by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:
The “hearing” yesterday was one of the more-infuriating things I’ve seen on CSPAN….. ever.
The Democrats on the committee kept trying to deflect. It was all they had; any sort of question about the actual subject matter, that is Hunter Biden getting special treatment, was nuclear and they knew it. So they played the race card (how, exactly, do you do that when Hunter is white?) They tried to claim there were no receipts — which blew up in their face when MTG showed a literal receipt for an airline ticket and a picture of the woman it was bought for obviously giving Hunter a hummer while on said trip; yes, the actual human body part was blacked out but there was utterly no doubt what was going on.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
That act, by the way, is federally illegal: The Mann Act dating back to 1910 makes it a federal crime to transport someone across state lines for the purpose of prostitution and carries up to a 10 year prison term upon conviction. That alone is enough for an indictment; it was passed to give the federal government tools to stop sex trafficking. Facially-sufficient evidence of said violation, demonstrating probable cause for all to see, was produced in public during the hearing so where is the indictment?
On the tax side, which was the point of all this, the premise that this was “no big deal” and the attempt to conflate Trump’s organization and Ivanka’s dismissal from personal involvement went up in smoke as well. While Trump did indeed get tagged for tax violations the case related to the payoffs had nothing to do with taxes (he apparently did pay taxes on the funds) and he didn’t funnel the money through multiple, as many as two dozen, shell LLCs and other fake business entities that had no actual business operations. Hunter did, which is hard evidence of knowing criminal intent because nobody does that sort of thing to try to hide the transactions if there’s nothing illegal about what they’re doing. What Hunter did is exactly what organized racketeering and money-laundering operations do.
Then there was Raskin who repeatedly asserted that the 14th Amendment doesn’t exist. That’s right — that’s what he said, even though he didn’t say it that way. But the premise that a prosecutor can choose who to prosecute when he has in hand hard evidence of felony criminal conduct is exactly that; either we have equal protection of the law as the 14th Amendment requires or we do not.
Not that this “well if you’re a Democrat the law doesn’t apply to you” view is new; who remembers “no reasonable prosecutor” with Hillary and then, of course, a multi-count indictment for secreting classified information by a person who actually has the capacity while in office to possess it on an unrestricted basis where a Secretary of State does not.
Hearings like this are enough to drive you to start thinking not in terms of 1-6-3-0-9 but rather something akin to 1-7-7-6.
But facts intrude; there’s simply nobody doing a Committee of Correspondents these days is there? Certainly not; we’re entirely too consumed with terrible garbage programming on Netflix, faces glued to a little screen and spoon-fed whatever sort of nonsense remake of Snow Woke might get kicked up next.
Oh, and while we’re at it, The Senate has refused to affirm that indeed only Congress can declare war. Rand Paul tried to get that into the record and it was voted down — and not by a little either. Note that a Treaty, being ratified only by the Senate, cannot under the Constitution stand in as a delegation of the War Power as declaring war requires concurrence of both House and Senate.
What was the American experiment, a claimed Constitutional Republic, certainly appears to be dead.
And so is the spirit of the people who animated same.
