smearing the committee’s latest memo as an “absurd innuendo [that] ignores reality.”

The Oversight Committee once again rejected these claims on Wednesday and refuted them with hard evidence that several Biden family members, including Hunter, James, Hallie, an unknown “Biden,” and companies linked to the family “collectively received $1.3 million in payments” from Walker, whose company was paid millions by Chinese firm State Energy HK Limited, implicating the family in selling political favors to China.

The Biden family received the money via several bank transfers within six months of the vice president departing the Obama White House. Comer said in April that his committee still did not know who the unnamed Biden was in the China transaction because the Biden family holds so many bank accounts and LLCs.

“The Biden family needs to answer for this and the DOJ needs to get off its ass and investigate. We’ve done the work for them so that they can’t screw it up. Now, if these allegations, any of these allegations are proven true then someone with the last name Biden needs to be charged, prosecuted, and maybe spend a little time in prison,” Mace said at the conclusion of her remarks.

Last week, Republicans Sen. Chuck Grassley and Comer subpoenaed the FBI over a document they say alleges a criminal scheme between now-President Joe Biden and a “foreign national” during his years in the Obama White House.

The Oversight Committee led by Comer, who previously warned it “doesn’t look good for POTUS,” promised to continue investigating whether Biden sold out the American people to the nation’s foreign enemies to line family’s pockets.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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To Distract from GOP’s Biden Family Business Investigation, Media Dredge Up More ‘But Trump’ Excuses

BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

Joe Biden speaking behind podium — **Corporate media are trying to distract from the Biden family scandals by conflating that corruption with the Trump family’s conduct.**

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One of House Republicans’ first steps after regaining the majority was to launch an investigation into President Joe Biden’s role in the Biden family’s lucrative pay-to-play business. Corporate media, however, are trying to distract from the first family’s scandals by conflating them with the conduct of the Trump family.

The Washington Post published an article last week, during the height of buzz about the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation, pointing the corruption finger at former President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

“An investment fund overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is backing ventures that profit the former president and his senior adviser, raising questions of conflict,” the article alleges.

Within days of the report’s publication, corporate media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, and even Rolling Stone featured anti-Trump information on their pages and networks. The point of amplifying the report is twofold. First, it gives the media and their Democrat allies more ammo against Trump’s third presidential run. The Washington Post is clear about that:

Now, with Trump running for president again, some national security experts and two former White House officials say they have concerns that Trump and Kushner used their offices to set themselves up to profit from their relationship with the Saudis after the administration ended.

Second, reports about the Trumps give anyone looking to escape conversations about the Biden family’s well-documented history of enriching their bank accounts with funds from foreign oligarchs an excuse to pivot to their favorite scapegoat.

Already, leftist commentators are claiming the Biden family “deserves grace,” while the Trumps deserve investigation. Despite countless real reports and ongoing federal investigations into the Biden family’s affairs, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan even bizarrely asserted there is “no real evidence” that the Biden family business leveraged Joe Biden’s status for personal profit.

The Political Enemy Playbook

Even before Trump’s White House tenure, the corporate media did everything in their power to make him look like a corrupt politician who was sold out to foreign governments. When they weren’t amplifying the Russia hoax, a fake scandal created and paid for by Democrats, the propaganda press scrutinized Trump’s tweets, twisted his words, and tried to undermine his presidency with lies that won Pulitzers.

They also aided Democrats in orchestrating two sham impeachments against Trump, whom they claimed was guilty of treason. These political attacks were sustained with plenty of negative press coverage of Trump’s sons, daughters, and son-in-law.

Where was the media’s outrage about White House familial corruption when Hunter exploited his father’s political reputation to strike business deals with oligarchs in Ukraine and China and then likely gave a cut to his dad? Joe Biden and his youngest son are the epitomal of the scandal and corruption Democrats and the corrupt corporate media desperately want Trump and his family to be.

There are literal receipts of the Biden family conducting shady business dealings overseas and profiting from relationships with sworn enemies, yet publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times worked overtime to downplay and mischaracterize the findings to save the Biden patriarch from criticism and losing the 2020 election.

They didn’t want the public to know that when Biden was vice president and overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine relations, Hunter received a whopping $50,000 per month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company he had no qualifications to be on. They didn’t want the public to hear that Hunter also raked in millions from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, and they certainly didn’t want Americans to discover that just two weeks after he traveled to communist China on his dad’s Air Force Two jet, Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.

“Hunter helped his Chinese business partners secure a deal that gave them control of a cobalt mine in Congo.”

Why COBALT? It’s one of the primary components of EV batteries.

No, for the media, there was no politically advantageous reason to expose that “an arm of the Chinese government” funneled money directly to a company managed by Hunter to compensate him for offering legal representation to the vice-chairman and secretary-general of Chinese energy company CEFC, Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping, the “spy chief of China.” And there was certainly no good reason for them to communicate that Ho, who was arrested, charged, and later convicted for using millions of dollars to “bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC,” made a phone call to James Biden, Joe’s brother.

Instead of covering bombshell stories about the questionable actions of a tight-knit family whose patriarch is in charge of the U.S. government, the propaganda press is still hyper-fixated on the Trumps.

When they aren’t going after the former first family, the media are amplifying the current president’s excuses and shilling for his son, who admitted through his lawyers that the infamous laptop exposing the Biden family’s foreign dealings was his. This investigation, they have claimed over and over and over and over and over, is a politically motivated one. But it’s not.

It’s About Joe, Stupid

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has repeatedly declared Republican investigators are interested in Joe Biden’s “knowledge of and role in his family’s foreign business deals to assess whether he has compromised national security,” not Hunter.

“Evidence obtained in our investigation reveals the Biden family business model is built on Joe Biden’s political career and connections. Biden family members attempted to sell access around the world, including individuals who were connected to the Chinese Communist Party, to enrich themselves to the detriment of American interests,” Comer said in a statement last week. “If President Biden is compromised by deals with foreign adversaries and they are impacting his decision making, this is a threat to national security.”

Despite the corporate media’s attempts to distract from, stifle, and smear Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family business by going after Trump again, the GOP can’t give up. Unlike when Democrats rallied their partisan network to falsely paint Trump as a Russian asset, this legitimate and evidence-based investigation is essential to determining whether U.S. national security is compromised from top to bottom because of Biden.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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FBI Office Investigating Hunter Biden Sent Twitter Numerous Censorship Requests Right Before 2020 Election

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | DECEMBER 27, 2022

Hunter Biden in blue shirt sitting at a table for ABC News interview — **When the bureau’s own former general counsel calls the FBI’s conduct ‘odd,’ it’s clear who’s discrediting the agency: It isn’t conspiracy theorists — it’s the FBI.**

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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Emails released on Saturday as part of the latest dump of the “Twitter Files” reveal that the week before the 2020 presidential election, the FBI field office investigating Hunter Biden sent multiple censorship requests to Twitter — so many in fact, a top attorney for the tech giant found it “odd.” This blockbuster detail from the weekend came mere days after the FBI issued a statement framing coverage of the “Twitter Files” as “misinformation” being peddled by “conspiracy theorists.”

The FBI has “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations,” then-Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille stressed in a Nov. 3, 2020, email to Jim Baker, the then-deputy general counsel for Twitter. “This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” Cardille continued, before telling Baker to let her know if he had any other questions.”

Less than an hour later, Baker responded to Cardille, noting it was “odd” that the FBI is “searching for violations of our policies.”

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi published these emails as part of a 50-something Christmas Eve “Twitter Files” thread that he remarked showed “the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”

The entire thread is newsworthy, but that FBI agents in both the Baltimore field office and at FBI headquarters were running keyword searches for supposed Twitter violations proves hugely significant because both offices were involved in the Hunter Biden investigation.

While the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office is — and was at the time of the 2020 election — handling the investigation into Hunter Biden, reportedly for potential money laundering and tax crimes, there is no separate Delaware FBI field office. Rather, the Baltimore FBI field office covers all of Delaware for the bureau and thus supported (and continues to support) the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office in its investigation of Hunter Biden.

We also know from multiple FBI whistleblowers that FBI headquarters entangled itself in the Hunter Biden probe: In July 2022, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, announced that “multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions,” had claimed that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.”

“The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.

Given the involvement of both Baltimore FBI and FBI headquarters in the investigation of Hunter Biden — and the latter’s attempt to shut down the probe — the revelation that “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ” were “doing keyword searches for violations,” suggests the FBI undertook a full-court press to interfere in the 2020 election.

Previously released “Twitter Files” and statements from Twitter and Facebook established the FBI lied to the tech giants, representing the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation and prompting the censorship of the Biden-family scandal mere weeks before the 2020 election. Internal Twitter communications also revealed that the night before the New York Post published emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, “the FBI used a private communications channel to send 10 documents to a top Twitter executive.”

The “Twitter Files” also exposed “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary of the FBI,” as Taibbi explained in an earlier thread. The “Twitter Files” Taibbi previously reported showed that from “January 2020 to November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth.” Those communications indicated “agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.”

These earlier threads, however, all focused on either communications coming from the San Francisco FBI field office or discussed the monthly and then weekly meetings between Twitter and the federal government’s Foreign Influence Task Force, or FITF. As Taibbi noted, the FBI greatly expanded the number of agents assigned to the FITF following the 2016 election, with the task force swelling to 80 agents.”

With FBI San Francisco and the FITF already liaisoning with Twitter, why then would the Baltimore field office and FBI headquarters have any involvement in communicating with Twitter? And as Saturday’s emails reveal, those officers were not merely passing on information they received, they were, according to a Twitter legal executive, running “keyword” searches — something even Baker, who was previously general counsel for the FBI, found “odd.”

And the Baltimore field office and FBI headquarters conducted these “keyword” searches and shared the results with Twitter for one reason only: to prompt Twitter to censor the speech the week before the 2020 presidential election.

“Odd” doesn’t even begin to capture the situation — which, given the connection between those two FBI offices and the Hunter Biden investigation, suggests a new wing to the Big Tech scandal: one in which FBI agents proactively sought out people and speech to censor for the benefit their politician of choice.

Ironically, the Wednesday before Taibbi broke this latest news, the FBI issued a statement claiming that “the correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. … It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

When the bureau’s own former general counsel calls the FBI’s conduct “odd,” it’s pretty clear who is discrediting the agency: It isn’t conspiracy theorists — it’s the FBI.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Hunter Biden’s Strategy to Go on The Offensive Further Indicts the Feds

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | DECEMBER 12, 2022

Hunter Biden being interviewed in front of brick wall — **A strangely timed DEA raid, whistleblower claims, and other red flags raise new questions about Hunter Biden and his family affairs.**

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Two months after the FBI subpoenaed the laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, the Drug Enforcement Administration searched the office of Hunter’s one-time psychiatrist Keith Ablow and seized a second laptop Hunter had left with him. The timing of the DEA raid and the fact that criminal charges were never filed against Ablow, coupled with whistleblowers’ claims that the FBI buried evidence against Hunter Biden, raises the question of whether the search was a pretext to recover Hunter’s laptop and protect the Biden family.

While the DEA’s recovery of the second Hunter Biden laptop escaped scrutiny over the last nearly three years, a Washington Post article from Saturday brings that laptop into focus — and with it questions about the DEA’s seizure of the laptop and agents’ decision to return it to Hunter.

Back in the News

In a weekend article titled “Some Hunter Biden Allies Making Plans to go After His Accusers,” The Washington Post reported that Hunter and his closest advisers are plotting an offensive for when Republicans assume control of the House of Representatives in January. The strategy sessions to counter what Biden associates frame as “an expected onslaught of investigations by House Republicans” began last September, according to the Post, with a meeting at the California home of Hunter Biden’s friend and lawyer Kevin Morris.

Morris, already famous in the entertainment industry as an attorney for the co-creators of “South Park,” gained notoriety when the New York Post reported that Morris “footed Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes totaling over $2 million.” In addition to Morris, David Brock, a liberal activist, reportedly joined in the September 2022 strategy session. “At one point, Hunter Biden himself happened to call into the meeting, connecting briefly by video to add his own thoughts,” according to the Post.

While not detailing Hunter’s purported thoughts, The Washington Post reported that Morris suggested “it was crucial” “for Hunter Biden’s camp to be more aggressive.” According to Saturday’s article, Morris then described during the September meeting at his California home the “defamation lawsuits the team could pursue against the presidential son’s critics, including Fox News, Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani.” Morris also reportedly “outlined extensive research on two potential witnesses against Hunter Biden — a spurned business partner named Tony Bobulinski and a computer repairman named John Paul Mac Isaac.”

Brock provided more insight, telling the Post: “They feel that there is a whole counternarrative missing because of the whole Hunter-hater narrative out there.” “What we really got into was more the meat of it, the meat of what a response would look like,” Brock said of the September meeting. To aid the efforts, Brock planned to start a new group — since launched — named Facts First USA, which Brock described as a “SWAT team” designed to “ensure that the media and public do not accept the false narratives that flows from congressional investigations.”

More recently, according to the Post, “Brock’s group, Facts First, is engaging with Hunter Biden and those in his immediate circle.” Brock is reportedly “reviewing research that Morris has conducted on Biden’s adversaries, including Bobulinski and Mac Isaac.”

According to The Washington Post, Morris and others are also focused on whether the data claimed to be recovered from the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at the Delaware computer repair store, “was improperly obtained and distributed,” with Hunter and his allies suggesting that the materials released by Giuliani and others may not have originated from the laptop Hunter abandoned at the repair shop. Instead, the help-Hunter crew posits that the information may have been improperly taken from a laptop Hunter left with Ablow, whom the Post frames as “close to Republican activist Roger Stone.” The Post then reported that “Morris has been overseeing a forensic analysis of that laptop to determine if it was the basis of the hard drives that were later distributed by Trump allies.”

Morris began floating a similar tangled conspiracy theory in May 2022, with CBS News reporting, “Morris and his team have been circulating provocative slides that tease a coming counter-narrative to political attacks against the president’s son.” The slides describe a “contextualized theory” positing that “there was no laptop dropped off with Mac Isaac, just a laptop which Hunter abandoned on Feb. 1, 2019, at the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow.”

The New York Post’s Miranda Devine also lighted the conspiracy theory Morris floated in May, writing: “Morris alleges in his scrawled mind map, and in conversations with confidants, that Trump ally Roger Stone and his lawyer, Tyler Nixon, masterminded a plot with Ablow and Mac Isaac to create ‘clones’ of the laptop left in Newburyport to damage Joe before the 2020 election.” Morris pushed the theory based on Stone writing a foreword for Ablow’s 2020 book, “Trump Your Life,” and Ablow’s appearances on Fox News.

But as Devine detailed in her article, the material contained on the MacBook abandoned at Mac Isaac’s business included material created after Hunter had left the laptop with Ablow: “The biggest problem with Morris’ conspiracy theory of the ‘Ablow clones’ is that there are authentic videos and other material unique to the Mac Isaac laptop that were created after Hunter left his second laptop at Ablow’s office.”

Ablow has also dismissed the counternarrative as “a work of fiction,” stating: “I never looked at any laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, much less shared any laptop belonging to Mr. Biden with anyone, ever.” “I wouldn’t know how to access a password-protected laptop if my life depended on it,” Ablow added. Stone reportedly said the theory is “insane conjecture bordering on defamation.” Mac Isaac described it at the time as a “loose effort to muddy the waters.”

In response to Morris’s most recent push, as captured in Saturday’s Washington Post article, Mac Isaac’s attorney, Brian Della Rocca, told The Federalist, “As we have always said, Hunter Biden knows it is his laptop. That is why neither he nor his father have ever actually denied that it is his.” “The night before the story broke,” Della Rocca added, “Hunter’s attorney reached out to John Paul to ask about whether he still had Hunter’s laptop.” What Morris is doing now, Mac Isaac’s attorney claims, is “nothing more than trying to create more of a stir so the story will be worth more in Hollywood.”

Beneath the Surface

Whether crafting a Hollywood story or an offensive strategy to protect Hunter Biden, what Morris and Hunter’s other confidants fail to realize, however, is that by pushing the theory that the material recovered from the Delaware laptop originated from the laptop left with Ablow, they are resurrecting a story that received little scrutiny at the time: the DEA’s raid of Ablow’s office. And since Morris first pushed this conspiracy theory in May 2022, “highly credible whistleblowers” have come forward and accused the Department of Justice and FBI “of burying ‘verified and verifiable’ dirt on President Biden’s troubled son Hunter by incorrectly dismissing the intelligence as “disinformation.”

So, the question arises: Was the DEA’s raid of Ablow’s office a pretext to recover Hunter’s second laptop? And relatedly: Did the DEA return the laptop to Hunter without securing the evidence first for the criminal investigation against the now-president’s son?

While most Americans now know of the infamous laptop Hunter reportedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, shortly after the New York Post broke the news that material recovered from the laptop implicated Joe Biden in Hunter’s shady business dealings, NBC News reported on Oct. 30, 2020: “[A]ccording to two people familiar with the matter, a different Hunter Biden laptop landed in the custody of the DEA in February when they executed a search warrant on the Massachusetts office of a psychiatrist accused of professional misconduct,” the psychiatrist being Ablow.

The February 2020 raid on the office of Hunter’s one-time Massachusetts-based psychiatrist Ablow received only passing mention at the time, with local outlets reporting that the DEA claimed the execution of the search warrant was part of an “ongoing investigation.” Coverage at the time also highlighted the revocation of Ablow’s medical license for alleged “inappropriate sexual activity with patients and illegally giving prescriptions to employees.”

There was no mention of the recovery of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden at the time, or at any time until two unnamed sources told NBC News of that detail on Oct. 30, 2020. Since then, Ablow confirmed that Hunter left his laptop at a bungalow attached to Ablow’s office in 2019, where the Biden son was reportedly staying for intravenous ketamine treatments for his addiction in December 2018 and January 2019.

Ablow reportedly “made repeated efforts to persuade Hunter Biden to retrieve his computer,” with Ablow even contacting Hunter’s attorney to arrange for its return.” However, the second laptop reportedly remained in a safe in Ablow’s basement for a year, and the DEA raided the psychiatrist on Feb. 13, 2020, then returned the computer to Hunter’s lawyer George Mesires.

Red Flags

The timing of the raid and the return of the computer to Hunter’s lawyer raises several red flags, especially since federal charges were never brought against Ablow. First, the Feb. 13, 2020, DEA raid occurred some nine months after the Massachusetts Board of Medicine suspended Ablow’s medical license on May 15, 2019, for purportedly diverting “controlled substances from patients,” among other things. One would think the DEA would act more promptly to execute a search warrant to prevent the destruction of evidence.

Second, the DEA only executed the search warrant after the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena in mid-December of 2019 to seize the first Hunter Biden laptop from the Delaware store owner, raising the question of whether the real goal was to ensure there were no more Biden laptops floating about before the 2020 presidential election.

Third, even if there was nothing pretextual or nefarious about the raid on Ablow’s office, that the DEA returned the laptop to Hunter’s lawyer raises other concerns because at the time, and still to this day, Hunter Biden was under investigation. In fact, it was that investigation that served as the basis for the FBI to subpoena the laptop from the Delaware repair store. Given the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden, why would the DEA return the laptop to his attorney?

Given the FBI whistleblowers’ claims that government agents buried incriminating evidence against Hunter Biden, the House oversight committees should pose these questions to the DEA to ensure that federal agency was not also acting as a protect-Biden front. And we can thank Morris and The Washington Post for reminding us of the DEA’s seizure of that second Hunter laptop — something that at the time seemed straightforward but, given the developments over the last six months, now smells suspect.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect that NBC News, not CBS News, first reported on the DEA’s recovery of a second laptop.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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