Fox host: Republicans have failed to produce any evidence for impeaching Biden after dozens of interviews and over 100,000 documents released pic.twitter.com/XRkaps8eCO
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) February 28, 2024
I'll walk through Hunter Biden's refutations of GOP allegations tomorrow. Tonight, I looked at the big picture of his testimony and his effective explanations of his career and his relationship with his father. No paywall: https://t.co/d3rn1BO7vZ
— Philip Bump (@pbump) March 1, 2024
No ‘On The Road’ behind the FYWP curtain this morning (there’s a bunch queued up for next week, don’t worry), so here’s a bonus post from me. From the rapidly-becoming-a-must-read Philip Bump, at the Washington Post, “Hunter Biden gives House Republicans the rebuttal they didn’t want”:
Hunter Biden’s appearance in front of investigators and members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees unfolded a bit like a Bruce Lee movie.
Republican legislators and interviewers challenging the president’s son on the House majority’s behalf would throw out an allegation, often one that’s been worn smooth after tumbling around in the right-wing media universe for the past year or two. And Biden would invariably swat it away, stripping off the layers of innuendo that had been applied by Donald Trump and Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) or Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) or any of myriad Fox News commentators.
This included epic battles against well-known foes, like an exchange between Hunter Biden and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), or repeated, extended back-and-forth with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). But at no point was a question left unanswered — including through an invocation of the Fifth Amendment — or, to an objective observer, left answered with obvious incompletion.
The discussion was centered on the Republican effort in the ongoing impeachment inquiry to demonstrate that President Biden had benefited financially from Hunter Biden’s business endeavors — and, they hoped, that the elder Biden had used his position as vice president to that end. They were unsuccessful in making that case from the hearing’s first moments.
“I did not involve my father in my business,” Hunter Biden said in his opening comments, “not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions, domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist, never.” His position did not diverge from that at any point; instead, he frequently invoked this same claim over and over again as a means of cutting off one of the familiar lines of inquiry with which he was presented…
Hunter Biden’s testimony centered heavily on two themes. First, the closeness of his family, having been drawn together by the tragic deaths of his mother and, later, his brother. This is why he always took his father’s calls, he said, and why he would always welcome his father to join him at dinners.
“I can’t count the number of times my dad stopped to have dinner with me and my family,” he testified — including at a cafe that was situated between the White House and the vice-presidential residence.
The other was that Joe Biden was a career politician.
“My dad has been a United States Senator since I was 2 years old,” Biden said at one point. “My whole life has been this.”
His point? That glad-handing strangers and dropping into events was part of his father’s daily life — and therefore his own…
A legislator asked him whether he’d worked for foreign governments.
“I never worked for a country,” he replied. “I am not Jared Kushner.”…
.@RepRaskin: This impeachment inquiry has been a comedy of errors from the beginning…I think our colleagues would do best at this point to fold up the circus tent and allow us to focus on something that would actually be of benefit to the American people. pic.twitter.com/VLNbdaSsoc
— House Judiciary Dems (@HouseJudiciary) February 28, 2024
MAGA's impeachment goose chase can’t pin a high crime or misdemeanor on the president, and its original star witness sits in jail awaiting prosecution for lying to the FBI. And so it ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Time to pack up the circus tent. pic.twitter.com/zaAx7G4mBO
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) February 29, 2024
Baud
Christmas is March!
Baud
Oh, snap.
Manyakitty
The comments on this article are good, too. I even left a nice one lol.
mrmoshpotato
Narrator: That’s because it was all a massive pile of shit that wasted taxpayer money.
Baud
I can’t believe they didn’t even find a private email server.
mrmoshpotato
“Suck my left nut! You all know what it looks like – especially Marge!”
Baud
This is why the Republicans wanted to do this behind closed doors.
Baud
Via reddit
This is the real reason Trump is competitive. One side of the class war knows how to fight it.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
The nut-sucking?
Baud
@mrmoshpotato:
Yes.
Princess
It’s interesting for me to see how much better he did in this hearing, under arguably much tougher circumstances, than those three university presidents.
Kay
@Baud:
When this started and Republicans started screeching, the reports I read seemed to indicate they would go after tax cheats – people who who file fraudulent returns. Do audits. “You should have paid 28,000 but you only paid 11,000”. But these people don’t even bother to file, let alone pay anything? This enforcement is apparently way, way overdue.
Baud
@Kay:
Yep. The low hanging fruit.
OzarkHillbilly
Unlike donald t-“if your innocent, why would you claim the 5th”-rump.
(as best I recall his statement on the subject)
OzarkHillbilly
Hence the GOP screeching. I do have to wonder how many GOP pols are in the crosshairs.
Kay
Which part of that do Republicans disagree with? They’re in favor of having a special group of people who just blow off filing and paying taxes? I taught my children that they had to file taxes when they started working. Do conservatives teach theirs something different? Is that where these special snowflakes are coming from?
Attempted Chemistry
@Baud: They found a “laptop”. Both the butter emails and the “laptop” take advantage of Americans’ fundamental ignorance of what technology is capable of.
Baud
@Kay:
Not paying taxes is their version of civil disobedience against injustice.
Baud
@Attempted Chemistry:
Maybe next they’ll ask chatGPT if Biden should be impeached.
OzarkHillbilly
Taxation is theft.
wjca
I wonder more how many major GOP donors are in the crosshairs.
Kay
Kay
Not a big fan of Hunter Biden but I have to say his oppositional and adversarial approach to the politically motivated attacks is kind of refreshing. I would have suggested he keep his head down and just let media (primarily the NYTimes) and Republicans invent a scandal – I would have said it was inevitable once they get rolling with a lie – but this approach is much better. They’ll still invent a scandal but at least we’re not all going along pretending it’s real. This is a like a defense of reality more than Hunter Biden.
OzarkHillbilly
@wjca: All of them Katie.
Baud
@Kay:
It is a nice change.
I’ll also repeat what I said yesterday: the Dems on this committee have been great.
Matt McIrvin
@Attempted Chemistry: Remember, the last chunk of “Hillary emails”, the ones that sparked Comey’s letter that probably flipped the election (though their contents were completely inconsequential, as Comey announced slightly too late for it to matter), were from Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They’re trying to play that story again.
lowtechcyclist
@OzarkHillbilly:
If not the pols, then certainly their major donors.
ETA: Beaten to it by wjca!
wjca
@lowtechcyclist: Two great minds with a single thought
Geminid
@Kay: The post made me think that Hunter Biden has good attorneys.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Maybe they’re trying, but so far the legwork to get to that point hasn’t been there.
OzarkHillbilly
Speaking of taxes:
Remember this when you file your tax return this year.
TBone
Heather Cox Richardson had this to say in today’s Letter:
“Last night, Maggie Haberman and Andrew Higgins of the New York Times reported that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has undermined democracy in Hungary, will visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago next week as Trump scrambles to find the more than half a billion dollars he needs to pay the fines and penalties courts have ordered. “We cannot interfere in other countries’ elections,” Orbán said last week, “but we would very much like to see President Donald Trump return to the White House.”
Is a foreign country going to bail him out of his civil judgment woes? Is that possible through some corporate or other murky machination so the money isn’t traceable? Or can anyone just gift the money to him like, say, by buying one of his properties and gifting it back to him for a dollar? I’m speculating, which I don’t usually do much of, but if he wriggles out of this I’m gonna be pissed. Someone wealthy enough might not care if he loses his appeal. I don’t know what to think, haven’t had enough coffee yet…
Baud
@TBone:
First I’ve heard of this.
JMG
@Princess: He has Abbe Lowell, Washington’s best white collar crime defense attorney, as counsel, while the university presidents had their in-house attorneys, who are nowhere near as good. Lowell was Jared Kushner’s lawyer, too.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: It’s also the wrong time. The reason the Comey letter had the effect it did was that it was an October Surprise about a week before Election Day, and seemed like a dramatic new break in the emails story (also reminding everyone of an association between Hillary Clinton and a sex offender–Trump leaned into that angle hard). If it had happened any earlier it would have just been another of the sporadic eruptions that amounted to nothing.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Putin recently claimed he wanted to see Biden reelected, which got a couple of days of press that interpreted it as Putin doing Trump a favor through reverse psychology (more likely than not, but I’m done trying very hard to psychoanalyze things that come out of the mouths of tyrannical liars).
TBone
@OzarkHillbilly: I paid a much higher tax bill in 2018 than Rump did (proudly). I had a financial windfall that year and marched right into an accountant’s office immediately. I bragged about contributing more than the president to my Rumpy neighbors and said Rump was criminally negligent, not “smart.”
wjca
Either of those constitutes income, taxable income, to him. And hard to hide.
Ken
Somehow “Here’s a picture of your dick!” doesn’t strike me as all that epic.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
That I heard about. Yeah, most people saw it for what it was.
TBone
@Baud: Heather Cox Richardson rounds up important news for each day and points it out in each night’s newsletter which I read in the mornings. Her daily Letter comes out usually very late at night. She takes Sundays off.
lowtechcyclist
How devoid of substance did the allegations have to be to get even Faux News to admit that there was nothing there??
Glad to know that even the MAGAts are being informed that the House investigation came up with a big pile of nothing.
A bunch of eagerly gullible marks in the House GOP caucus got played by the Russkis. That’s the story.
TBone
@wjca: thank you!
OzarkHillbilly
@JMG: Hmmmm… Makes me wonder how many times Hunter had to tell Lowell, “I am not Jared Kushner.”
Betty
@Princess: As one Republican noted after the hearing, he was well prepped. The University Presidents were not. On another note, in a news summary, I saw a headline from the New Your Post announcing that Hunter admitted his father had received $5 million. How do they get away with such blatant lies? .
TBone
@Ken: now I’m smiling again.
Geminid
@OzarkHillbilly: That reminded of tbe ending to the movie Spartacus:
“Hunter Biden is not Jared Kushner! I am not Jared Kushner! We all are not Jared Kushner!”
Princess
@JMG: not true. Harvard hired a very expensive specialist law firm to coach Gay. Some think it would have been better if she had stayed in house. It’s ridiculous to think Harvard with its endowment had fewer resources than Hunter Biden when getting ready for this.
Steve in the ATL
@Geminid:
It’s a shame that my clients don’t!
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Eyeroller
@Princess: The main problem the university presidents had was that they are academics and only understood academic politics and didn’t seem able to comprehend the real situation they were in. The former president of U Penn is a lawyer herself so it should have been easy for her to prep for the legal aspects. But they went before Congress and talked like they would at a faculty meeting. Hunter Biden clearly understands the underlying politics here so can be much more effective.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Geminid
@Princess: The University presidents had a shorter time to prepare for their committee appearances, and the subject was more difficult and complex; they basically had to traverse a political minefield.
Hunter Biden’s task was more straightforward: take punches and punch back hard.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I appreciate his approach. Because, this shyt is ridiculous 😡 and they are clowns 😡
Suzanne
We are delivering 100% construction documents today, on the pair of projects I have worked on every day for the last three years. I was up until about 2 AM putting final touches on my scope (operating rooms, hybrid OR, cath labs, EP labs, interventional radiology).
I am exhausted.
wjca
Learned politics at his father’s knee. (He was 2 when his dad became a senator.)
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: Congratulations! Also, holy cow.
Gin & Tonic
@Suzanne: But it feels good when you’re done, right?
Geminid
@Suzanne: Good thing this is leap year. February 29 might have come in handy.
Suzanne
@Gin & Tonic: Um, the dirty secret is that we aren’t done. All of those rooms, except for the general OR, have a large equipment modality that will be purchased. And then the room is designed around that specific piece of equipment. Each piece on the market has different structural requirements for both the floor and the above-ceiling…..and then we design a whole custom ceiling for whichever piece they ultimately buy.
So…. we did each room type, designing to a piece of equipment they selected, but they haven’t fully committed to the medical equipment yet. And they likely will not commit until 2026. So, I am expecting that at least half of these rooms will have to be done again.
But they look beautiful.
ETA: If they change equipment and the room needs to be redesigned, they have to pay us more to do it again. I don’t come cheap, friends!
SFAW
@Baud:
That’s because the Deep State hid it, to help Sleepy Joe Brandon.
SFAW
@Baud:
Kinda like others going pantsless?
topclimber
@TBone: Orban also tries to mess with Ukrainian politics. A couple of months ago he was going to host oligarch and former UKR President Peter Poroshenko in Budapest. Z saw through this attempt to fluff up and conspire with a possible rival and suddenly Poroshenko didn’t get permission to leave the country–under martial law, males 18 to 60 have to be on call and in country.
In order to qualify for EU, Ukraine has to crack down on corruption, so maybe the oligarchs (of which Ukraine has too many) are feeling the heat.
Maybe not ALL NATO expansion has been for the best.
wjca
“The work(wo)man is worth of her hire.”
wjca
Hungary joined NATO first. Orban came along later. Hindsight is 20/20.
And, after all, we had TIFG, who was at least as bad as Orban, so we’ve got no room to talk.
Anyway
@Suzanne:
Congratulations! 100% sounds so good. Done-done as we like to say.
Take a nap. Maybe put off the peloton/run ’til Sunday :P
NotMax
@Suzanne
There’s no such thing as too many wall outlets. (Well removed from oxygen connections, of course.)
;)
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@lowtechcyclist: With luck, some of them won’t be as stupid as Jim Jordan, who said to a dumbfounded reporter, “The basic facts are still there.”
Nettoyeur
@Geminid: He is also himself a lawyer.
Geminid
@topclimber: I recall that in the first year of tge war Orban also tried some prisoner gambit, whereby Russia tranferred a dozen or so Ukrainian soldiers to Hungary. They were all from Ukraine’s Carpathian region in the west, and it seemed like Orban wanted to help stir up tensions within Ukraine.
The Nato alliance can certainly do without Hungary. The alliance already does well without Switzerland and Austria, two similarly sized nations. I think that may be why Orban came around on Swedish Nato accession; he was told that Nato would either include Sweden with Hungary or Sweden without Hungary.
Suzanne
@NotMax: Each wall outlet in these rooms prolly costs $2K, and that’s to say nothing of the fiber optic outlets for the surgical robots. :) We have to spend money judiciously. Each of these rooms costs well north of $2 million.
Suzanne
@wjca:
Goddamn right.
I like when people tell me that my job is less difficult than hanging drywall. Because I lift less stuff.
SFAW
@Suzanne:
Appalled that people do that to you, but I guess I’m not surprised. But having done project management (on a much smaller scale than what you do), I know how difficult it is to get it right.
Suzanne
All I can say is….if you have a STEMI or need a pacemaker or need a joint replacement in 2028 or after, and you live in the NoVA DC suburbs…. they can roto-rooter your arteries or give you a new knee in a nice room. And then you can recover in another nice room.
Geminid
@Nettoyeur: Yes, Hunter Biden is a lawyer, and he seems very engaged in this matter. And he’s not intimidated by some political hacks with the title, “Representative.”
SFAW
@Suzanne:
Almost makes me want to move there from the PRM, and then mess up my knee so I can get it replaced in “your” hospital.
Almost.
TBone
@Suzanne: you’re doing great work, be proud while you rest as much as you are able to.
TBone
@topclimber: grrrrrrrr
Nettoyeur
@Betty: Now you know why Hunter didn’t want closed testimony without a lot of conditions.
Suzanne
@SFAW: This is an interesting business to be in. Architecture has historically been very male-dominated, and it still is at the leadership/ownership level, but there is much more gender parity at the mid-career level and below. (Not coincidentally, I am suuuuure, that’s about when design and engineering fees became deregulated and now we make much less than we used to on projects.)
On this project, I have mostly worked in the office and with the client, but for most of my career, I have also spent a lot of time in the field with the general contractors and trades. It is like getting a front-row seat to all of the contempt white patriarchy has to offer!
Xavier
This whole thing is because Trump, and Republicans in general, are convinced that everyone is playing fast and loose with the rules and if you look hard enough you’ll find the evidence you’re looking for.
I leave it to the reader to explain why Trump thinks that.
Xavier
@wjca: either of those constitutes clear purchase of a politician by a foreign government.
Ironcity
@Suzanne: Yes! Change Orders and Changes in Scope. Profit centers for any A&E work.
JAFD
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Trust Mr. Winsor is getting better. Am heart attack survivor, know it’s slow but sure process. If you don’t feel you can trust your doctors, get new ones, do what they say.
@Suzanne: Trust you made the catheter labs, hmm, ‘cheerful’ – I ‘came back from the dead’ in one, twice.
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid: Minor geographical nit to pick. The region of Ukraine which borders Hungary and where Orban has tried to stir up trouble is called “Trans-Carpathia” (Zakarpattia) – the literal meaning of the Ukrainian word is “on the other side of the Carpathians” – because it really is on the other side from Ukraine proper. It’s funny when you travel around there, like in Mukachevo, and see signs in both Ukrainian and Hungarian, two languages that have absolutely nothing in common.
Geminid
@Suzanne: This made me think of Virginia State Senator L. Louis Lucas. She was hired by the Navies Norfolk Shipyard as an Assistant Shipfitter in 1969, and four years later became the Yard’s first woman Shipfitter. Lucas was a naval architectural draftsperson.
Senator Lucas learned a lot as a Black woman in a white man’s world. She was well-prepared when Governor Youngkin showed up in January of 2022 because she had dealt professionally with privileged white men for 50 years.
Chris T.
@Suzanne:
Whoever comes up with the hospital-equipment equivalent of “containerized cargo” could make a mint…
NotMax
@Suzanne
Now remembering Janet Bonnema.
SFAW
@Suzanne:
I love reading about your projects, I get wistful. [Although, as I said, my projects were much smaller — design and development engineering for electronic equipment.]
twbrandt
@Suzanne: Congrats! I hope you feel good about it;
Suzanne
@JAFD:
I don’t know if I would describe them as “cheerful”….. but they are spacious, modern, easy to clean and maintain, and effective!
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: Thanks for the information. My knowledge of this area is pretty vague. One thing this war has done is make me realize how much I have to learn about the nations surrounding the Black Sea.
Speaking of which, the corvette Hetman Ivan Mazepa is scheduled to be delivered to the Ukrainian Navy this year. It was launched from a Turkish shipyard in October of 2022, and has been going through fitting-out and sea trials since. When the Mazepa was launched, Ukraine’s Defense Minister said its home port would be Sevastopol.
Suzanne
@SFAW: It was on this project, a couple of years ago, that I had a (male) surgeon helpfully inform me that “some walls are load-bearing”.
Trick is on him, because in a hospital, vanishingly few walls are load-bearing.
Suzanne
@Geminid: I worked on a project once where I was often the only woman in meetings. One day, our civil engineer walked into the conference room, and he “greeted” me by tugging on my braid.
I will note that he was a consulting engineer, and their firm was selected by mine. So in a real way, he worked for me. And he just reached out to me on LinkedIn this week.
Ughhhhhh.
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid: Mazepa himself, the Cossack leader, is still considered excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for his siding with Sweden’s King Charles XII and defection from Tsar Peter I in 1708.
Jackie
@Suzanne: TGIF!
Big Fly
@Baud:
And the “injustice” of course is the idea of having to pay taxes.
Freemark
@Steve in the ATL: we’ll at least you are hopefully the best they can afford /s
Paul in KY
@Princess: Think Hunter had a more realistic idea of what he was facing. The Presidents seem to have been a bit high on their supply.
SFAW
@Suzanne:
Fixed to comport better with his mansplaining.