Tuesday, May 16, 2023 7:08:00 PM
Horseshit, unsubstantiated allegations is all I read. Chew on this.....
The wider House Oversight’s net, the more often it catches Trump
Analysis by Philip Bump
National columnist
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/10/wider-house-oversights-net-more-often-they-catch-trump/
The argument was put most concisely by Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), as members of the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee sought to deliver the “judgment day for the Biden administration” that committee chair James Comer (Ky.) had promised Fox News viewers.
“The family’s getting money from various countries and foreign businesses through various shell companies and this web of LLCs?” Donalds said, summarizing his party’s claims about President Biden’s family. “I mean, guys, you in the press, this is easy pickings. I’m giving you Pulitzer stuff here!”
Perhaps someone will win a Pulitzer for uncovering the extent to which a president and his family had been influenced by foreign money. But at this moment the odds seem much better that the family who would be the target of that successful probe would be Donald Trump’s, not Joe Biden’s.
That line about LLCs — limited-liability corporations — stuck out for me because three years ago I tried to document the cascade of companies that made up Trump’s personal web of pass-throughs and tax-avoidance structures. There are scores of them, loosely clustered as ways of splitting corporate ownership that only a tax accountant could love.
This diagram shows how those companies and trusts flow into and out of one another and where the Trumps benefited. It is obviously lacking a layer of information, but you get the point. A web of LLCs. Lots of shell companies. Easy pickings on one’s way to a Pulitzer.
Again, though, this is just a subset of the claims being presented by Comer and his allies. Those claims have been hyped for weeks, centering on allegations that Biden was somehow implicated in a scheme to vacuum up money from foreign actors as part of an influence-peddling scheme. Wednesday’s news conference was supposed to be the moment when the pieces were revealed, the puzzle completed.
They were not. Comer presented allegations about money being paid from a Romanian who was later convicted of corruption to “the Bidens" for a purported business relationship, including during the period when Joe Biden was vice president. But this use of “the Bidens,” like his repeated use of “the Biden family,” was simply an effort to use the involvement in these deals of Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his brother James as a way of implying that the president himself benefited.
Asked directly by reporters whether there was any evidence of the president’s involvement, Comer fell back on insinuations.
“We’re pretty confident that the president was very knowledgeable of what his family was doing,” he claimed at one point — which, of course, is very different from Biden’s being a beneficiary of foreign contributions himself. If it’s even true, which Comer didn’t assert.
No reasonable person would argue that Hunter Biden’s obvious efforts to leverage his father’s power and position were beyond moral reproach. Even when Joe Biden was vice president, at least one government official warned the Obama administration about Hunter Biden’s efforts to make money, a warning that emerged during Trump’s first impeachment. Nor is Hunter escaping potential accountability: The Justice Department (a part of Biden’s administration, of course) is investigating him and may soon file charges related to taxes among other things.
So far, though, there’s been no link drawn between those efforts and the president himself, despite a preponderance of material that Republicans have combed through and despite spending months combing through it. That they have found evidence of payments flowing from foreign nationals to Hunter Biden-linked LLCs and then (allegedly) to a number of members of Biden’s extended family is used by the Republicans as rhetorical evidence that Joe Biden must somehow be involved. But the opposite argument seems more valid: After all this searching, no concrete link showing money going to the president has turned up. This seems exculpatory more than incriminating.
Then, of course, there’s the question of Trump and his family. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington estimates that Trump’s various business interests pulled in as much as $160 million when he was president, cash mostly flowing in through overseas properties. But there was also foreign money coming in domestically, as when Saudi interests repeatedly booked large blocks of rooms at his hotels. The House Oversight Committee itself found that foreign interests spent $750,000 at Trump’s D.C. hotel during his presidency — a report produced when Democrats still held the majority.
That’s just Trump himself, mind you. His family also benefited from that spending. (See the above chart of how money Plinkos its way through the Trump Organization.) In 2019, the New York Times reported on the ways in which Trump’s sons were trying to expand their business internationally, despite a pledge to halt new outreach during Trump’s tenure as president. And, of course, there was the massive deal reached by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, immediately after he left the White House.
This was presented to Comer for consideration by a reporter. He asserted that there was a broad problem of presidential family members seeking to make iffy foreign business deals, stretching back to (Democratic) President Jimmy Carter. He also said they were going to “look at everything” — though earlier this year he admitted that his committee was shutting down the aforementioned Democratic investigation.
His main argument, though, was one made by Donalds: “The Biden family doesn’t really have a business.”
“What are the Biden businesses?” Comer said. “ … What business are they in?”
The distinction being drawn, then, is between family members of a president seeking to expand existing businesses with foreign investment and family members of a president creating new businesses with foreign investment. A huge web of LLCs is not nefarious, apparently, if it predates the president’s time in office. As did the LLCs linked to Hunter Biden highlighted by House Republicans, but let’s not fuss over details.
The news conference on Wednesday reinforced Comer’s two primary interests when it comes to investigating foreign businesses and presidential families: First, that he and his allies aren’t really interested in the Trumps; second, that there’s no development too incremental to not warrant media attention.
It reinforced something else, too. Perhaps the Oversight Committee will eventually get the goods on Biden. So far it hasn’t by a long shot. But in articulating the nefarious things Hunter Biden allegedly did, they can’t help but demonstrate how Trump and his family engaged in similar behavior. That’s why the “what are the Biden businesses” line was ginned up: It was becoming obvious that they needed some differentiator between the two families beyond the purported evidence itself.
Now if they could only tie Biden to the “Biden family” business, they’d really be on their way.
The wider House Oversight’s net, the more often it catches Trump
Analysis by Philip Bump
National columnist
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/10/wider-house-oversights-net-more-often-they-catch-trump/
The argument was put most concisely by Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), as members of the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee sought to deliver the “judgment day for the Biden administration” that committee chair James Comer (Ky.) had promised Fox News viewers.
“The family’s getting money from various countries and foreign businesses through various shell companies and this web of LLCs?” Donalds said, summarizing his party’s claims about President Biden’s family. “I mean, guys, you in the press, this is easy pickings. I’m giving you Pulitzer stuff here!”
Perhaps someone will win a Pulitzer for uncovering the extent to which a president and his family had been influenced by foreign money. But at this moment the odds seem much better that the family who would be the target of that successful probe would be Donald Trump’s, not Joe Biden’s.
That line about LLCs — limited-liability corporations — stuck out for me because three years ago I tried to document the cascade of companies that made up Trump’s personal web of pass-throughs and tax-avoidance structures. There are scores of them, loosely clustered as ways of splitting corporate ownership that only a tax accountant could love.
This diagram shows how those companies and trusts flow into and out of one another and where the Trumps benefited. It is obviously lacking a layer of information, but you get the point. A web of LLCs. Lots of shell companies. Easy pickings on one’s way to a Pulitzer.
Again, though, this is just a subset of the claims being presented by Comer and his allies. Those claims have been hyped for weeks, centering on allegations that Biden was somehow implicated in a scheme to vacuum up money from foreign actors as part of an influence-peddling scheme. Wednesday’s news conference was supposed to be the moment when the pieces were revealed, the puzzle completed.
They were not. Comer presented allegations about money being paid from a Romanian who was later convicted of corruption to “the Bidens" for a purported business relationship, including during the period when Joe Biden was vice president. But this use of “the Bidens,” like his repeated use of “the Biden family,” was simply an effort to use the involvement in these deals of Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his brother James as a way of implying that the president himself benefited.
Asked directly by reporters whether there was any evidence of the president’s involvement, Comer fell back on insinuations.
“We’re pretty confident that the president was very knowledgeable of what his family was doing,” he claimed at one point — which, of course, is very different from Biden’s being a beneficiary of foreign contributions himself. If it’s even true, which Comer didn’t assert.
No reasonable person would argue that Hunter Biden’s obvious efforts to leverage his father’s power and position were beyond moral reproach. Even when Joe Biden was vice president, at least one government official warned the Obama administration about Hunter Biden’s efforts to make money, a warning that emerged during Trump’s first impeachment. Nor is Hunter escaping potential accountability: The Justice Department (a part of Biden’s administration, of course) is investigating him and may soon file charges related to taxes among other things.
So far, though, there’s been no link drawn between those efforts and the president himself, despite a preponderance of material that Republicans have combed through and despite spending months combing through it. That they have found evidence of payments flowing from foreign nationals to Hunter Biden-linked LLCs and then (allegedly) to a number of members of Biden’s extended family is used by the Republicans as rhetorical evidence that Joe Biden must somehow be involved. But the opposite argument seems more valid: After all this searching, no concrete link showing money going to the president has turned up. This seems exculpatory more than incriminating.
Then, of course, there’s the question of Trump and his family. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington estimates that Trump’s various business interests pulled in as much as $160 million when he was president, cash mostly flowing in through overseas properties. But there was also foreign money coming in domestically, as when Saudi interests repeatedly booked large blocks of rooms at his hotels. The House Oversight Committee itself found that foreign interests spent $750,000 at Trump’s D.C. hotel during his presidency — a report produced when Democrats still held the majority.
That’s just Trump himself, mind you. His family also benefited from that spending. (See the above chart of how money Plinkos its way through the Trump Organization.) In 2019, the New York Times reported on the ways in which Trump’s sons were trying to expand their business internationally, despite a pledge to halt new outreach during Trump’s tenure as president. And, of course, there was the massive deal reached by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, immediately after he left the White House.
This was presented to Comer for consideration by a reporter. He asserted that there was a broad problem of presidential family members seeking to make iffy foreign business deals, stretching back to (Democratic) President Jimmy Carter. He also said they were going to “look at everything” — though earlier this year he admitted that his committee was shutting down the aforementioned Democratic investigation.
His main argument, though, was one made by Donalds: “The Biden family doesn’t really have a business.”
“What are the Biden businesses?” Comer said. “ … What business are they in?”
The distinction being drawn, then, is between family members of a president seeking to expand existing businesses with foreign investment and family members of a president creating new businesses with foreign investment. A huge web of LLCs is not nefarious, apparently, if it predates the president’s time in office. As did the LLCs linked to Hunter Biden highlighted by House Republicans, but let’s not fuss over details.
The news conference on Wednesday reinforced Comer’s two primary interests when it comes to investigating foreign businesses and presidential families: First, that he and his allies aren’t really interested in the Trumps; second, that there’s no development too incremental to not warrant media attention.
It reinforced something else, too. Perhaps the Oversight Committee will eventually get the goods on Biden. So far it hasn’t by a long shot. But in articulating the nefarious things Hunter Biden allegedly did, they can’t help but demonstrate how Trump and his family engaged in similar behavior. That’s why the “what are the Biden businesses” line was ginned up: It was becoming obvious that they needed some differentiator between the two families beyond the purported evidence itself.
Now if they could only tie Biden to the “Biden family” business, they’d really be on their way.
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