Dear Weekend Jolter,
Only in the coming weeks might we get a sense of how much of a surprise Merrick Garland’s special-counsel appointment on Friday really was to President Biden — and, likely over a longer period of time, how broad in scope David Weiss’s investigation will actually be.
On the surface, it looked like this president’s Jeff Sessions moment. As attorney general under then-president Trump, Sessions famously recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2017, after which Robert Mueller was named special counsel. The target was livid. The New York Times later reported that Trump — not one to conceal how he feels — berated Sessions in the Oval Office:
Mr. Sessions would later tell associates that the demeaning way the president addressed him was the most humiliating experience in decades of public life.
Garland might not have to worry about such a dressing-down.
The AG, who previously named a special counsel to investigate Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, did take things a step further by granting Weiss’s request for the status as part of the probe into Hunter Biden and “other matters.” As the NR news team reports, Garland was open-ended about where the probe could lead:
In a brief statement, Garland explained that Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, had requested special counsel authority on Tuesday and that he had been granted the appointment “after consideration.”
Weiss will continue to oversee the “ongoing investigation” of Hunter as well as “any other matters that arose or may arise from that investigation,” Garland said.
But Andy McCarthy, who accurately predicted the appointment, stressed that a key question will be whether the prosecutor is given a “sweeping mandate to investigate and prosecute any and all crimes uncovered in an inquiry into the Biden family influence-peddling business,” or confined to Hunter Biden’s tax and gun crimes, which were the subject of his recently derailed plea deal. As for the selection of Weiss, Andy was not optimistic — arguing that the U.S. attorney should not even be eligible for the post and describing him as, ultimately, the “vehicle by which the Biden Justice Department intends to maintain tight control over the so-called Biden investigation.” Calling the probe a sham, he noted Weiss’s record of coordinating with Hunter Biden’s lawyers on his lenient plea deal and allowing the statute of limitations on Hunter and Co.’s 2014–15 conduct to lapse:
Because of the way Weiss has handled the investigation, any criminal offenses that occurred while Joe Biden was vice president are now time-barred. As I noted when the House Oversight Committee released its latest report on the $20 million-plus the Biden family raked in from agents of corrupt and anti-American governments, much of the conduct — and money — committee investigators have uncovered comes from transactions that took place prior to 2017.
Andy predicted that the appointment will culminate in a report clearing President Biden of any involvement in his family’s influence-peddling. The chairman of the House Oversight Committee was similarly skeptical of Garland’s intentions, alleging that the attorney general’s announcement was part of a “coverup” and an attempt to stonewall congressional oversight. It came hours after James Comer announced he intends to subpoena members of the Biden family.
The action in 2024, for both front-runners, might not be on the campaign trail, but in the U.S. House and the courtrooms.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Don’t say we didn’t warn you: Harvard’s Cynical Move to Get Around the Affirmative-Action Decision
Give it teeth: Biden’s Crackdown on Investments in China Is Only a First Step
ARTICLES
Rich Lowry: The Honor of Mike Pence
Madeleine Kearns: The Unproductive Moral of the Barbie Story
Becket Adams: The Miraculously Changing Narrative around Biden’s Involvement in Hunter Inc.
John McCormack: NBC’s Faulty Abortion Fact-Check
Brittany Bernstein: Biden Family Received Millions from Foreign Oligarchs Who Had Dinners with Then-VP Joe Biden
Brittany Bernstein: Oberlin College Sues Insurance Companies for Refusing to Reimburse $40 Million Settlement Paid to Bakery for False Racism Accusations
Ari Blaff: Inside a DEI Training Led by Consultants Who Humiliated School Principal before His Suicide
Caroline Downey: Trans Activists Assault Attendee at Texas ‘Save Women’s Sports’ Act Signing Ceremony
Natan Ehrenreich: Conservatives Must Follow Bill Buckley’s Lead in Fighting Antisemitism
Jimmy Quinn: Is the PLA Bringing Back Kamikaze-Style Attacks?
Charles C. W. Cooke: Lame Memes Are a Poor Substitute for Good Candidates
Andrew McCarthy: Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . . Still No Indictment in DOJ’s Biden ‘Case’
Christian Schneider: Donald Trump’s Appetite for Destruction
CAPITAL MATTERS
Peter Menzies reports from the good-intentions beat: Canada’s Online-Media Legislation Hits the Buffers
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White has a tough time making his way through Passages: Passages Strikes Out
The Fogg lockdown has lifted, and Brian Allen is grateful: Harvard’s Fogg Museum Comes Back to Life with a Glorious Watercolor Show
FROM THE NEW, AUGUST 28, 2023, ISSUE OF NR
Nicole Stelle Garnett & Michael Q. McShane: The School-Choice Moment
Daniel Buck: The School-Discipline Disaster
Ryan Mills: How Do You Spell ‘Mississippi’?
Dan McLaughlin: Trump Gave Them a Sword
Dominic Pino: Cricket Comes to America
EXCERPTS, THE IDEAL BEACH READ
The new issue of NR is out — a special issue, on education. I’ve included a few of those articles directly above, and you can find the rest here. But I’ll excerpt here something entirely unrelated, Dominic Pino’s colorful piece on cricket in America, complete with scenes from a game in Dallas:
There’s a sport beloved by well over a billion people around the world. Its stars are multi-millionaires, and they are some of the most followed athletes on social media. Some of the world’s largest stadiums were built for this sport, and games are broadcast and streamed globally.
I’m talking about the world’s second-most-watched sport: cricket. Most Americans don’t even know how the game works, let alone follow it as fans.
Cricket’s global presence is no longer centered around the country from which it came, the U.K. With its billion cricket-mad residents, India now leads the way. This year, India is passing China to become the world’s largest country by population. India is currently the world’s fifth-largest economy and is projected, after growing at a faster rate than any other major economy, to be third-largest by 2030. As India’s economic might grows, expect its cultural impact to grow as well.
One of India’s top entertainment exports is cricket, and it has come to America in the form of Major League Cricket (MLC), which played its championship game near Dallas on July 30. To determine whether cricket has any chance of establishing a foothold in the U.S., I headed down to Texas. There I discovered an enthusiastic fan base and an established subculture around the game. It’s not mainstream, but it’s lively and has potential for significant growth. . . .
I wanted to see whether there would be tailgating before a cricket match when it’s 105 degrees outside, so I showed up about an hour before the MLC championship between the Seattle Orcas and MI New York began. Sure enough, there was. Groups of people had found the few shaded spots under trees in the parking lot to set up camp.
I spoke to Faheem, who works for a major bank and was wearing a gigantic blue foam cowboy hat. He said he got it at a Dallas Cowboys game and was saving it for the right moment. When I asked him why he had come out to the match, he said, “We grew up watching cricket in Bangladesh, but my sons have never seen a match before.” His sons, aged seven, ten, and twelve, told me they were rooting for MI New York.
Nearly every fan in attendance was of South Asian descent. Many were wearing IPL jerseys or Indian or Pakistani national-team jerseys. A sizeable number were sporting MLC merchandise. Sponsors with logos plastered around the stadium included Abound (an app for sending remittances, from Indian firm Times Internet), Royal (a rice company), BetBricks7 (an Indian betting website), and Sling TV (which was emphasizing that it streams cricket matches and has a large library of Hindi TV and movies).
The concession stands offered Pepsi products and mango lassis. Chicken biryani and pizza were on the same menu board. There was a tent selling grilled corn and tandoori chicken. Beer-drinkers could get Anheuser-Busch products or Arka, an Indian-style lager. One man carrying a concession haul back for his family had stacked servings of French fries, chicken nuggets, and vegetable samosas on top of each other.
More damning revelations and allegations emerged this week concerning what we’ll just call Biden Family Inc. going forward. See here. Relatedly, Andrew McCarthy looks at why we haven’t yet seen a Hunter indictment. We’ll have to wait and see if the special-counsel appointment, announced after Andy’s report was first published, affects the situation at all:
Where is the indictment?
Let me back up for a sec. If you are a normal person reading our Brittany Bernstein’s report about the new House Oversight Committee memorandum on the Biden influence-peddling business, the number that pops your eyes is $20 million. But if, like me, you were a former prosecutor jaded by the Biden Justice Department’s unabashed sabotage of the Biden-family corruption “case” — which the media–Democratic complex tirelessly labels the “Hunter Biden case,” lest we notice the more consequential Biden who is up to his presidential neck in it — the numbers that drop your jaw are 2014 and 2015:
- In February 2014, Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina transfers $3.5 million.
- In April and May 2014, Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky places Hunter Biden and Devon Archer on the board of Burisma, Zlochevsky’s corrupt energy company, at a cool $1 million per year each. Archer is Hunter’s partner in the “Rosemont Seneca” business entities used to transfer money to the Bidens, and he is well aware of Joe Biden’s deep involvement in the family business — because Joe Biden isthe business.
- In April 2014, a Kazakhstani oligarch wires Hunter $143,300 for a sports car.
Why are these dates more significant to me than the exorbitant dollar amounts? The federal statute of limitations for relevant tax crimes is six years. The federal statute of limitations for other relevant crimes is five years. And what stops the statute of limitations from continuing to run until potential criminal charges lapse? The filing of an indictment.
The Biden Justice Department has never filed an indictment in the Biden “case.” That is why I put the word case in quotes. There is no Biden case in the sense of an appropriately aggressive investigation that would trigger the Justice Department’s practice of filing an indictment that comprehensively outlines criminal wrongdoing and its guideline of accepting a guilty plea only if it includes the most serious, readily provable charge.
The Justice Department opened what it pretends is its “Hunter Biden case” in 2018. By 2019, it was obvious that there were significant tax felonies, as well as a firearms felony. If there had been an actual investigation — of the kind, say, that special counsel Robert Mueller’s staff of activist Democrats conducted of Paul Manafort, whose wrongdoing is similar to that in which the Bidens appear to have engaged — there might well also be grounds for money-laundering and Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) felonies.
When Mueller’s alpha-prosecutors found evidence against Manafort, though, they charged him. In stark contrast, when the terminally passive Biden Justice Department was reluctantly forced to notice evidence implicating Hunter Biden and his family members, particularly the now-president, they did nothing. They sat by while the statute-of-limitations clock kept ticking . . . and ticking . . . and ticking . . .
Charges based on suspected criminal conduct prior to 2016 — and maybe even prior to 2017 or 2018 in some instances — are already time-barred. That is because the Biden Justice Department refuses to indict. This is strategic inaction. . . .
It has been two weeks since the July 26 implosion of Hunter Biden’s plea bargain in Delaware U.S. district court. Have you heard of any indictment? Me neither.
Ari Blaff continues his assiduous reporting on the ideological warfare within Ontario schools, this time getting access to footage of DEI training sessions allegedly linked to a tragedy in Toronto. From his opening:
In mid July, a former Toronto District School Board (TDSB) principal, Richard Bilkszto, took his own life in a story that made international headlines. According to a statement released by his lawyer at the behest of family members, Bilkszto’s bullying at the hands of equity consultants hired by the school district played a part in his eventual suicide.
Bilkszto’s reputation was destroyed in front of hundreds of fellow educators when KOJO Institute facilitators — including founder, Kike Ojo-Thompson — accused the venerated teacher of being an “apologist” for white supremacy during a training session conducted over Zoom. “We are here to talk about anti-black racism, but you, in your whiteness, think that you can tell me what’s really going on for black people?” Ojo-Thompson shot back at Bilkszto after he challenged her assertion that Canada’s racial history resembles America’s.
Bilkszto went out on sick leave shortly after the incident and later prevailed in a workplace harassment suit against the district. But, according to his family, he never recovered psychologically from his public humiliation.
“Sadly, Richard experienced an affront to . . . [his] stellar reputation in the spring of 2021, causing him severe mental distress,” Bilkszto’s family lawyer said in a statement announcing his death.
While the recordings of Bilkszto’s encounter have yet to be fully released, National Review obtained more than ten hours of footage from four identical training seminars led by Ojo-Thompson in the neighboring York Region school district just two weeks before her interaction with Bilkszto.
Those sessions, which were attended by over 200 York administrators and provincial officials from the Ministry of Education, offer a glimpse of what Bilkszto experienced before sliding into a depression that culminated in his suicide.
This, from Jimmy Quinn, is . . . worrisome:
More than 75 years following the close of World War II, kamikaze-style attacks might be making their return to the Pacific.
At least, that’s what China’s propagandists want the world to think. A new eight-part propaganda series on China’s CCTV network, “Chasing Dreams,” sets out to demonstrate Beijing’s single-minded focus on annexing Taiwan — at any cost. (The dream, of course, is for China to be sovereign over Taiwan.) The series, which is on YouTube, features mostly footage of People’s Liberation Army exercises: fighter jets streaking through the sky and soldiers as they climb mountains, emerge from the sea onto beaches, and march in formation.
A few news outlets have done the work of translating some of the most arresting dialogue from the series. The quotes that stand out are incontestably those in which PLA members vow to ram themselves into enemy vessels and to clear minefields with their bodies.
Li Peng, a pilot from a squadron in the PLA’s Eastern Command — which covers Taiwan — said, according to the South China Morning Post: “My fighter would be my last missile, rushing towards the enemy if in a real battle I had used up all my ammunition.”
Shout-Outs
John Masko, at UnHerd: Washington DC is a failed city
Susan Crabtree, at RealClearPolitics: Suit Against Tech Giant Shines Light on U.S. Complicity in Chinese Torture
The College Fix: Arizona’s public universities drop use of DEI statements in job applications
CODA
Thanks for the responses to last weekend’s request for bluegrass covers of popular music (not to say bluegrass isn’t popular . . . ). Jay Reilly sends in a cover of the Stones’ “Wild Horses” by Old & In the Way, a ’70s project consisting of Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, and several others. Soothing. Another reader offers Iron Horse’s take on “Enter Sandman.” Smooth. Dave Woosley steps just to the side of bluegrass, sending a country cover of “Wish You Were Here” by the NDC Mystery Band. Sweet.
Have a good one, and thanks for reading.