By Mike Huckabee
September 8, 2023
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For the past few days, legal analyst Margot Cleveland has been focusing like a laser beam on breaking news in the Hunter Biden case and Biden family financial scandal.
On Tuesday, she had an exclusive story about emails showing the FBI leaked a fake story to THE NEW YORK TIMES, as one step in a plan to spoon-feed them to Delaware U.S. Attorney/Special Counsel David Weiss. Gosh, it’s just like old times, when corrupt Crossfire Hurricane agents leaked stories to the media about Trump and Russia. Recall how, in a strategy called “circular reporting,” those stories in the media were used by the FBI as confirmation of their suspicions. Here it is again.
In December 2020, they leaked to the NYT that Rudy Giuliani was the source of claims of corruption against the Bidens (as if that alone were enough to discredit such evidence). The NYT story portrayed then-U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania Scott Brady, whom then-Attorney General Bill Barr had tasked with screening all new material relating to Ukraine, as a partisan hack out to get the Bidens, and falsely said Brady had pushed the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office to investigate them based on material provided by Giulani.
But the FBI had to know Giuliani was not the source, because the bribery allegations had come from their own very credible “confidential human source” (CHS), whose allegations about Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky saying he’d paid $10 million to two Bidens were immortalized in a now-public “1023.” The FBI had leaked the story that Giuliani was behind the bribery claim right after news broke that Hunter was being investigated by the IRS.
It took Sen. Chuck Grassley releasing the unredacted parts of that “1023” this year to confirm that the Biden bribery story had come from a credible FBI source --- NOT Rudy Giuliani.
Doesn’t the NY TIMES ever get tired of reporting lies and furthering the cause of liars? They seem to take great pride in that work, having won awards for it. The reporters who won a Pulitzer for their false reporting on Trump/Russia “collusion” probably take turns polishing and displaying it.
It wasn’t until this year that we learned, through IRS whistleblower testimony and statements from former Attorney General Bill Barr, that Giuliani had NOT been the source. And we know even more now through a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. The never-before-seen emails this lawsuit turned up were shared exclusively with THE FEDERALIST. And one particular email thread shows how the fake Giuliani story was passed to David Weiss.
An email dated December 11, 2020, and sent from the FBI Office of Public Affairs’ National Press Office to the FBI’s Baltimore Office forwarded the NYT article, which, as Cleveland reports, “spun evidence obtained by the Pittsburgh office as originating from Giuliani disinformation.” The FBI in Baltimore were providing support to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office investigating Hunter. Sure enough, the email thread shows that within two hours, the link to the fake NYT story had been forwarded to a number of Baltimore agents, and from there to Weiss’ top agents, including Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf. (Wolf has been implicated in what we have no problem calling obstruction in the Hunter case.) The story was sent on to Weiss, and from Weiss to another member of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, name redacted. Virtually everyone connected to the Hunter investigation ate up the fake Giuliani story with a spoon.
Cleveland suspects that some in the U.S. attorney’s office, such as Wolf, were well aware of the existence of the “1023” and the information in it but that the boss, Weiss, likely was in the dark. Some in the Pennsylvania U.S. attorney’s office were apparently also kept ignorant of Hunter’s laptop by the Delaware office.
We don’t know whether Weiss knew these details or not, but the emails confirm he and other top officials were fed the fake NYT story about Giuliani being the source for the Hunter bribery allegations. So, tracing it back, who at the FBI fed the fake story to willing scribes at the NYT?
Here’s another good write-up on her column…
In her piece the next day, Cleveland digs deeper, expanding on the idea that a few select DOJ and FBI agents buried the “1023” alleging Biden bribery. When IRS lead investigator-turned-
In an update specifically on Hunter’s IRS case --- the gun and tax charges --- Cleveland suggests that Special Counsel Weiss is going to be just as soft on Hunter as U.S. Attorney Weiss was going to be.
Recall that Hunter’s hyper-aggressive legal team, led by Democrat powerhouse Abbe Lowell, was claiming the “sweetheart” deal (our word, not theirs) they’d tried to sneak past the judge in a pretrial diversion agreement had been agreed to and thus was in force, whether the judge liked it or not. They continue to maintain this, in response to Judge Maryellen Norieka’s order last week for both parties to provide her with an update.
The government says the agreement was never executed. (As Lucy of PEANUTS once said, “Peculiar thing about this signed document. It was never notarized.”) The defense says it was. So the impasse remains; Cleveland has the details.
But I could save you some time and sum up this case as an inexcusable mess --- inexcusable because it’s taken five years to “investigate” and “prosecute (maybe)” Hunter on these few tax and gun charges (never mind bribery and money laundering), in what for you or me would be an open-and-shut case.
As Cleveland explains, there’s no case law on this, “as the federal government has never entered into an agreement remotely resembling the deal offered to Hunter Biden.” Judge Noreika will be deciding this case as “an issue of first impression.” But the next step is for Special Counsel Weiss to obtain a grand jury indictment on the gun charge. Weiss seems to be taking his sweet time, which suggests to Cleveland that Hunter is still getting the kid-glove treatment from him.
But whatever happens, or does not happen, to Hunter, we can agree that the most important part of this case is determining the involvement of then-Vice President Biden in his family’s financial exploits. To that end, the House Oversight Committee posted evidence on Wednesday that in 2015, then-VP Biden worked with Hunter’s business partner Eric Schwerin on White House talking points related to the Burisma corruption scandal before personally signing off on them. It looks as though Schwerin conveyed to the White House the exact quotes they wanted put into these. Just a little service Burisma appears to have received for putting the Vice President’s son on its board. Smart investment!
Chairman James Comer of Kentucky is “calling on the National Archives to provide complete and unredacted documents related to the Office of the Vice President colluding with the Biden family…” REDSTATE has details on specifically what he’s asking for.
Finally, let’s contrast Margot Cleveland’s lawyerly approach to the Biden scandal with the more emotional take in Victor Davis Hanson’s new piece for TOWNHALL. With a variety of alleged felonies ranging from bribery to tax evasion, the frustrated Hanson says, the fact that Hunter hasn’t yet been prosecuted for anything is “scandalous.” And he thinks Hunter, after years of trying to win love and respect from his family, is continuing his reckless behavior to send them a message: that he will not be their fall guy.
“Biden is an embittered, angry son,” Hanson observes. “As the Biden bagman for foreign shakedown cash, he did the dirty work and most risked the legal exposure that made all the Bidens rich.” Hanson does not believe Hunter intends to go to prison “while the other exempt Bidens continue to enjoy their ill-gotten riches due to Hunter’s imaginative cons.” He suspects this is the real reason why they moved Hunter into the White House and continue to keep him close.
https://townhall.com/
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