. . . At least not yet
. . . At least not yet
E lected progressive Democrat Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s district attorney, has indicted Donald Trump in one of the most truly ridiculous, nakedly partisan prosecutions of all time. Not only can Bragg not prove a federal campaign-finance offense; as a state prosecutor, he would have no jurisdiction to prosecute a federal-law violation even if he had the proof.
Nevertheless, Bragg is upset that Trump, the Dems’ arch-nemesis, did not disclose prior to the 2016 election that he’d green-lit hush-money payments to two women who (quite credibly) claim to have had extramarital liaisons with him a decade earlier. Mind you, hush-money payments are perfectly legal — they are often part of what’s known in the law biz as “non-disclosure agreements,” a staple of litigation settlements. Furthermore, even if they had been campaign expenditures (and, as a matter of law, they were not), federal law would not have required disclosure until 2017 — i.e., after the election. Naturally, none of this mattered to Bragg, who campaigned for office by touting the more than 100 lawsuits he’d filed against Trump as a state-government lawyer (much like his fellow elected New York progressive Democrat Letitia James, who campaigned vowing to use the state attorney general’s power against Trump, and is now doing just that). Bragg has used the hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels as the predicate for a false-bookkeeping case against Trump, a misdemeanor which the DA has abusively inflated into 34 felony counts.
The case is sufficiently embarrassing that no one can say when, or if, it will ever get to trial. Months ago, a March 25, 2024, trial date was set, but it’s not going to happen because that date conflicts with the Biden Justice Department’s election-interference trial against Trump (commencing March 4), and Bragg has signaled that he’d happily defer to the federal prosecutors.
The brazen partisanship of his effort has had the effect of diminishing the public perception that other Democrat-driven prosecutions of Trump are serious. The media–Democrat complex has thus allowed Bragg’s case to fade into the deep background. But that’s not a problem for Bragg. See, in politicized prosecution, the process is the penalty. On that score, the elected Democrat got what he wanted: to subject Trump to the expense, anxiety, and humiliation of investigation and indictment. Whether the case ever gets tried is beside the point.
Consider that as backdrop for the latest Biden corruption revelations.
It turns out that Kevin Morris, the Joe Biden donor and Hunter Biden “sugar bro” we discussed here just yesterday, paid off Hunter’s back taxes after expressing concern about the “political risk” to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign posed by the younger Biden’s arrears.
As the Washington Examiner’s Sarah Bedford reports, Morris, a wealthy Hollywood lawyer, pressured accountants working on Hunter’s millions of dollars in unpaid taxes in a February 7, 2020, email. “We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in,” Morris admonished. He also apologized to the accountants for the “pressure” he had put on them in an earlier conversation.
The email was among documents released by the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax issues and is one of the Republican-controlled committees conducting the impeachment inquiry that Speaker Mike Johnson is reportedly planning to shore up by conducting a full House vote to approve it.
Morris made outlays of an eye-popping $4.9 million to the president’s son between 2020 and 2022. The initial payments were to satisfy Hunter’s tax arrears, which, Biden insiders and Morris feared, would result in significant negative publicity during the election year. The Examiner relates, for example, that Morris paid $160,000 in January 2020 to settle a 2015 tax debt over which Hunter’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, was agitating. He continued paying tax arrears for Hunter — disbursements eventually aggregating to well over $2 million — basing the order of payments on the arrears that seemed most likely to generate negative political publicity.
Morris made the maximum allowable contributions to Joe Biden’s campaign, in addition to donating $25,000 to a left-leaning political action committee, and $10,000 to a political group dedicated to defeating President Trump in 2020. Much of Hunter’s exorbitant tax liabilities were generated by big money transfers from agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes seeking access to Joe Biden’s political influence (euphemistically referred to as “the Biden Brand”). Morris’s payments to satisfy Hunter’s liabilities were not reported as campaign contributions by the 2020 Biden campaign — or, apparently, in any other political-fundraising disclosures.
Jim Biden, the president’s brother and Hunter’s frequent partner in the family influence-peddling business, sent Morris a message “on behalf of the family” thanking him for his help. In a 2022 interview with the FBI and IRS, Jim said he couldn’t recall why he had thanked Morris. Memory’s a funny thing — brother Joe somehow couldn’t remember his scores of conversations, phone calls, pseudonymous emails, and meetings about Hunter’s and Jim’s Biden Brand business endeavors.
The Examiner adds that Hunter’s opaque financial entanglement with Morris has been described as a loan, which would not have to be repaid until 2025 — i.e., until after President Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign. Even though the payments started in 2020, there were evidently no loan documents until 2021. Meantime, as I discussed yesterday, Hunter appears to have transferred to Morris his 10 percent stake in Bohai Harvest RST — a lucrative investment partnership he established with agents of the Chinese regime. It is not known how much that asset is estimated to be worth, nor how it factors into the Biden–Morris financial relationship.
IRS agent Gary Shapley has testified that agents in 2021 raised concerns about a possible campaign-finance violation during the Justice Department’s Biden investigation — an apparent reference to Morris’s covering of Hunter’s tax liabilities. Shapley elaborated that prosecutor Lesley Wolf instructed the agents not to look into the allegation. Wolf was a top subordinate of Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, who was nominally in charge of the Justice Department’s probe — which was also being monitored by the top Biden Justice Department officials in Washington (including Tax Division, which would have to approve any tax charges).
Shapley and his team of IRS agents were removed from the investigation, at Weiss’s insistence, after five years of work. The removal followed Shapley’s internal complaints and memoranda, documenting that the president’s son was being given favorable treatment that would not be accorded to suspects without political connections.
Weiss, meanwhile, dragged his feet on the case for years while the statute of limitations lapsed on some of the most egregious potential offenses — including millions of dollars from foreign sources paid into the Biden family coffers between 2014 and 2017, while Joe Biden was vice president. Weiss tried to make the case disappear through a sweetheart, no-jail misdemeanor plea bargain, but the deal unraveled upon a few pointed questions by the presiding federal judge.
To be clear, I am quite confident that neither Kevin Morris nor President Biden and his campaign violated campaign-finance law. It makes no difference that they were probably motivated by Joe Biden’s election bid and political prospects to pay off the millions Hunter owed and “hide” the unseemly Hunter–Morris arrangement by not reporting the payments as donations.
I put the hide in quotes because there is no federal-law obligation to report if the payments are not campaign expenditures; and even if the participants are motivated to pay outstanding debts by fear of damage to a political campaign, the payments are not covered by the federal disclosure laws unless they are actual campaign expenditures. If they are, instead, the satisfaction of obligations that would have to be paid off regardless of whether there was a campaign, there is no violation of law — in either paying or refraining from disclosure.
So I wouldn’t authorize such a case against President Biden, just as I wouldn’t have authorized Bragg’s case against President Trump. But see, I’m not the attorney general. Nor am I a lawyer running for an elective state prosecutor’s position by promising to use the powers of the office to hound my party’s adversaries. Nor am I running for president by presenting myself as the only candidate who can stop a MAGA cabal of crooks and domestic terrorists. Nor am I the opposition candidate, portraying myself as my supporters’ “retribution” — the president who will give Democrats a taste of their own politicized-law-enforcement medicine if returned to the White House.
While insufficient to establish a crime, the cozy Biden–Morris arrangement looks closer to a felony campaign violation to me than does the nonsense that Bragg has framed as felonies stacked on felonies — so many they could theoretically land Trump in the slammer for over a century. The Biden–Morris transactions were close enough to a federal felony that objective federal investigators believed they were worth investigating — only to be thwarted by the Biden Justice Department. And if a Republican Justice Department decided to open an investigation of it in 2025 (when the statute of limitations, arguably, would not yet have lapsed), those prosecutors would at least have jurisdiction to enforce federal campaign laws — which Bragg does not.
The point is that, come January 2025, we are not apt to have prosecutors who objectively — if, alas, quaintly — apply the law, shorn of partisanship. We are going to have the likes of Jack Smith, subpoenaing millions of tweets by Trump followers just because he can, and indicting a former president on highly dubious charges, confident that a federal judge in Washington, D.C., would conclude Trump had no immunity from prosecution.
We’ll have the Smith types, along with the Bragg and James types. Except for this: Next time around, if there’s a new administration come January 2025, these may instead be scorched-earth, hyper-partisan prosecutors of the Trump persuasion, here to show you that revenge is a dish best served under a caption that says, “United States of America v. [Fill in Biden or other Democrat here].”
Each day, it seems, there is a new Biden-probe revelation that makes you wonder how Democrats are going to like living on the bottom rung of the two-tiered “justice” system they’ve erected.