As we approach Monday’s highly anticipated closed-door congressional testimony of Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s longtime friend and business partner, here’s my theme for the week: obstruction of injustice.
In a normal universe, we would be considering questions members of the House Oversight Committee ought to be asking Archer about Biden family corruption. For example, what was the extent of President Biden’s participation in the business of cashing in on his political influence?
The president’s ne’er-do-well son Hunter appears to have steered that business, with copious assistance from Archer and such other confederates as the president’s brother Jim Biden, and business partners James Bulger, Rob Walker, James Gilliar, and Eric Scherwin, among others.
Why do business with agents of corrupt and anti-American governments?
If the business was legitimate, why does it appear that these foreign regimes, so anxious to pay the Bidens, do not appear to have gotten comparable value in exchange… unless you count access to Joe Biden (both while he was vice president and as he was planning his 2020 presidential run)?
If the business was legitimate, why not have straight payments – money directly exchanged for goods and services? Why, instead, did the Biden business structure payments in the manner of money launderers: parsing multimillion-dollar foreign transfers into smaller slices – the better to draw less attention – which were routed through a labyrinth of transfer channels, bank accounts, and business entities that appear to have existed almost exclusively to collect money rather than produce value?
Why set up 20 limited liability companies? Why payments to no fewer than nine Biden family members – including grandchildren and others who can have had nothing to do with the relevant business transactions?
That is all straightforward enough, or at least it would be if this were a normal corruption investigation.
But there’s nothing normal about it. That’s because, as we saw in connection with Hunter Biden’s Delaware debacle last week – the collapse of his sweetheart plea deal – the Biden Justice Department is not really investigating the Bidens. It is protecting the Bidens – particularly the president.
Indeed, the first question to ask Devon Archer is: Why are you here?
If there were a real criminal investigation, the Justice Department would not be allowing Archer to testify in a congressional hearing.
In a normal situation, federal prosecutors tightly control access to essential witnesses until they can testify in court. They fight against any grandstanding attempts by Congress to question their witnesses until the criminal investigation and prosecution are complete.
In a free-wheeling congressional hearing, witnesses are insufficiently prepared for the questioning. (By contrast, prosecutors prep witnesses for days on end, walking them through the evidence to ensure the accuracy of eventual trial testimony.)
In a House committee hearing, members rush through five-minute interrogation rounds, asking loaded questions or badgering and interrupting the witness. There is no presiding judge, as there is in criminal trials, to sustain objections to the politicians’ poorly formed, error-ridden, and argumentative questions. This leads to errors, half-baked explanations, and misimpressions that are not – or at least not primarily – the witness’ fault.
Source Fox News