In 2018, I went pretty deep into the Burisma hole.
I felt that, since I was reporting so much on Trump's international corruption, I should give serious look into Hunter Biden.
But the story just wasn't there.
— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) March 19, 2022
Clouds and shadows, Mr. Vogel, only works when you’re attacking female politicians…
It’s definitely lame that the children of politicians can get lucrative gigs off their last names.
I wish that didn’t happen.
But it was absurd to compare Hunter/Burisma to any one of the Trump deals I covered. 2/
Now, I think I–and my editors–would have written as much as we could if we found that Hunter Biden did something illegal, bad, etc.
But we didn’t.
So, we used our news judgment to not write about this nothing issue. 3/
To be clear: I hate the way politicians use their positions to make money. I think it’s really bad that Obama and Clinton became wildly rich after leaving office.
And I really hate the nepotistic aspect.
BUT, there is no comparison to the Trump Org. 4/
I don’t care what the Manhattan DA says, the Trump Org’s core business model since 2009 has been working closely with money-laundering oligarchs to facilitate their money-laundering.
There is zero comparison between that activity, which actively undermines the US …5/
and hurts the victims of corruption in other countries.
On a scale of 1 to 100, Hunter Biden is, I dunno, a 20? It’s pretty lame to get sweetheart deals on your dad’s name, but also very, very common.
The Trump Org is a profound outlier among US companies. 6/
I’d say a 95 on that 1 to 100 scale.
They KNOWINGLY participated in and helped a money laundering operation that was almost-certainly for Iran’s National Guard’s WMD efforts.
Alright, I’m bumping that 95 up to a full 100. 7/
Hunter Biden’s laptop has gotten, roughly, infinitely more coverage than Trump’s actual work for an actual enemy power of the US.
What the fucking fuck? 8/end
Right!?https://t.co/1ntbtMiMkH
— Kimberly (@ArizonaK1m) March 19, 2022
https://t.co/GrEudf2HLghttps://t.co/LJUdjyti3hhttps://t.co/i5fLaIxhiO
— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) March 19, 2022
Baud
Hunter Biden should sell NFTs of his laptop.
Calouste
The only reason the Bushes didn’t become wildly rich after leaving office is because they were already wildly rich when they started.
debbie
I can’t imagine why anyone would think Rudy had even a shred of integrity at this point.
Jerzy Russian
I wonder if either of the former presidents named “Bush” would be included in the above. If lots of people want to pay good money to see former presidents speak or to read their books, I don’t see a huge problem with that.
Mike E
@Calouste: Yep, from real Nazi money.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
SalterWobchak
I’m sure Hillary will also be locked up any day now…
schrodingers_cat
In art related news, my Tombow fudenosuke set is here. Black pens, colors and neon colors. I am stoked. They are recommended for brush lettering.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
?
Cacti
Thank goodness that never happens in journalism.
gwangung
@Jerzy Russian: Yeah, well, even on our side, there are people who give Obama and Clinton crap for speaker’s fees and book sales (the latter boggles me more…how much crud can there be when that many people line up and actually buy a book?).
debbie
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
False equivalency in it’s purest form. Hunter Biden wasn’t running for office, like Dump.
Sister Golden Bear
<“Mean Girls” voice> Stop trying make Hunter Biden’s laptop happen! It’s not going to happen.
bbleh
@Jerzy Russian: Also … “wildly rich”? No, not by contemporary standards. And anyway, doesn’t that amount to “class warfare” or “hating people for success” or some other Republican sin?
Oh wait … sorry … there I go about Republican hypocrisy again. Really, I should stick to complaining about winter being cold.
Baud
@gwangung:
Agree about book sales. That’s a lame criticism.
Another Scott
Meh.
Davidson’s a good guy, but he’s mixing up all kinds of things here. He needs to get out of his fishbowl.
TFG had his kids and relations on the payroll of the federal government, while they were also running their skeevy businesses and shaking down foreign governments for their own private gain (666 Park Avenue, etc., etc.). Hunter was never on the US government payroll and Biden had nothing to do with his business dealings.
Are kids of politicians never supposed to be able to earn a living? I don’t think so.
When does it become “corruption” for a politician’s kid to get a position outside of government? Using their last name is not corrupt. Is being a janitor or a salesman not corrupt, but being a VP or on a board corrupt? No. It’s not the position that proves corruption. We don’t need yet another layer of bureaucracy snooping into politicians’ lives and their families lives (we need more good people running for office and working in government, not driving them away from yet more layers of BS that can be manipulated by bad actors), deciding whether their relations are somehow corrupt. We have plenty of safeguards and laws already. We need faithful people enforcing them.
Obama made a lot of money selling genuinely popular best-selling books that he himself wrote. The Clintons did the same. Do politicians have to take a vow of poverty and only live on their government pension on leaving office? No. Obama raised around a billion dollars for his campaigns. Did he treat it as a slush fund and direct it through his own family company, skimming off tens or hundreds of millions in the process? No.
Hunter Biden was and is a private citizen. The press gratefully allowed themselves to be played by GQP operatives that were hoping to use lies and “clouds and shadows” to bring down Biden the way they brought down HRC. There was never anything there, it was all obvious from the beginning, and using stolen private communications and files from a private citizen as a political cudgel is highly unethical and should be illegal (as I said downstairs). Calling stolen e-mails and files “leaks” doesn’t make them fair game.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Barbara
@debbie:
So funny!
RevRick
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: I just saw on Twitter that Belorussian railway workers have sabotaged the routes to Ukraine, which, if true, would take the Russian army’s logistics problem go from bad to incredibly awful.
Steeplejack
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Source?
Edmund Dantes
It’s also a good thing nepotism never happens in corporate world. Or all those kids of Richie Rich’s really did get those jobs at their parents friends companies completely on their own merits.
Dan B
@RevRick: Great news! Now can they work on the Russian artillery?
Gravenstone
@Jerzy Russian: As opposed to Republican politicians who actively try to become rich while In office. Anyone remember the old wrestling coach Denny Hastert who somehow went from a few thousand dollars net worth on entering Congress yet was worth millions at the time of his indictment.
schrodingers_cat
Since it was Holi yesterday.
One of my all time favorites from the 1959 Navrang (Nav = nine, rang = colors) about a poet and his muse.
Since I took dance lessons for years, I can appreciate the technical difficulty in what Sandhya (the dancer onscreen) has accomplished here. Plus who can resist a dancing elephant.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Happy Holi-days
RaflW
The Marcy Wheeler embedded thread is the more important one, IMO. I completely agree with the need to run Rudy to ground (but of course Vogel will never do it. He and Maggie need their contacts too badly so they can ‘scoop’):
debbie
@RevRick:
Twitter was also full of rumors that Belarus is about to open an attack on Ukraine. That sabotage is far more meaningful.
Gravenstone
@RevRick: If true seems like a big fuck you to their own pro-Putin strongman as well.
smith
@Edmund Dantes: Not to mention all the kids whose future success is greased by their legacy admissions to the Ivies.
Kalakal
@Another Scott: Nailed it. Well put
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Thanks! Holi is a festival of colors, these days I play with colors throughout the year, so every day is a Holi – Day!
Kalakal
@schrodingers_cat: Splendid.
Another Scott
@Steeplejack: It’s on the KyivIndependent news feed column:
The “external” link seems to be of a FB page that requires a login.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@smith: Or moving down the SES ladder, people whose dad got them a good paying job at the mill or auto plant.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Steeplejack: (linky)
Gravenstone
@Omnes Omnibus: Mid-80s, I got a summer job at the local brass plant. Everyone was shocked I got hired, because I wasn’t related to anyone already there. Having an “in” has always been a thing, at many levels.
artem1s
@Jerzy Russian:
Why? Hate to tell you this but both the Clintons were wicked smart and were going to be wildly rich whether they held public office or not. They were grossly overqualified for public service work and would have been wildly rich much, much, much, much, much x100 sooner if Bill hadn’t decided he wanted to be governor of Arkansas. Hillary was already well on her way to being wildly rich before they moved into the governors mansion in Little Rock. FUCKING LITTLE ROCK! SHE DIDN’T LET BEING IN FUCKING LITTLE ROCK keep her from succeeding at anything she decided to take on. She didn’t let Bill’s penis problem stand in her way either.
Michelle was also on her way to making oodles of money – and Barack came from a pretty well off family on his mother’s side.
Maybe the thing you should think is really bad is that all the Bush and Traitor Tots family members were grossly incompetent and still were given chance after chance but could only enrich themselves by bankrupting company after company and/or blowing up the Savings and Loan, banking and stock market. Or the old fashion way by bombing some country back to the stone age.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@RevRick:
You gotta hand it to Colonel Hogan and the Underground, they’re so good sabotage.
RevRick
@Dan B: I wish. But if this hinders getting ammo…
Chief Oshkosh
@Another Scott: You are super-correct, sir! Trump pissed all over the Emoluments Clause. He had his kids manage the business side of those many, many actions! He literally installed his kids in federal sinecures! In heretofore important governmental positions! Only in The Village do those illegal and actually-harmful activities equate to maybe, kinda, sorta, possibly enhancing potential business prospects. Which didn’t exist to begin with.
If The Village was vaporized tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
Jerzy Russian
@artem1s: That quote was from the series of tweets in the post itself. I don’t have a problem with either Clinton or Obama making money post presidency.
RevRick
@Gravenstone: Definitely! Lukashenko called in Putin’s thugs to put down the protests last year, so there’s a strong likelihood of that.
RevRick
@debbie: Let’s hope the report is accurate.
RaflW
@Gravenstone: Part of my policy work the last 10 years before I retired was around getting new people into the construction trades (the policy part was around getting lots more People of Color and women in the pipeline, funded, and retained in the workplace after hiring).
For a couple generations, one of the reasons (beside just plain racism and sexism) that the trades stayed really white was that these guys referred their cousins, nephews, etc, and got them thru the union hall process and into apprenticeships.
(Also, it turns out this generation of HS grads isn’t really looking to uncle Ralph the plumber for as many job leads.)
Another Scott
@artem1s: Michelle was the breadwinner when they were in Chicago. She was making $350k a year as some sort of administrator at the UofC Hospitals, IIRC.
Too many doofuses raid the treasury (directly or indirectly) when they’re in office, but lots and lots of good people don’t.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
Hunter Biden’s laptop is just a distraction from Hunter Biden’s paintings.
geg6
@Baud:
LOL! My favorite comment of the week.
HumboldtBlue
As I see that absurd statement has been covered, here’s a clip of a dude in Liverpool (incorrectly labeled Netherlands) dancing.
I learned today from r/linguists on Reddit that English speakers using the word “fucking” in the middle of a word is called “expletive infixation.”
Also:
Suzanne
@RaflW:
I’ve observed a lot of sexist, homophobic, and racist behavior on job sites, too. It’s still really bad. A couple of years ago, I was working on a project with a large, national CM/GC, and their project manager straight up told me that he would have anyone who he suspected was LGBT taken off his projects, because he just did not want to deal with the tension and bullshit that would inevitably occur with the tradesmen harassing that person.
MisterForkbeard
@Baud: There’s no market for it. Literally every republican and Russian asset already has a “complete legit Hunter Biden Laptop”
RaflW
@Suzanne: Yeah, it’s a big problem around here, too. That’s been one of several retention challenges. Getting the culture to change is some slow and often very friction-y work.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodingers_cat:
Can’t wait to see what you create with them!
different-church-lady
What do you wańt to bet every document on Guliani’s laptop begins with the words, “I am Hunter Biden and this laptop is mine and no one else’s and there is absolutely nothing suspicious on this laptop that belongs to me and nobody else, certainly nobody associated with the Trump campaign so stop thinking that.”
laura
@RaflW: The Marcy Wheeler embedded thread is the more important one – nominated for a rotating tag!
Hunter Biden was a lawyer who was as legitimate a board member as any random public figure regardless of the practice of appointing public figures to bolster or apply luster to the underlying entity; and he informed in writing his adherence to the law regarding FARA and such like; and I especially remember a flurry of anti-dynastic posts at Calculated Risk in 2014 that focused on both Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden and rose twitter/bernie/dsa that so irked over time that I walked away from the site. I’m predisposed to presume best of intentions by people and so failed to see what in hindsight looks like muddying the 2016 waters before either began serious campaigning.
different-church-lady
@MisterForkbeard: But that’s the whole point of NTFs! It proves you’re the only owner of something everybody has.
debbie
@HumboldtBlue:
Is that a negafuckingtive?
Cameron
@RaflW: That was the Philly construction unions right up into the ”70s. The Feds had to step in.
sukabi
@Jerzy Russian: the problem with the Clinton’s and Obama earning boatloads of money after being in office is they started out poor and on the wrong side of the tracks and got rich because of their skill, not at all the method that’s preferred by inherited wealth and position.
JAFD
@RaflW:
Of coursse, we do need plumbers, and it pays pretty well …
Had some connections in the building trades, myself. Fifty years later, wondering if I’d have had happier and more productive life as carpenter or electrician….
SpaceUnit
Isn’t it just a teensy bit illegal to knowingly provide falsified evidence to the friggin’ FBI?
Why isn’t Rudy in a cell? Seriously, I don’t understand this.
Suzanne
@JAFD: Do you have all your fingers? If so, then you’re doing comparatively well.
Mike J
@SpaceUnit: You need to prove that he knows it’s fake. He’ll plead stupidity, and what jury wouldn’t believe that?
HumboldtBlue
@debbie: Abso-fucking-lutely!
Here’s a great vantage point of the cyclist and the truckers today.
SpaceUnit
@Mike J:
I see what you mean. At this point he could probably use an insanity plea.
Another Scott
@HumboldtBlue: Brave fellow. Too many cyclists have been killed by normal traffic in DC.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Villago Delenda Est
John Solomon should be exiled to Saint Helena for his role in this farce. With no Internet access, either. Let him rot in Napoleon’s old villa.
NotMax
@JAFD
And nary a one of us made the right third wish.
:)
prostratedragon
@HumboldtBlue: Love it! And like his bike. Shows forethought.
Kelly
@Omnes Omnibus: My heavy equipment operator Dad got me great summer jobs building logging roads.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cacti: If only Vogel could see this, he’d be headed to the burn unit.
James E Powell
@HumboldtBlue:
Right, as in God for-fucking-bid. I think it is either the only one in English or the only one that readily comes to mind.
Villago Delenda Est
You’re singing to someone in the choir here!
RaflW
@JAFD: We had to replace the well pump at our family cabin this week. Granted, Rock & Walworth counties in SE Wisconsin are a ruralish, blue collarish part of the state, but the young guy (maybe 30?) who did the work was personable, worked pretty fast & competently, and talked about ice fishing, going skating on the lake, and some relative’s cabin.
I bet when he gets off work, he doesn’t overthink and run through his work day, struggle to ignore after hours emails from clients, bosses or co-workers, plus earns a good living.
HumboldtBlue
@James E Powell:
ST.-FUCKING-PETER’S!
JERSEY CITY IN THE HOUSE!
MOM SMILING FROM WHEREVER SHE IS!
Ken
@James E Powell: British English sometimes infixes “bloody” (which was, I understand, considered much more offensive a few decades ago).
Kelly
@HumboldtBlue: Murray St had the longest winning streak in men’s NCAA Bball going into the game. St Pete’s had the second longest. What a game.
Craig
@HumboldtBlue: I’m all aboard the St. Peter’s Cinderella Story. Such a fun team.
MisterForkbeard
@RaflW: On the other hand…
I have a friend who’s dad was an elevator mechanic. It was really hard work – hugely draining and it messed up his back badly enough that he was essentially bedridden 5 years after he “retired” due to medical reasons. He didn’t have insurance after he left either, so he was pretty well screwed.
I have another friend doing similar work now who lost 4 fingers on the job and was really lucky he could get them reattached. My desk job sucks a lot of butt sometimes, but I don’t have to worry about either of those things.
Jim Appleton
Dead thread, but this is worthy.
In late 1976 my dad booked a family vacation in Europe, from our home base in Kuwait.
He communicated with the travel agent by Telex, a now extinct medium which sent and received text via phone lines.
In my dad’s world, Telex had its own jargon. I saw some of his routine messages, which barely looked like English.
“I,” as in I am soandso, became “Eye,” he said to avoid confusing for the numeral 1.
So the Appletons were booked into hotels, car rentals, airline connections, tour packages, etc. as the “Eye” family, because Pops wrote a lot of “Eye will be …”
HumboldtBlue
@Kelly:
Great game, great sports story.
@Craig:
St. Peter’s is the reason we watch, for the one-in-a-million upset. It’s what makes this tourney special.
BellyCat
@JAFD: Biggest difference from job sites and white collar workplaces? One frequently hears people whistling, humming or singing at the former. And the finger count is significantly higher than one might think.
debbie
@HumboldtBlue:
They don’t seem to be happy. ?
debbie
@James E Powell:
Absofuckinglutely is the one I’ve used most. I also like how it strengthens the certainty of whatever the absolute is.
brantl
@James E Powell: Abso-fucking-lutely?!