Here is what the New York Times doesn’t tell you.
Here is what the New York Times doesn’t tell you.
I can’t decide which is my favorite part of the story dribbled out by the media-Democrat complex’s mothership last night.
It’s probably the part, 16 paragraphs down, in which the New York Times explains how it knew the Biden-Harris State Department was stonewalling on the production of documents showing that, while Joe Biden was vice president, his ne’er-do-well son Hunter beseeched the Obama-Biden State Department to lobby the Italian government on behalf of Burisma — the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that was lavishly paying Hunter so it could have access to Vice President Biden and his political influence.
Pray tell, how did the Times know? Well, as reporter Kenneth Vogel relates, because the State Department “had failed to produce responsive records contained in a cache of files connected to a laptop that Mr. Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop” (emphasis added).
Right, the laptop from hell.
That’s the Hunter Biden laptop that the Times, the rest of the media-Democrat complex, and the politicized “community” of current and former national-security officials colluded with the 2020 Biden campaign to convince the public was a Russian disinformation operation. The same laptop over which Hunter and his allies smeared the repair-shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, as a thief . . . even as they implied that the incriminating data might be fake.
Like the FBI, the IRS, and rest of the Biden Justice Department investigators, who had acquired the laptop data months earlier, the Times understood that the laptop was authentic, that the data was not manufactured by a foreign intelligence service. Ergo, as Vogel relates, the Times sued the Biden-Harris State Department when it failed to produce relevant government correspondence, the existence of which the laptop established.
This turns out to include correspondence showing how and why the Obama-Biden administration was asked to weigh in with a foreign government on behalf of a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch (Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky), who was paying a fortune to the vice president’s son — indeed, who slashed Hunter’s salary in half as soon as daddy dearest’s term as VP expired in 2017. (As I’ve previously detailed, the New York Post reported last year that the laptop established, for example, Hunter’s 2015 communications with Antony Blinken, then the Obama-Biden administration’s deputy secretary of state, now the Biden-Harris administration’s secretary of state. In 2020 congressional testimony, Blinken falsely denied the email correspondence with Hunter.) Because the State Department’s belated disclosure to the Times is heavily redacted, it remains unclear whether the Obama-Biden administration actually went to bat with the Italian government on Burisma’s behalf.
So I think my favorite part of last night’s story is the one that relies on the laptop that the Democrats and their notetakers told us was “Russian disinformation.” But honestly, it’s got stiff competition.
That’s because eleven paragraphs into its report, the Times notes:
Hunter Biden has not been charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires people to disclose when they lobby the U.S. government on behalf of foreign interests.
The Times elaborates that the prosecutor in Hunter’s tax case, faux special counsel David Weiss, is really starting to pile on the FARA evidence. Why just last week, “in what was perceived as a pressure move,” Weiss and his staff disclosed “that they had evidence that Mr. Biden had reached out to the State Department on behalf of a different client, a real estate magnate facing corruption charges in Romania.” The paper stresses that although Hunter “did not register under FARA as a lobbyist for the Romanian developer or Burisma,” Weiss and his prosecutors told the presiding judge in Hunter’s federal tax prosecution that “they did not intend to add a FARA charge.”
Remarkable.
As my column a few days back attests, I must cop to “perceiving” Weiss as making a “pressure move” — i.e., turning up the heat in an effort to get Hunter to plead guilty. That’s because it is a pressure move.
The tax case, which is scheduled to go to trial in Los Angeles federal court on September 5 (i.e., shortly before early voting in the presidential election begins), involves Hunter’s willful failure to pay “his fair share” — i.e., about $1.4 million in taxes — on income he generated by peddling his father’s political influence, with his father’s obvious encouragement, to agents of corrupt and anti-American governments. This is the last thing that the Biden-Harris administration, the Harris-Walz presidential campaign, and Democrats nationally want in the news for four or more weeks right after Labor Day.
Despite the Times’ excuse-making for the Biden-Harris State Department (you know, they’re just kinda slow), it is obviously not an accident that State withheld the documents showing that Hunter asked the Obama-Biden State Department to lobby Italy on behalf of Burisma until after President Biden was pressured by Democrats and donors to fold his reelection campaign. This revelation comes at the same time Weiss is providing a pretrial whiff of the corruption evidence in the tax case. The point is to induce Hunter to plead guilty and make the story go away — or, at the very least, to draw the sting of the corruption proof so that, if there is a trial, Democrats can dismiss it as “yesterday’s news” when the testimony is adduced while Americans have started casting ballots.
Here is what the Times doesn’t tell you.
First, Weiss and the Biden-Harris attorney general, Merrick Garland, desperately tried to make the Hunter Biden cases go away. First, they schemed to drop the influence-peddling investigation with no charges at all. When IRS whistleblower testimony about DOJ’s preferential treatment of the president’s son made that politically untenable, Weiss offered Hunter a no-jail plea to a couple of puny tax misdemeanors, along with a side deal that would vanish the felony gun charges against him in a “diversion” program.
Because of pointed questioning by an alert federal judge regarding the highly unusual plea bargain, plus the bull-headedness of Hunter’s lawyers, the sweetheart plea deal collapsed. In their scrambling embarrassment, Garland named Weiss a “special counsel” to pretend he was an independent actor (knowing the appointment did not comply with the conflict-of-interest regulations that apply to special counsels), and Weiss finally indicted Hunter on the gun and tax charges. Hunter has now been found guilty and awaits sentencing in the gun case; in the tax case, Weiss has taken pains to keep President Biden’s name out of the indictment even though it was Joe’s political influence that Hunter was monetizing.
Second, Weiss and his prosecutors have told the court that they don’t intend to file FARA charges because, at this point, they can’t file FARA charges. That is because Weiss intentionally allowed the statute of limitations on Hunter’s FARA charges to expire. Just as Weiss intentionally allowed the statute of limitations to expire on Hunter’s tax charges from the years when Joe Biden was vice president.
The statute of limitations for a FARA offense is five years. Joe Biden’s term as vice president ended in January 2017. Weiss delayed indicting — after trying not to indict at all — until 2023. Despite the incriminating evidence, there are no FARA charges because Weiss strategically disappeared them. To repeat some of what I wrote a few days back (which drew on a column from a year earlier):
There has been surprisingly little attention paid to one of Weiss’s most critical but furtive decisions in the case.
Last year, Weiss dropped the FARA investigation of Blue Star Strategies. That would be the Clinton-allied Democratic lobbying firm that Hunter recruited to lobby for Burisma and its chief, Mykola Zlochevsky. That would be the same Zlochevsky who lavishly paid Hunter to sit on the energy company’s board, who told an FBI informant he had paid Hunter and Joe Biden a combined $10 million in bribes, and whom Hunter put on the phone with his dad, then-vice president Joe Biden, in late 2015 — while Zlochevsky was a fugitive living in exile in Dubai and was pressuring Hunter to use his political connections to pressure the Ukrainian government to drop its Burisma investigation. That was just days before Vice President Biden started pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
Weiss quietly aborted the Blue Star Strategies probe in exchange for the lobbying firm’s being quietly permitted to file a post hoc FARA registration detailing its Burisma exertions — an implicit admission that the law called for registering with the Justice Department at the time of those exertions.
Obviously, if Weiss had any intention of proceeding with FARA charges against Hunter Biden, he would not have opted against charging the lobbyist that Hunter had brought in to do Burisma’s bidding. And at this point, of course, the statute of limitations on 2015–16 FARA violations has expired in any event.
There are no FARA charges because the Biden-Harris Justice Department expected that President Biden would be running for reelection. There was no way the DOJ that answers to Biden was going to highlight, in a felony prosecution against his son, that while Biden was vice president, Hunter was a well-paid agent of corrupt oligarchs and the Communist Chinese regime, who lobbied the Obama-Biden administration to do his patrons’ bidding.
Besides that, the Times’ story is very informative.