Trump Gets A Law & Order Judge
Republicans were so eager to win the House majority so they could do investigations and embarrass the Democrats. So far all their investigations have been busts and the only ones to be embarrassed have been themselves. No matter how much Marjorie Traitor Greene shouts about all the “revelations,” it’s just one failure after another, to the extent that no one even pays any attention short of the Traitor Greene/Matt Gaetz fan club.
Is James Comer really as stupid as he appears to be? Charles Pierce thinks so— particularly when it comes to anything to do with the Republican Party bizarre obsession with Hunter Biden’s penis. Comer keeps coming up with disappearing witnesses and irrelevant witnesses. And I think there was one, some Israeli shyster and arms trafficker (Iran) who was caught spying for China named Gal Luft, on the lam. China hired him to “turn” a Trump advisor to get Trump to adopt China-friendly policies even if he felt he had to denounce China for political reasons. But Luft isn’t the only “witness” Comer has come up with.
Ever hear of Devon Archer? At one point he was Hunter Biden’s business partner. If Marjorie Traitor Greene has dick pics of him, she wasn’t whipped ‘em out yet. But he was another one of Comer’s star witnesses. Until he sat down with Comer’s investigators. Not that that stopped Comer. According to Phil Bump, Comer rushed to Hannity’s show right after the interview. He told the Fox audience that “Archer’s testimony was enormously damaging to President Biden… insisting that Archer’s testimony made the bribery allegation he’d first introduced two months ago ‘more credible.’…Archer ‘said that Hunter Biden was under immense pressure while they both served on the Burisma board to call Washington, D.C., immediately and try to get Shokin fired,’ Comer told Hannity. ‘That’s the Ukrainian prosecutor. And not many days later, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine’— a trip in which he called for Shokin’s ouster. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) reiterated this same claim a short while later, that after a Burisma board meeting in Dubai in early December 2015, Hunter Biden and Burisma executives ‘make a phone call to D.C. … I don’t know who they call, but they call D.C. And five days later, Dec. 9, 2015, Joe Biden is in Ukraine and he gives a speech starting the pressure on the prosecutor in Ukraine.’ All of this is tied together in the narrative that Comer and Jordan have been presenting: Burisma was being probed by prosecutor Viktor Shokin so they needed Hunter Biden to loop in his father, and his father obliged. The bribery claim asserts that Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma with whom Hunter Biden and Archer met, had paid millions to Biden and his father to help protect the company from Shokin.”
The only problem was the Comer and Jordan narrative had nothing to do with the facts or with anything Archer said, which neither Comer nor Jordan has bothered to attend nor, apparently, even read.
What Archer said not only doesn’t comport with the presentations made by Comer and Jordan on television (which were obviously wrong from the outset), his testimony undermines the idea that Burisma wanted Shokin fired, that Zlochevsky paid any bribe— and, crucially, that Joe Biden was involved in any of this.
Archer explained that his work for Burisma was centered on finding external financing for the then-young company to expand. Hunter Biden also helped set up connections in Washington, helping “set Burisma up with [legal firm] Boies Schiller, with Blue Star Group, with the DHS lobbyists, with a whole government affairs and lobbying team in D.C.”
He said that Biden’s last name helped— and that Hunter Biden sought to give the impression he was leveraging Joe Biden in his role. But he also testified that Hunter Biden knew this was deceptive. Archer confirmed an email in which Hunter Biden discussed how to frame an announced trip by the then-vice president to Ukraine.
“The announcement of my guy’s”— his father’s— “upcoming travels should be characterized as part of our advice and thinking— but what he will say and do is out of our hands,” the email read. “In other words, it could be a really good thing or it could end up creating too great an expectation.”
This distills Archer’s broader point: Hunter Biden wanted to give the impression he could bend Joe Biden’s will but, in private conversation, he said he couldn’t.
“He was getting paid a lot of money,” Archer told the investigators, “and I think, you know, he wanted to show value.”
It is true, Archer said, that in December 2015, Zlochevsky and Burisma were under a lot of pressure. But Shokin was not a cause of that pressure, he testified— Shokin was an asset.
“There was capital tied up in London, 23 million pounds. There was, you know, a U.S. visa denied and then a Mexico visa denied,” he testified. “Shokin wasn’t specifically on my radar as being an individual that was— that was targeting him. But, yes, there was constant pressure.”
The sort of pressure that those non-vice-presidential connections Hunter Biden had helped set up were designed to try to relieve. Pressures unrelated to Shokin.
In fact, as Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) pointed out in questioning Archer, Shokin had himself helped relieve some of that pressure on Burisma. Those assets in London? They were unfrozen in part because Shokin refused to assist a British investigation into Zlochevsky, Goldman noted.
“This goes to the idea that Shokin, who was prosecutor general in 2015, was good for Burisma,” Goldman said.
“Uh-huh,” Archer replied.
When Biden traveled to Ukraine in December 2015— a trip that was announced publicly before the phone call that Jordan and Comer implied had triggered it— he joined other international leaders in condemning Shokin’s performance. (This was not, as Jordan claimed on Fox News, the “starting [of] pressure” on Shokin.) Archer testified that he was told by Burisma’s team in Washington that this pressure from Biden “was bad for Burisma.”
Archer agreed that the fact that “Shokin did not pursue corruption investigations against Burisma’s owner, effectively shielding the owner from prosecution,” as Goldman articulated it, meant that Shokin’s ouster put Burisma and Zlochevsky at more risk, not less.
More broadly, Archer severely undercut Republican claims about Hunter Biden’s interactions with his father.
He at first indicated that Hunter Biden had called his father after that meeting in Dubai in December 2015 but later said that he only knew that Hunter had “called D.C.”
So, he was asked, did Hunter Biden ever ask his father to take official actions on behalf of his business partners? “He did not,” Archer said. “He did not ask him— to my knowledge, I never saw him say, do anything for any particular business.”
Archer was asked later to confirm that he was not aware of any policy discussion between Hunter Biden and his father or of any occasion on which he asked the then-vice president to do anything improper. “That’s my understanding,” Archer said.
What about that bribe? Would he disagree with the idea that an FBI interview form that was the root of Comer’s initial claim actually constituted evidence of a bribe? “Yeah, I would,” Archer said, noting that (as the informant who claimed to have been told about the bribe noted) this sort of boasting was common in such situations— “very similar to D.C. operators,” Archer added, not needing to identify Hunter Biden as such an operator. What’s more, he said— under penalty of perjury, mind you— he was never aware of any such bribe offered to Hunter Biden or anyone else.
There was never a good reason to believe that the bribe allegation was legitimate, and Comer’s repeated claims about it have done enormous damage to his credibility. To have Devon Archer dismiss it certainly isn’t complete exoneration, but it is more evidence against the idea that it occurred.
Consider the first words out of Comer’s mouth in that interview with Hannity: “Every day this bribery scandal becomes more credible.” In fact, Archer’s testimony pointed precisely in the opposite direction.
That’s the pattern here. Comer and Jordan and others hype claims of Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s work only to see those claims collapse as more information is made public. Devon Archer’s testimony was hailed as a central breakthrough in implicating Joe Biden. Instead, it has a top ally of Hunter Biden stating under penalty of perjury that Joe Biden was not involved in Hunter Biden’s business and that Biden’s trip to Ukraine in 2015 was not centered on protecting Burisma at all.
Very much contrary to what those leading Republicans implied on Fox News.
Meanwhile, their leader may finally be in some serious trouble. He drew the wrong judge for the big trial. Tanya Chutkan is a 21st Century version of a “hangin’ judge.” She believes criminals should go to prison. And she is already aware that Señor T is a criminal. Lawyers who practice in DC agree she’s “the toughest judge he could’ve gotten in the Washington, D.C., district court. ‘It’s probably the worst draw for Trump. She’s the worst judge he could’ve gotten handed,’ one attorney with experience representing a January 6 defendant tells Rolling Stone. ‘She’s pleasant, she’s nice, and she’s fair, but she’s a tough judge with these Jan. 6 cases.’ Chutkan’s record of tough sentences in Jan. 6 cases has driven Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham to make cartoonish pronouncements about the supposed bias against the former president. ‘The judge in this case hates Trump,’ he told Fox News on Wednesday evening.”
Chutkan, an immigrant from Jamaica, worked as both a trial attorney in private practice and a public defender in Washington, D.C., before she was appointed to the bench by President Obama in 2014. (She was confirmed 95-0, including support from a pre-MAGAfied Sen. Graham.)
Throughout the course of [the J-6] trials, Chutkan has repeatedly voiced her disgust for the actions of rioters on Jan. 6. “Every single time that I see videotape or hear recordings of what happened that day, I am struck anew with both the horror of what was going on that day and how close we came— how close we came to not fulfilling one of the basic functions of our democracy, which is a peaceful transfer of power, which we lecture other governments all over the world on and we’re supposed to be an example of, and we were not that day,” Chutkan said during the trial of Christine Priola, a rioter who appeared smiling on the Senate floor on Jan. 6. (Chutkan sentenced Priola to 15 months in prison.)
Chutkan also criticized “those in high office in this country” who’ve claimed the rioters were just “visitors exercising their First Amendment rights.” The statement was an implicit rebuke of Republicans who have argued that rioters were merely “tourists” at the Capitol. But Trump and his attorneys have also relied on First Amendment arguments in defending him from lawsuits and criminal charges related to the insurrection, claiming that his efforts to incite the riot and disrupt the count of electoral votes were protected speech.
Lawyers with experience in her courtroom are quick to warn others not to underestimate Chutkan, who can be obliging on procedural matters and empathetic with defendants but firm when it comes to handing down sentences.
…In the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, Trump and his attorneys have sought to slow the trial down as much as possible in hopes of pushing it back after the election and, in Trump’s belief, his victory in the presidential race. But others who’ve argued before Chutkan say the case might move quicker than some expect.
“Judge Chutkan is an extremely competent judge who is fair to both sides in my experience. She is not swayed by partisan interests, public clamor, of fear of criticism,” says Charles Haskell, an attorney who has represented Jan. 6 defendants in her courtroom. “I would expect the case to move quickly.”
…She frequently describes sentencing as “the hardest part of my job and the part I like the least.” “I see these cases and people on the outside who aren’t in the system see these cases and they are like, Oh, they are all traitors, lock them up. They are all drug dealers, lock them up. It’s not that simple. Everyone is complicated.”
Chutkan made those comments in February while sentencing Jeffrey Finley, a West Virginia member of the Proud Boys. And in that case, she demonstrated that, for her, contrition matters.
Chutkan sentenced Finley to 75 days in prison and allowed him to serve the sentence in West Virginia, “to be close to his home, his mother, and his community,” noting during the sentencing that he displayed “genuine remorse” for his actions.
Trump continues to insist the 2020 election was stolen and that he did nothing wrong. He has suggested he’ll pardon Jan. 6 rioters if he retakes the White House in 2024. And after the indictment came down on Tuesday, his campaign put out a statement comparing it to Nazi Germany.
Trump wants a MAGA judge he appointed, like the crackpot in Florida who's already screwing up the classified documents case. And he wants to be tried in West Virginia, which happens to be the state that gave him the highest percentage of his votes, other than Wyoming in 2020. West Virginia was #1 in 2016.
