Biden pardons | BIDEN ISSUES PREEMPTIVE PARDONS - Family, Fauci, J6 Committee, Others

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UNCMSinLS said:
Yep. The moral equivalency of this pardon to Trump's antics is staggering. It's like comparing a nothing burger to a five-course meal.
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When another Democrat is elected President and that President appoints Hunter Biden as ambassador to France, this might be comparable to the corruption of the Trump administration.
 
Jamison2Carter said:
Who gives a fuck
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Mulberry Heel said:
Our so-called "news media" is hopelessly broken, imo. There is now a clear and definite double standard for Trump Republicans and Democrats. Trump Republicans can be as outrageous, insane, and horrible as they want and the media shrugs, including now even most legacy "mainstream" media. Democrats do something controversial but still far down the scale of outrage compared to Trump and his minions, and the media is all over it and plays it up as beyond the pale. It's as if one sibling yells harshly at another one for running around the yard in the nude and taking a dump in full view of the neighbors while screaming like a crazy man, and everyone criticizes the sibling who yelled and just pretends to ignore the one running around nude in public and acting like a lunatic.
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I've been saying it: Rupert Murdoch has won. Leading with Fox News, he has created a fiercely loyal, radicalized audience that is steered by misinformation and driven by hate. And that audience has now grown large enough to convincingly win a presidential election. And that audience's absolute hatred of the Democratic party is personal. In a nutshell, American democracy, as we know it, is royally fucked.
 
superrific said:
1. I'm able explain away bullshit. If you come here with non-bullshit I won't try to explain it away. Essentially, you are complaining that the world is more complicated than you would like. Sorry, buttercup, it doesn't work that way. The world is what it is. It's complex. If you want to understand it, you have to put in some effort. Otherwise, you are just an easily manipulated rube.

The reality is that you are advancing a conspiracy theory. Literally hundreds of people looked into this stuff. There was a whole House committee that did pretty nothing but investigate Hunter Biden for two years, and they found NOTHING. Remember they had the witness who was going to spill the beans, except it turned out HE was under indictment and fled the jurisdiction? And then they found some documents, but the documents actually said the opposite of what they thought? And then they called Hunter's business partner, who they thought would spill the beans but the partner told them that nothing happened.

And here I am explaining to you why your suppositions about supposedly damning evidence are incorrect, and you're waving your arms frantically. Notice that my explanation of the world (i.e. SARs mean nothing on their own) and the reality of the world (nobody ever found any dirt at all that stuck to Biden other than the gun, drugs and tax things) coincide, whereas your explanation runs counter to available facts.

2. SARs are rarely useful for initiating investigations. Typically, they are used by prosecutors who have already indicted a suspect (or are in the process of indicting them), and the SARs provide a roadmap for where to look for additional evidence. They mean nothing in and of themselves. Like I said, a lot of people on this board have been the subject of SARs. If you don't like that reality, it's a shame I guess, but you can't change reality by denying it.

3. I thought we agreed after much conversation that there was no significant delay in implementing the border fix, since we agreed that DHS was already working on the new rule before the Title 42 authority expired. I even showed you the rulemaking documents from early 2023, and then I explained how rulemaking works, and why it takes time. On average, it takes years to go from the "president tells the cabinet agency head to draft a rule" to "rule becomes law." Years. Sometimes decades, if the courts get involved. This was actually a pretty quick turnaround.

Trump and social media have created for you an impression that the president can snap his fingers and do things. That's actually not how it works at all. Sometimes I think the press should be barred from reporting on executive orders, because nobody understands them. Executive orders do not make law, no matter how many times Trump insists they do. The Administrative Procedure Act covers virtually all agency action, and it's only through agency action that the executive branch has any authority to set policy. The president, for instance, cannot impose ambient air quality standards. Only the EPA can do that, because the law gives that authority to the EPA. So the president can staff the EPA with the people he wants, that he thinks will make the policies that he wants; he can instruct them about regulatory priorities and direct them work on some issue or another; but the president cannot make the law.

4. I have no idea what you're talking about with millions from China. Please post a non-paywalled version of this story from a reputable source. I don't subscribe to the WSJ and anyway the WSJ is not exactly a neutral source when it comes to Hunter Biden. But I'll give you a preview: literally dozens of similarly sourced allegations against Hunter have proven false or misleading. There's really no reason to think this will be any different.
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First, I'm not talking about Joe Biden. This discussion started as a discussion about Hunter Biden and I agree that there is nothing meaningful to link Joe to Hunte's "business" dealings.

Second, I hesitate to continue this discussion because there is no chance of agreement. You've already written off the 150 SARs linked to Hunter as basically meaningless, even though those flags are there for a reason. When people are receiving large sums, in round numbers (like $5 million) and then that money is quickly moved to other accounts... those are red flags. They are particularly red flags when you're the son a the VP on the United States. You seem to not be aware of the millions of dollars he received from China days after the now-infamous "I'm sitting next to my father" messages and the subsequent (and rapid) movement of the that money to other companies.

I don't see any reason to continue. It's going to be two people beating their heads against brick walls.
 
People need to recognize the norms we've been accustomed to are no longer relevant. This is a new age in America - if you keep playing by last season's ruleset, you'll end up out of office and in the gutter.
 
ZenMode said:
First, I'm not talking about Joe Biden. This discussion started as a discussion about Hunter Biden and I agree that there is nothing meaningful to link Joe to Hunte's "business" dealings.

Second, I hesitate to continue this discussion because there is no chance of agreement. You've already written off the 150 SARs linked to Hunter as basically meaningless, even though those flags are there for a reason. When people are receiving large sums, in round numbers (like $5 million) and then that money is quickly moved to other accounts... those are red flags. They are particularly red flags when you're the son a the VP on the United States. You seem to not be aware of the millions of dollars he received from China days after the now-infamous "I'm sitting next to my father" messages and the subsequent (and rapid) movement of the that money to other companies.

I don't see any reason to continue. It's going to be two people beating their heads against brick walls.
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You think it is odd when someone receives $5 million into a cash account they then move it to another account?
It would be odd not to.
 
BlueSteel said:
I've been saying it: Rupert Murdoch has won. Leading with Fox News, he has created a fiercely loyal, radicalized audience that is steered by misinformation and driven by hate. And that audience has now grown large enough to convincingly win a presidential election. And that audience's absolute hatred of the Democratic party is personal. In a nutshell, American democracy, as we know it, is royally fucked.
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Don't give Rupert all of the "credit"... Roger Ailes was the mastermind of Fox political "news"
 
ChileG said:
You think it is odd when someone receives $5 million into a cash account they then move it to another account?
It would be odd not to.
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I think it's odd that you received $5 million from China when you've provided them nothing to pay you for.
 
ZenMode said:
First, I'm not talking about Joe Biden. This discussion started as a discussion about Hunter Biden and I agree that there is nothing meaningful to link Joe to Hunte's "business" dealings.

Second, I hesitate to continue this discussion because there is no chance of agreement. You've already written off the 150 SARs linked to Hunter as basically meaningless, even though those flags are there for a reason. When people are receiving large sums, in round numbers (like $5 million) and then that money is quickly moved to other accounts... those are red flags. They are particularly red flags when you're the son a the VP on the United States. You seem to not be aware of the millions of dollars he received from China days after the now-infamous "I'm sitting next to my father" messages and the subsequent (and rapid) movement of the that money to other companies.

I don't see any reason to continue. It's going to be two people beating their heads against brick walls.
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And again you put words in my mouth instead of addressing what I actually say. You're right that there is no reason to continue, but the reason is not symmetric.

I never said the 150 SARs are meaningless. I don't know what's in them. I said the existence of them is meaningless without more, which is 100% true and lawtig backs me up on that point (technically he brought it up first so maybe I'm backing him). The flags are there for a reason. That reason is not for people to infer criminality from their filing.

Did you do the reading I gave you? That case explains why banks file so many SARs. It's CYA. As long as they have a robust reporting process in place, the board cannot be sued for any money laundering from the bank. If they are skimpy, a lawsuit could result (probably not, but there's a non-trivial chance). Thus do the banks flood the agencies with SAR reports. 40 years ago that probably would have been a disaster, back when everything was on paper. With electronic submissions, it doesn't really matter.

As for round numbers, you've gotten it wrong. Round numbers for large transactions are inherently less suspicious, because of the way people invest money. When hedge funds solicit business, they don't ask for amounts like $3,423, 832. They ask for $5M, or $10M or more. Maybe $17.5 million. Round numbers.

You're thinking of round numbers in repeated transactions. THOSE are suspicious because they tend to indicate that a large transaction has been broken up into smaller ones. For instance, if you have $568,322 in cash from drug sales, you will be reported if you deposit it in one go. So they break it up. If I was a criminal in that situation, I would break it up into differently and seemingly randomly sized chunks. But the people who are doing the deposits are usually not too sophisticated (if they were, they would be higher-up in the organization and less exposed to criminal liability), so they will do things like divide it into a bunch of $9999 chunks, or $9000 chunks.
 
BlueSteel said:
I've been saying it: Rupert Murdoch has won. Leading with Fox News, he has created a fiercely loyal, radicalized audience that is steered by misinformation and driven by hate. And that audience has now grown large enough to convincingly win a presidential election. And that audience's absolute hatred of the Democratic party is personal. In a nutshell, American democracy, as we know it, is royally fucked.
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UNCBAdookJD said:
Why not just pardon him for the tax and gun charges? Because the whole reason for the pardon is Kash Patel has made it clear he intends to use the FBI to go after Hunter.
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So why didn't joe pardon him for those acts specifically, like most pardons. Why did he have to write a Nixon type blanket pardon going back to 2014? Of course we know why. And all this time, you guys thought it was trump who was the threat to democracy.
 
Callatoroy said:
So why didn't joe pardon him for those acts specifically, like most pardons. Why did he have to write a Nixon type blanket pardon going back to 2014? Of course we know why. And all this time, you guys thought it was trump who was the threat to democracy.
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This has nothing to do with democracy. It's a threat (in my view) to the rule of law. It's a threat to confidence in our justice system. It's (in my view) an abuse of Biden's presidential powers. It definitely gives Trump cover to issue comparably broad pardons to far worse people, which he will absolutely do. But the rule of law =/= democracy. Plenty of nondemocratic countries uphold the rule of law at least as well as we do, and nothing about Hunter's sordid saga implicates the integrity of our democratic processes.
 
"They are particularly red flags when you're the son a the VP on the United States. You seem to not be aware of the millions of dollars he received from China days after the now-infamous "I'm sitting next to my father" messages and the subsequent (and rapid) movement of the that money to other companies."

If you are talking about Hunter raising money for his investment fund, then that behavior is 100% expected. It's the norm, not an exception.

See, here's what you don't know about how private equity works: a private equity fund is not a single organization. Rather, the private equity fund manager (e.g. Apollo, KKR) creates lots of small LLCs or LPs. Sometimes there is one per fundraising round; sometimes one per client, or one for a handful of clients; and sometimes one or a handful for a single invested company. The fund manager then acts as a GP for those funds, and charges management fees.

For instance, I've seen the org chart for a Goldman Sachs private equity fund, because I filed HSR notifications for them. There are literally dozens of subsidiaries of that one. KKR has literally hundreds upon hundreds of them -- and that was many years ago. There are probably thousands now.

So for Hunter Biden to be moving money around different accounts is normal. And this is why it helps to know things before forming judgments.
 
lawtig02 said:
It definitely gives Trump cover to issue comparably broad pardons to far worse people, which he will absolutely do.
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He's been promising to do it for a year. The pearl clutching about "oh, Biden has given Trump cover" is misplaced, in my view. Even if Biden hadn't done this, Trump would face no blowback at all for pardoning J6 protesters or his cronies. He's repeatedly said that's what he would do, and apparently nobody cared very much.
 
lawtig02 said:
This has nothing to do with democracy. It's a threat (in my view) to the rule of law. It's a threat to confidence in our justice system. It's (in my view) an abuse of Biden's presidential powers. It definitely gives Trump cover to issue comparably broad pardons to far worse people, which he will absolutely do. But the rule of law =/= democracy. Plenty of nondemocratic countries uphold the rule of law at least as well as we do, and nothing about Hunter's sordid saga implicates the integrity of our democratic processes.
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"threat to confidence in our justice system." I see that as a direct threat to democracy.
 
superrific said:
He's been promising to do it for a year. The pearl clutching about "oh, Biden has given Trump cover" is misplaced, in my view. Even if Biden hadn't done this, Trump would face no blowback at all for pardoning J6 protesters or his cronies. He's repeatedly said that's what he would do, and apparently nobody cared very much.
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I agree that's what Trump would have done. I, for one, would just have liked to be able to complain about it without knowing my guy did the same thing. But I agree that's not important in the big scheme of things.
 
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