Tag Archives: politics

More Witness Intimidation?

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Now Hunter Biden is suing the IRS and referencing one of its whistleblowers ostensibly for illegally disclosing private tax matters to the public. Never mind that what was revealed was matters relating the DoJ’s naked interference into investigations of Offspring Biden’s tax peccadillos.

But wait.

Biden’s lawyers suit documents appear[] to misquote IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, and those lawyers alter[ed] the facts regarding testimony from an FBI official about the Hunter Biden investigation [brackets in the original].

During an interview that aired Aug. 1, 2023, on Fox News, “Mr Shapley alleged that FBI General Counsel, Jason Jones ‘was given a letter the Sunday before [his July 17 deposition before the House Oversight Committee] from DOJ basically telling him not to talk,'” the lawsuit states.
The entire quote from Shapley on Fox News‘ America’s Newsroom is: “For example, the FBI SSA that testified for the House Ways and Means Committee, he was given a letter the Sunday before from DOJ basically telling him not to talk. And I know that he could have confirmed additional material facts on this investigation.”

And his lawyers are lying about the facts of the case. Lying, not making mistaken claims: these are highly talented and heavily trained lawyers and words are their stock in trade. They knew what they wrote in their complaint, they knew what they were going to write when they formed the thoughts, and they know what they’ve written after the fact.

The former agent [whom The New York Post identified as Joe Gordon] testified to the Oversight Committee on July 17 that the FBI “asked us to, quote, decline to respond to questions seeking nonpublic information likely covered by one or more components of executive privilege or other significantly—or other significant confidentiality interests…we intend to abide by and follow the Department’s guidance and expectations.”

This just seems like another method for intimidating the witnesses involved in the Joe Biden & Son potential criminal activities.

Ransom

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That’s what President Joe Biden (D) paid for five Americans kidnapped by Iran—$6 billion worth of ransom. Here’s Biden’s disingenuous (at best) claim:

Today [18 Sep 2023], five innocent Americans who were imprisoned in Iran are finally coming home…after enduring years of agony, uncertainty, and suffering[.]

Translation: Today, the United States government aided and abetted a criminal entity in the pursuance of its crimes by rewarding Iran for its crime of kidnapping.

Paying this ransom has just put a price tag on all Americans traveling overseas, and especially in the Middle East. Worse, that price has gone sky high: Biden has set the reserve price at $1.2 billion per American.

Biden’s dishonest rationalization, through a carefully anonymous senior administration official, for paying the Iranian ransom:

The alternative is these Americans never come home.

Never mind that lots of prior administrations—not just the immediately prior Trump administration—had brought kidnapped Americans home from a variety of criminal enterprises, not only Iran, without paying any ransom.

That’s not all. In addition to upping the incentive for kidnapping and raising the ransom requirement, Biden has personally funded further Iranian terrorist and terrorist-supporting activities for Iran, to the tune of $6 billion that Iran didn’t have last Sunday.

Cowardice in DoE

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Recall that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tried a cross-country trip in her electric vehicle convoy and that, along the way on a hot and humid Georgia day, a staffer driving a gasoline-powered vehicle blocked off an EV charging station so that when the rest of Granholm’s group arrived, one of the EVs in her convoy would have a place to recharge. Police were called over the behavior by a separate EV driver who needed a charge and had a small baby in the car.

Last Tuesday, Granholm was called to testify before the House Science and Technology Committee about that incident among other items. Responding to Congressman Scott Franklin’s (R, FL) question about the incident, Granholm said,

Let me just say, I have a fantastic young staff, just fantastic. It was poor judgment on the part of the team.

Fair enough, openly acknowledging the error like that.

But when pressed by Franklin,

Granholm also sidestepped blame during the back-and-forth with Franklin on Thursday, saying that it was not her that was “saving the spot.”

But whose error, again? Isn’t she the one in charge? Wasn’t her fantastic young staffer only acting within the department culture and associated imperatives that she has consciously developed during her tenure?

This is the arrogance of Government above all, and the MFWIC of DoE above all of that. Not her fault; she’s the one in charge, she’s not one of the worker bees who, you know, actually do things.

Oh, W-a-ah

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These precious ones bring it on themselves.

Big banks and brokerage firms are handing over bigger checks to settle regulatory investigations, including those that don’t result in losses for investors. US market regulators are increasingly demanding tens of millions of dollars to settle technical violations that just a few years ago cost companies much less to resolve.

Because:

The SEC settles most of its enforcement cases, and Wall Street firms prefer to pay fines and avoid litigation that would put more heat on executives. But SEC officials under Chair Gary Gensler are seeking higher fines to settle, even if prior offenders paid less.

We’re supposed to feel sympathy for these…personages. Wall Street Is Furious Over Rising Fines From SEC goes the headline. There’s much about which to criticize Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, but Wall Street executive shyness, fear of heat, outright cowardice isn’t on that list.

That those worthies would rather settle and skitter into the baseboard holes to avoid a bit of heat does severe disservice to the companies they’re pretending to manage and those companies’ shareholders. Litigation costs too much, and it’s cheaper to settle? Settling repeatedly runs up that cost and alters the balance.

If Wall Street managers were worthy of their paychecks, they’d hie the SEC into court over the SEC’s charges, which range from social and climate justice claptrap to the trivia noted in the linked article to the occasional legitimate SEC beef. It would take only a few wins in court to get the SEC to back off and stick to its knitting.

Knee-jerk settling SEC suits is a violation of those persons’ fiscal duties.

Speaker McCarthy and a Government Shutdown

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Supposedly, there’s considerable pressure on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) to Do Something to avoid a government shutdown in a couple of weeks.

Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t.

Part of the pressure is purely internally political. There’s no real downside to shutting down the government for a period of time, as the Schumer Shutdown and the Obama Shutdown before that demonstrated.

Besides, the government wouldn’t be fully shutdown—only non-essential areas like the EPA (whose then head demonstrated that 90% of her department employees were non-essential, at least in the short- to mid-term, when she furloughed them) would be seriously impacted.

Social Security and Medicare payments would go as scheduled, Federal debt payments would go as scheduled, our military would still be paid as scheduled, and on and on, all because there’s plenty of tax revenue coming in under current tax law to make those payments.

See this graph, from an earlier article of mine: