Bill Barr and his October Surprise

I'm gonna quote the super rad Parker Molloy on this one.
I’m still waiting for someone, anyone to explain what the scandal is supposed to be and how these emails are evidence of it. Running headlines calling something a “smoking gun” does not make something a smoking gun. This is the same playbook as their “unmasking” nonsense.
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Trumpers really have lost their minds over this one. It seems like, at most, Hunter Biden introduced a business associate to his dad. That's not a crime anywhere on the planet.
 
I Am The Scum said:
Trumpers really have lost their minds over this one. It seems like, at most, Hunter Biden introduced a business associate to his dad. That's not a crime anywhere on the planet.
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Apparently, they're still running with the idea that Joe Biden worked to get rid of the prosecutor in order to protect Bursima, and this was part of it.
You know, the exact opposite of reality.
 
I Am The Scum said:
I'm gonna quote the super rad Parker Molloy on this one.


Trumpers really have lost their minds over this one. It seems like, at most, Hunter Biden introduced a business associate to his dad. That's not a crime anywhere on the planet.
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Of course it would be a nothingburger even if true, but that's not the point from the Republican mindset.

Like I've said over and over all the arguments from the Republican side are minor variations on the same argument. "It's not that I'm not as bad as you think I am, but the people who are criticizing me are as good as they think they are."

So when the Right is caught doing something bad their defense is to find something thematically similar, even if totally different, someone on the Left did.

If right now footage hits CNN of Eric Trump decapitating a hooker FoxNews would not stop until it found footage of Hunter Biden giving a homeless woman a haircut and present it as "See! See! He's doing something vaguely thematically similar if you squint really hard!"
 
"When Giuliani went to Ukraine in December to investigate Burisma and the Bidens, he interacted with “people tied to Russian intelligence,” the Washington Post reported Thursday night.

Intelligence officials feared Giuliani — a former federal prosecutor who is now a Trump lawyer and freelance White House investigator — was being used to feed Russian misinformation to the president, four former officials familiar with the matter told the newspaper.

Their warning to Trump, one of the officials told the newspaper, was: "Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine.”

Trump “shrugged his shoulders” at the warning, the former official said. “That’s Rudy,” the president said dismissively."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...e-links-report-says/ar-BB1a4vMU?ocid=msedgdhp
 
Armitage72 said:
Apparently, they're still running with the idea that Joe Biden worked to get rid of the prosecutor in order to protect Bursima, and this was part of it.
You know, the exact opposite of reality.
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Do we actually know what the reality was? As far as I'm aware of the facts, Hunter was getting paid at least $50k per month by the Ukrainian company (Burisma) without having anything obvious to offer them other than the connection to his father who was handling the allocation of aid to Ukraine. The Ukrainian prosecutor Shokin was investigating Burisma. There were claims that Shokin was corrupt amid complaints that he wasn't making progress on the investigation of Burisma. Biden threatened to withhold aid unless Shokin was fired. Shokin was forced out in Feb 2016. The case against Bursima was dropped in 2017. In 2018 the decision to annul the case was overruled and the oligarch behind Burisma fled the country. Trump was then impeached over the phone call pushing Ukraine to investigate this.

Biden was accused of having a conflict of interest as his decisions directly benefitted the company that was paying his son $50k a month for no readily discernible reason. Biden claimed that there was no conflict because he never talked to his son about his overseas business. If these emails pan out, then we see in fact his son was connecting people within Burisma to Joe Biden, undermining Joe Biden's claims a bit.

I don't think it is exactly proved that Biden was doing anything corrupt here, but I don't understand your certainty that he wasn't.
 
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shuttlt said:
Do we actually know what the reality was? As far as I'm aware of the facts, Hunter was getting paid at least $50k per month by the Ukrainian company (Burisma) without having anything obvious to offer them other than the connection to his father who was handling the allocation of aid to Ukraine. The Ukrainian prosecutor Shokin was investigating Burisma. There were claims that Shokin was corrupt amid complaints that he wasn't making progress on the investigation of Burisma. Biden threatened to withhold aid unless Shokin was fired. Shokin was forced out in Feb 2016. The case against Bursima was dropped in 2017. In 2018 the decision to annul the case was overruled and the oligarch behind Burisma fled the country. Trump was then impeached over the phone call pushing Ukraine to investigate this.

Biden was accused of having a conflict of interest as his decisions directly benefitted the company that was paying his son $50k a month for no readily discernible reason. Biden claimed that there was no conflict because he never talked to his son about his overseas business. If these emails pan out, then we see in fact his son was connecting people within Burisma to Joe Biden, undermining Joe Biden's claims a bit.

I don't think it is exactly proved that Biden was doing anything corrupt here, but I don't understand your certainty that he wasn't.
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Ah, yes. The old Conspiracy Theory Two-Step.

Profess ignorance about a topic: “Gosh, we don’t know much about what really happened”.

Then launch into your detailed conspiracy theory as if you’re just innocently spitballing off the top of your head.
 
johnny karate said:
Ah, yes. The old Conspiracy Theory Two-Step.

Profess ignorance about a topic: “Gosh, we don’t know much about what really happened”.

Then launch into your detailed conspiracy theory as if you’re just innocently spitballing off the top of your head.
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I didn't claim to be ignorant about the topic. Pretty much everything I said can be found on the Wikipedia pages for Burisma and Mykola Zlochevsky, the oligarch behind Burisma. Are any of the facts I claimed in my post controversial?
 
shuttlt said:
I didn't claim to be ignorant about the topic. Pretty much everything I said can be found on the Wikipedia pages for Burisma and Mykola Zlochevsky, the oligarch behind Burisma. Are any of the facts I claimed in my post controversial?
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How about the Republican-led Senate report that found no evidence of any wrongdoing? Did that happen to come up during your diligent research?
 
shuttlt said:
I didn't claim to be ignorant about the topic. Pretty much everything I said can be found on the Wikipedia pages for Burisma and Mykola Zlochevsky, the oligarch behind Burisma. Are any of the facts I claimed in my post controversial?
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At least one of your claims is certainly not a fact. Shokin was in fact not investigating Burisma.

I'm surprised you missed that on the Victor Shokin and Burisma Wikipedia pages.
 
shuttlt said:
Do we actually know what the reality was? As far as I'm aware of the facts, Hunter was getting paid at least $50k per month by the Ukrainian company (Burisma) without having anything obvious to offer them other than the connection to his father who was handling the allocation of aid to Ukraine. The Ukrainian prosecutor Shokin was investigating Burisma. There were claims that Shokin was corrupt amid complaints that he wasn't making progress on the investigation of Burisma. Biden threatened to withhold aid unless Shokin was fired.
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Bottom line: Joe Biden was not the singular impetus in the firing of prosecutor Shokin. Ukrainian society orgs, the International Monetary Fund, the Obama administration, including the American Embassy in Ukraine, the European Union, foreign investors, etc., all wanted the corrupt Shokin out. So Biden wasn't performing a rogue operation in the Ukraine to help his son, but was delivering policy supported by Western and Ukrainian interests.
 
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jerrywayne said:
Bottom line: Joe Biden was not the singular impetus in the firing of prosecutor Shokin. Ukrainian society orgs, the International Monetary Fund, the Obama administration, including the American Embassy in Ukraine, the European Union, foreign investors, etc., all wanted the corrupt Shokin out. So Biden wasn't performing a rogue operation in the Ukraine to help his son, but was delivering policy supported by Western and Ukrainian interests.
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Yea, this. And the "claims that shokin may be corrupt" are kind of like "claims that Barry Bonds may have used steroids".
 
TellyKNeasuss said:
Another problem with the Hunter Biden laptop story: Hunter Biden was living in California at the time when the laptop was supposedly left at a repair shop in Delaware.
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A citation for the claim that Hunter Biden moved to California prior to the alleged trip to the Delaware computer repair shop:

ps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign
 
shuttlt said:
Do we actually know what the reality was? As far as I'm aware of the facts, Hunter was getting paid at least $50k per month by the Ukrainian company (Burisma) without having anything obvious to offer them other than the connection to his father who was handling the allocation of aid to Ukraine. The Ukrainian prosecutor Shokin was investigating Burisma. There were claims that Shokin was corrupt amid complaints that he wasn't making progress on the investigation of Burisma. Biden threatened to withhold aid unless Shokin was fired. Shokin was forced out in Feb 2016. The case against Bursima was dropped in 2017. In 2018 the decision to annul the case was overruled and the oligarch behind Burisma fled the country. Trump was then impeached over the phone call pushing Ukraine to investigate this.

Biden was accused of having a conflict of interest as his decisions directly benefitted the company that was paying his son $50k a month for no readily discernible reason. Biden claimed that there was no conflict because he never talked to his son about his overseas business. If these emails pan out, then we see in fact his son was connecting people within Burisma to Joe Biden, undermining Joe Biden's claims a bit.

I don't think it is exactly proved that Biden was doing anything corrupt here, but I don't understand your certainty that he wasn't.
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Even if Biden did apply pressure to aid his son, I don't care. If the choice is who is less corrupt, Biden still wins (and already got my vote and financial donations).
 
The core problem is that Hunter Biden was put on the board of a Ukranian gas company despite having no experience in the Ukraine or the gas industry. Despite having just been discharged from the Navy Reserve for cocaine use. This happened at a time when his father was Vice President and specifically handling Ukraine relations.

That problematic appointment creates a ripe environment for speculation. Why was Hunter appointed if not to curry favor with the VP, his father? It really doesn't make sense any other way. A relatively reasonable person can make inferences that lead them to concluding that there was at least some motive for corruption on Burisma's part. Which, given the chain of events, a somewhat-less-but-still-reasonable interpretation is that there indeed was some corruption. I personally don't think there was, quite the opposite, in fact. I think there's plenty of evidence to show that Biden and the rest of the Western world wanted the prosecutor out because he wasn't pursuing obvious corruption, including that of Burisma.

But it's that problematic confluence of established facts that raises the question in the first place: Why was Hunter Biden on a board of company he had no experience with in a country he had no experience with? Because his father was in charge of Ukraine policy - there simply is no other answer.
 
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