Episode description

Hey guys, it’s Liz Dye, and we’ve got some big, exciting changes coming your way next week. It’s all still in process, but I can tell you now that we’ll be shifting our podcast drops from Monday/Friday to Tuesday/Friday and ramping up the written content, as well. So, heads up, the next show will be in your feed Tuesday, not Monday. 

But today, I’m so excited to talk to a personal hero of mine, Marcy Wheeler. This woman is relentless! If you want to understand what’s going on with the Biden prosecution, you have got to read her site emptywheel.net. But before we get into the show I think we need to spend a bit of time discussing the cast of characters and timeline here, because if you’re not up to your eyeballs in it all the time, the details can get a little fuzzy. And I’m going to put the text of this intro in the show notes with a million links, for you to follow along if you like. So, here goes.

President Biden’s son Hunter has battled addiction for much of his adult life. He’s also done some questionable things to earn money to support his family. Those things generally fall under the category of distasteful but legal, not to say quotidian. It’s a dirty, little NOT AT ALL secret that DC runs on access, and family members routinely market themselves as conduits to their powerful relatives. E.g., Ginni Thomas, who is nutty as a fruitcake, and collects hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from people with a stake in shaping the Supreme Court.

In 2019, as Biden was emerging as a candidate to take on Trump, the Republican smear machine was looking for dirt. And so they turned to the same dirt merchants that managed to muddy up Hillary Clinton. Clinton was dogged for years with allegations that she’d “sold America’s uranium stockpiles to Russia” to benefit a donor to the Clinton Global Initiative. That story was ridiculous — she was Secretary of State at a time when the State Dept was one of eight agencies that had to approve the sale of a mining company called Uranium One to a Russian conglomerate. And the supposed CGI donor who would have benefited, had sold his shares before the deal was approved. But that didn’t matter to Peter Schweizer, a Breitbart editor and Steve Bannon ally who wrote a book called “Clinton Cash” and laundered this nonsense into the collective consciousness. And in 2018, he did the same thing with Joe Biden. 

As VP, Biden had made a speech in 2015 pressing the Ukrainian government to fire a corrupt prosecutor named Viktor Shokin. It was the consensus of the entire US government, as well as the entire international establishment, that Shokin had to go if Ukraine was ever going to get its house in order. Nevertheless, Schweizer wrote a book called “Secret Empires” in which he alleged that Biden was unilaterally forcing out this prosecutor to protect a Ukrainian oil company called Burisma which employed his son as a board member. I wrote about it at the time as Ukranium One. And if you hear me shittalking NYT reporter Ken Vogel, that’s why. Because when Rudy Giuliani started flogging this nonsense about Burisma, Vogel treated it as if it might be true. And it was very clearly NEVER true. It was Uranium One all over again, and it’s been the same shit for five years now. And when Trump pressured Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to “do us a favor though,” this is what he wanted. He wanted the Ukrainian government to say it was investigating this bullshit as if it were real.

So in 2019 Rudy Giuliani waddled off to Ukraine in search of proof of this concocted story, where he got fed Russian propaganda by a Russian spy named Andrey Derkach, who was later sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department for using that Russian propaganda to influence the 2020 election. But Trump didn’t give a shit about that, and neither did Bill Barr, they set up Scott Brady, the US Attorney in Pittsburgh, as Rudy’s personal disinformation concierge to go chasing down his lies about Joe and Hunter Biden. Remember, Rudy was alleging that Joe and Hunter Biden had smuggled literally hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country. It was just utter nonsense. This investigation was tainted from the jump.

Brady was the one who kicked up Alexander Smirnov, the FBI informant who suddenly remembered in 2020 that Burisma executives had bragged to him in 2017 about bribing Joe and Hunter Biden. This was an obvious lie, for a whole bunch of reasons, but in 2023, Republicans in Congress get wind of it, and they decide that they’ve finally found the one true witness who will make all of Rudy’s lies about Joe Biden true. Instead Smirnov was indicted earlier this year for lying to the FBI.

Barr also tapped a second US Attorney, David Weiss, in Delaware, to investigate Hunter Biden with the unstated goal of trying to dirty up Joe Biden. Weiss was largely focused on Biden’s failure to pay taxes in 2018 and 2019 when he was in the throes of addiction. He also investigated Biden for having lied on a gun application where he checked the box that said “I swear I’m not a drug addict.”

At the same time, there was a legally blind computer repair dude in Delaware named John Paul Mac Isaac who claimed to have Hunter Biden’s laptop. He says that Biden abandoned three devices in his store and never came back for them, and so Mac Isaac had a right to open up them up and look at what was inside. And because Biden’s phones were autosaving to his hard drive, it was basically his whole sad and sordid life. Pictures of his brother Beau dying of cancer. Pictures of Hunter descending into addiction. Pictures of Hunter doing drugs and having sex. Plus every text and email and bank statement he’d sent for years. And Mac Isaac turned the thing over to Rudy Giuliani and his lawyer Robert Costello, who tried to weaponize it somehow against Joe Biden.

I think we all know a fair bit about the laptop, to the extent that there’s “one” laptop. But as Marcy has pointed out, the chain of custody on this stuff is totally murky, and it’s basically useless as evidence.

So, during much of the first half of 2023, Hunter Biden’s lawyers are negotiating with David Weiss to get a global deal to shut the investigation down. Hunter Biden had paid all his taxes, he was sober and in recovery and he just wanted to be done. But at the same time, political pressure was ratcheting up like crazy from Republicans in Congress, particularly after these two supposed IRS whistleblowers came forward claiming that the investigation had been slow walked. Those two guys are named Gary Shapley and Joseph Zeigler, and their testimony, like that of Scott Brady, who also testified before Congress, was highly problematic. 

But at some point last summer, the pressure on Weiss seems to have overwhelmed him, and he backed away from the plea deal he’d already negotiated with Biden’s lawyers. And in a dramatic hearing in July of 2023, the whole thing imploded. 

Hunter Biden has now been indicted in California on tax charges, and in Delaware on the gun charges. He’s claimed that he has a right to enforce the original plea deal which would shield him from prosecution. And he claims that the prosecution was tainted from the beginning by political bias, which … clearly it was. He’s also filed lawsuits against the IRS and various figures in this case, including Giuliani and Costello, in an attempt to both stop them constantly slandering him and to shake loose information which would help his case.

Look, it’s a whole lot. And I guess the most important thing to understand, even if you can’t follow every strand of this story, is that the entire case had its genesis in Trump’s efforts to stop Joe Biden from becoming president, and we’re here now because Republicans in Congress wanted to impeach Biden, or at least make sure he didn’t get a second term in office. 

Show Links:

https://www.lawandchaospod.com/

BlueSky: @LawAndChaosPod

Threads: @LawAndChaosPod

Twitter: @LawAndChaosPod

Patreon: patreon.com/LawAndChaosPod