[NY Post] One of the most basic lessons that we teach law students is that you should "never ask a question you don’t know the answer to."
Most Democrats avoided any questions on the substance of the allegations, focusing instead on everything from systemic racism to the use of the term "two-tiered system of justice" and, of course, Donald Trump. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) often goes where wiser members fear to tread. On this occasion, Goldman may have delivered one of the most damaging moments for the Democrats.
Goldman pressed veteran IRS investigator Gary Shapley about his suggestion that Joe Biden discussed the foreign dealing with his son. Shapley eagerly said he would be happy to explain, but Goldman cut him off and said he did not have time for such explanations.
At this point, most lawyers would have reversed engines out of troubled waters, but Goldman plowed full speed ahead. He said the references to Joe sitting next to his son do not mean that they actually discussed his business.
Goldman then pounced and said slyly, "Now let me ask you something, that doesn’t sound much like Joe Biden was involved in whatever Hunter was doing with the CEFC if Hunter Biden is telling him that he is trying to do business with them, does it?"
That is when Shapley stated the obvious: "No, but it does show that he told his father that he was trying to do business and ..."
Goldman finally heard the train whistle and tried to get off the track: "OK, well, that is true that Hunter Biden does try to do business, that is correct."
Too late.
Goldman was citing the testimony of Walker that Joe Biden not only came to lunch on Hunter’s foreign dealings but did so after being told that Hunter wanted to lay the foundation for such a deal.
Unfortunately, that is when Goldman’s time ran out.
A few more minutes and we might have had an open-and-shut case for the appointment of a special counsel.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/22/2023 07:31 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[17 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
Why would we want an appointment of a Special Counsel? It would be someone from Weismann’s crew. The impeachment inquiry is the way we want this investigated. A Special Counsel just locks up all the evidence for four years.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/22/2023 8:20 Comments ||
Top||
#2
I concur Supe. The corrupted DoJ will do nothing until a thorough internal house cleaning takes place. Impeachment will facilitate discovery and documentation for future criminal charges...and there should be many.
The only hope (if there is to be any hope) for justice is an administration change.
#3
Remember when they took out Ted Stevens and Duke Cunningham as impediments so that they could get Obamacare passed? Duke certainly was dirty, but was he really dirtier than Biden? By total dollars received, I believe that he underperformed the Biden family syndicate. Duke also wasn’t in the pocket of foreign powers. Now, I will give you that both Hunter and Duke were veterans, but there is a big difference between the two. The Feds investigated Cunningham. Have the Feds investigated any of the scions involved in Ukraine? Absolutely not.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/22/2023 10:33 Comments ||
Top||
#4
To be precise, Hunter Biden was appointed an Ensign in the USNR at age 43, by special age waiver and was sworn in by his father, the Vice President. His military service lasted a month, but Ensign Biden failed an initial drug screening urinalysis for cocaine upon reporting to his duty station in Norfolk. He was processed for discharge but the kind of discharge has never been revealed.
[American Thinker] Is there anything Joe Biden and his greenie paymasters won't try to take away from us?
Issues & Insights has found a doozy of a new item they're targeting for taking away from us -- gas-powered generators, which are used in the event of blackouts:
When the power goes out, most of us just have to wait until it’s restored to get back to our normal lives. In the meantime, as we wander through a dark house flipping useless switches out of habit, we make sure we don’t open the refrigerator and we put off anything we had planned that requires us to burn electricity. The more-prepared among us, though, buy fossil-fuel-powered generators to avoid interruptions
Their future, though, is in doubt. The Biden administration wants those generators to go the way of the incandescent light bulb.
"Just months after a Biden-appointed regulator teased a ban on gas stoves, the administration is working to enact a rule that would prohibit the manufacturing of nearly all portable gas generators on the U.S. market," the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this week.
The legality of this is amazingly questionable. They're literally ruling by "rules" to enact vast declines in our standard of living, taking away our freedom of what we can buy for our basic energy needs because of global warming.
It's bee ess. In places such as California, the grid has been so battered by greenie requirements for energy production blackouts are expected and inevitable.
The Los Angeles Times has even put out a piece for its establishment buddies, with this lede:
#4
^ Individuality. It's such an ugly, democracy destroying thing.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
07/22/2023 7:27 Comments ||
Top||
#5
That reminds me: I need to go get my generator out of storage. There's a storm tracking for the windward islands...
Posted by: ed in texas ||
07/22/2023 8:09 Comments ||
Top||
#6
My generator is large and permanent. I have no intention of freezing in the dark in the north woods for these pocket hitlers.
When the power goes out the generator kicks in and is good for a couple of weeks if necessary though 3 days is the longest we've needed it since moving to NH 4 years ago.
Sounds like it might be time to build up the ammo supply.
#8
They are trying to trigger martial law. It will take an elimination of bass boat engines to throw society into chaos. When I see that restriction hit, II will be heading to The Walmart to buy two pallets of toilet paper.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/22/2023 11:28 Comments ||
Top||
#9
When you are able to exercise legitimate control of your affairs, you have freedom. When some other SOB exercises control of your affairs freedom is lost.
#14
Re the generator in storage: it's a 10kw (not very) portable. It's got an 8kw little brother sitting next to it.
I bought those while I was living south of Houston; since I retired and move to near Lake Livingston, we haven't even had a flicker. Hence, "in storage".
Posted by: ed in texas ||
07/22/2023 13:27 Comments ||
Top||
#15
/\ Better not to take any chances. Go ahead and turn yourself in Ed.
[Daily Caller] The Biden first family seems determined to confirm every stereotype of their antisocial behavior — to the point of dysfunctionality.
During the 2020 campaign at least eight women alleged that then presidential candidate Joe Biden in the past had serially and improperly touched, kissed or grabbed them.
One, Tara Reade, alleged she was sexually assaulted by Biden, who denied the charge.
Yet Biden himself finally was forced to apologize for some of his behavior. Or as he said at the time, "I get it."
He claimed that he would no longer improperly invade the "private space" of women and had meant no harm.
But Biden’s obnoxious conduct extended well beyond the eight accusers.
Women as diverse as former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Biden’s own daughter-in-law Kathleen Buhle, have both alleged in their memoirs that Biden made them feel uncomfortable through his intrusive touching and embraces.
On several occasions, Biden developed a strange tic of becoming too physical with young girls. He habitually attempted to hug them while blowing in their hair.
His daughter Ashley wrote in her diary that she feared her past adolescent showers with her father had been inappropriate. Even as president, Biden has weirdly called out young girls in his audiences to note their attractiveness.
[FoxNews] Biden corruption case relies on veteran IRS agents whose testimony holds up against Hill Democrats.
In Wednesday’s marathon House hearing, Oversight Committee Democrats ran into a buzzsaw: two IRS whistleblower agents — Gary Shapley, the supervisor on the investigation who went public a few weeks ago, and Joseph Ziegler, the lead investigator on the case, who was publicly identified for the first time at the hearing.
In gory detail, the agents outlined how President Biden’s Justice Department quashed the Biden corruption investigation from within while publicly pretending that it was being conducted with independence and integrity.
When committee Democrats tried to poke holes in the testimony, they ended up on the receiving end of what they hadn’t bargained for: fusillades of fact — damning data about the millions raked in by the president’s son and family members from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes.
The agents’ stellar performance did not surprise anyone who has ever participated in a criminal tax investigation. In nearly 20 years as a prosecutor, I was — as the lawyer on my cases — better versed in the criminal law applicable to, say, racketeering, international terrorism, money-laundering, admissibility of evidence, and standards of proof, than the agents from the FBI and other agencies with whom I worked, a sizable majority of whom were non-lawyers. Tax enforcement was an exception.
The tax code is an esoteric area of the law. Experienced investigators know a lot more about it than most prosecutors — I learned a lot more from my IRS agents than they learned from me. In fact, tax enforcement is sufficiently abstruse that prosecutors from around the country need approval from the Justice Department’s Tax Division in Washington to file charges. In almost all other cases, they may indict without main Justice’s supervision.
In this very specialized area, it turns out that the very best tax-enforcement agents were assigned to the Biden case. Shapley and Ziegler have combined decades of education and experience in tax law and financial bookkeeping practices.
They have been involved in some of the most significant tax investigations, including international schemes, ever conducted in the U.S. They held critical positions and were trusted to run big cases because they knew their stuff.
And because they’ve been investigators for such a long time, they know how to testify — how not to get intimidated (especially when you know much more than the people asking the questions do) and how not to accept the premise of questions loaded with inaccuracies and misimpressions.
It showed. The ranking Democrat on the panel, and thus the first in the minority to ask questions was Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, a tireless progressive partisan and former law professor who never tires of posing as a legal titan. But his questions were rife with disinformation and the witnesses called him on it.
There’s a big difference between teaching law and litigating cases. The best can do both, but by definition very few are the best.
He began, for example, trying to make the point that prosecutors and agents often disagree on whether felony charges ought to be brought. Rather than simply accept that proposition, which is true, Shapley explained why it is irrelevant — in this instance, the case agents and line prosecutors agreed that felony charges were appropriate; it was higher-ups in the Justice Department who slammed the brakes on the case.
On this point, it is vital that committee Republicans keep their eye on the ball.
Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who besides being on yesterday’s panel is chairman of the Judiciary Committee with oversight over DOJ, took pains at the hearing to point out that, while the whistleblowers have been completely consistent, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss has repeatedly changed his story.
The agents stress that they were being ordered by prosecutors not to follow leads that could have garnered evidence against Joe Biden. Despite all the obstacles, they managed to make a strong case against Hunter Biden, but they couldn’t get it charged because Weiss told them he was not the ultimate decisionmaker — he was being stymied by the Biden Justice Department.
But Attorney General Merrick Garland has publicly claimed that Weiss was in charge and was assured that he would have all the authority he needed to bring any charges in any jurisdiction — all he needed to do was ask.
Initially, Weiss backed that story. But then, when Shapley became the first of the whistleblowers to go public, Weiss changed his tune, struggling to back Garland while not contradicting Shapley, whose account is richly corroborated.
First Weiss said he had the authority. Then he conceded that he lacked authority to file charges outside his district of Delaware (i.e., in districts where Hunter had allegedy committed tax crimes), but vaporously added that he had consulted with the Justice Department about that problem. Then he claimed that he had not asked to be designated a special counsel, which would have given him authority to file charges anywhere.
Meantime, Shapley’s account was never shaken: Weiss had told a room full of agents that the Justice Department had refused to grant him special counsel authority, and that he was being blocked from filing felony tax charges against Hunter by Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in Washington, D.C., and California.
Jordan is right that Weiss is a weasel. But Weiss is the wrong target here. He is just the fall-guy for Garland. Contrary to what the attorney general would have the country to believe, it was not Weiss’s job to ask for special counsel authority. It was Garland’s duty to appoint a special counsel the moment he realized there was a conflict of interest that prevented DOJ from investigating in the normal course.
#4
I think the fictitious court cases cited by an AI recently tell you all you need to know about "computer models."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
07/22/2023 7:55 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Whatever broke first at this point is actually irrelevant. The sub had what is refered to as 'single failure mode'. Any one fault would destroy it. There was nothing remotely resembling a backup, on anything. Any one failure, and it's all over.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
07/22/2023 8:14 Comments ||
Top||
#6
All of this speculation on how precisely that submersible imploded is becoming downright ghoulish!
Posted by: ed in texas ||
07/22/2023 13:30 Comments ||
Top||
#11
The problems of redundancy to prevent catastophic failure have been well studied for decades. Look at refineries. They've been dealing with similiar pressure and thermal issues for years, and largely successful at it.
The peak fault occurence is usually in transition, i.e. start up or shutdown. Things are quite stable at each end of the curve, but it gets crazy in the middle. Almost like an inverse bell curve. Generally because the material it's made out of reacts to stress unevenly.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
07/22/2023 13:41 Comments ||
Top||
#12
^ I meant once the catastrophic failure is under way. Horse > barn door.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
07/22/2023 14:24 Comments ||
Top||
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
At this point, most lawyers would have reversed engines out of troubled waters, but Goldman plowed full speed ahead. He said the references to Joe sitting next to his son do not mean that they actually discussed his business.
[FoxNews] Biden corruption case relies on veteran IRS agents whose testimony holds up against Hill Democrats.
