Biggest revelations from the whistleblower testimony.

• Hunter linked daddy to Chinese deal in threat to business partner.
• Joe Biden showed up at business meetings with Hunter and his Chinese partners, clearly the doting father.
• The FBI authenticated Hunter Biden's laptop almost a year before we knew it existed and found no evidence of misinformation.
• Hunter deducted hooker and sex club payments from his taxes.
• The investigation into Hunter Biden had started due to a foreign porn website back in the 2018, and of course all of this was hidden from the public.
• Prosecutors wanted to charge Hunter with felonies, but all he got was misdemeanors.
• Biden’s Department of Justice worked to block the investigation.
• Agents wanted to search Biden family homes but were told the optics would be too bad.
• IRS wanted search warrant for Hunter’s storage locker but a Biden-appointed prosecutor tipped off his lawyers.

Federal crimes reduced to misdemeanors. DOJ and FBI obstructing Justice. Threatening oligarchs to pay up or else daddy will get them. Crack, prostitutes, leaving a gun by a school.

But Trump held a rally!!

The desire to be good isn't good enough, in my opinion. We can desire to be good until the cows come home, but until it motivates other actions and behaviors, those which can affect anyone else but oneself, a species of desire is all it will remain.

For my own part I'm opposed to utilitarian morality, that one's abilities, and the consequences or effectiveness of her actions can make her behavior moral. Moral logic and quests for the common good can lead one to do immoral things. As intimated I believe morality reveals itself in the act alone, whether it is impelled by thought or instinct or self-concern.

Note the difference between the dutifully quoted propaganda and the actual quote of the whistleblower testimony.

NYT:

Mr. Shapley, in fact, also told Congress that his investigation had uncovered some evidence that some of the claims of the elder Mr. Biden’s involvement were mere “wishful thinking.”

He told of an interview conducted with Hunter Biden’s business associate Rob Walker, who told investigators that it was “projection” that former Vice President Biden would get involved in their business ventures.

“I certainly never was thinking at any time the V.P. was a part of anything we were doing,” Mr. Walker said, according to Mr. Shapley.

Actual testimony:

Walker answered: "I think that maybe James was wishful thinking or maybe he was just projecting that, you know, if this was a good relationship and this was something that was going to happen, the VP was never going to run, just protecting that, you know, maybe at some point he would be a piece of it, but he was more just, you know -- it looks terrible, but it's not. I certainly never was thinking at any time the VP was a part of anything we were doing."

https://waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Whistleblower-1-Transcript_Redacted.pdf

Mens rea. The so-called intention can lead to a harsher punishment. You’re right. I guess I’m trying to find out why, ethically speaking, this needs to be the case.

The content your ellipses leave out.

The WhatsApp message was among a batch of documents released by the Ways and Means Committee along with the transcripts of interviews with Mr. Shapley and a second I.R.S. investigator whose name was redacted.

The two investigators, one of whom described himself as a Democrat, told Congress of a lengthy period of strife between them and others involved in the investigation. They said a particular prosecutor at the Justice Department blocked some of their efforts and communicated too much information to Hunter Biden’s legal team.

Mr. Shapley suggested that I.R.S. investigators believed there were grounds to charge Mr. Biden with more serious crimes than he ultimately agreed to plead guilty to as part of his deal with the Justice Department. Mr. Shapley told the committee that he was “alleging, with evidence, that D.O.J. provided preferential treatment, slow-walked the investigation, did nothing to avoid obvious conflicts of interest in this investigation.”

Not a good look.

“Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” Mr. Biden wrote, referring to other participants in the proposed deal. “And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”

Taken at face value, the message would undercut President Biden’s longstanding claims that he had nothing to do with his son’s international business deals.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-joe-business-deal.html

Hunter Biden got a nice little slap on the wrist for tax fraud and gun crimes, and if other allegations are true, the justice department was running defense for him even while daddy was out of office. It must be nice to be above the law.

If you want to find the “process of thought” watch a person think. Human thought, like believing and reasoning, is an action performed by persons, and not by any other collection of things and processes. If you want to see a cartwheel or a backflip you do the same thing: watch a person perform these actions.

If thoughts are not persons thinking, beliefs are not persons believing, and reasons not persons reasoning, then they are nothing but words without a referent. There is no other way around it.

One wonders how different the issue would be if the pictograms on bathroom doors were penises and vaginas.

Schiff promised them evidence of Russian collusion and when he didn’t deliver they didn’t care. He deceived congress, the public, and the world and it is quickly forgotten. They followed the Big Lie™ all the way to the end.

The fallacy of division reminds us that that which true for a whole needn’t be true of its parts. So a vast combination of non-intentional and non-purposeful processes could form an intentional and purposeful being.

Reasoning, forming beliefs, making logical inferences, seeking to arrive at a true understanding—these are the activities of a human being.

Human beings are physical and chock-full of neurochemicals and synapses. Human beings are often described as intentional and purposeful. They are rational.

Since human beings are physical, and their actions are often intentional and purposeful and rational, beliefs are inferred by both physical and rational causes.

So beliefs can still be fully explained in terms of physical causes, and naturalism remains true.

That’s what I’m struggling with. My conscience won’t let me abandon the truth of the matter, nor will it let me abandon compassion and manners. I believe abandoning one or the other is fracturing the issue and leading to the division, on what in my mind should be a matter of health.

It seems to me that if it is a matter of health we should be focusing on the dysmorphia, the question of why one cannot identify with his own body, those strong desires and incongruities which directly causes most of the suffering. That in my mind is the humane approach, while it is not clear that satisfying these desires is, especially when we risk violating the rights of the other sex.

However, in a more generalised sense, I do think a blanket denial of trans womanhood that simply designates trans women as men who "like to wear dresses " or change their bodies to look like women is transphobic, though not necessarily ill-intentioned (this seems to be @NOS4A2's stance).

Why is it transphobic?

A woman is a female of the human species. It's mind-boggling that such a benign fact can create so much division between people. The truth of this says nothing about the right of men to wear dresses or put on makeup, which are rights that ought to be defended as matters of personal choice and freedom. Nothing of this fact diminishes theplight or worsens the burdens of those that struggle with dysphoria.

Rather than cede the language, the bathrooms, the sports, though, all of which pertain to sex, we should abandon the use of gender altogether. If the sex surgery, the puberty blockers, the desire to compete with members of the opposite sex is any indication, it all has to do with sex anyways, and the use of gender only muddies the water.

If consciousness is strictly a bodily function, we'd have to explain how it is that the body doesn't adapt, but the mind does.

It’s not clear that the mind has adapted when the examples given are exclusively performed by bodies.

Interesting OP. Thank you for writing it.

My own take is that morality mandates behavior rather than a perspective. In that sense it must become objective for one to be called “moral”, a kind of “show don’t tell”, where it can be brought to judge. It needs to be seen, extended into the physical sphere as behavior.

Subjective morality alone, on the other hand, whether adopting perspectives, taking positions, or holding on to and espousing what one believes are good ideas, belong in the category of mere brain chatter, which to me is amoral behavior. Wherever morality reveals itself in words and thoughts only it is largely an exercise in subjective and personal excuse-making, probably to counteract the inner pangs of dissonance, which is self-seeking behavior. As a corollary, one cannot judge another for the views they hold.

So while having principles and being principled are necessary, at least as potential guides for how one ought to live situation to situation, they are nothing without the corresponding behavior and the objective aspect of morality. With this one can only lead by example, where coercion doesn’t quite fit.

I don’t know if this fits in in any way. If not I apologize.

Somewhere, out there, some poor soldiers life was at risk. This is the kind of propaganda that justifies jailing dissidents, starting wars, and droning innocents.

You cannot name a single person whose life is at risk, I’m afraid, which leads me to believe this is just the NatSec, neoconservative propaganda we tell ourselves to justify state tyranny. The only thing at risk is the power and prestige of the US government, people like General Mark Milley, who apparently was drawing up plans to invade Iran despite what he wrote in his book. Or people like the FBI, who put spooks in a presidential campaign, spied on a candidate, based on lies and misinformation. People here are advocating for the use of the Espionage Act to jail political opponents, perhaps yearning for the opaque and censorial days of the Obama administration, which jailed more people under that law than all previous administrations combined. Former official John Kiriakou said it best, jailed as he was for speaking to a reporter:

“The purpose of an Espionage Act prosecution, however, is not to punish a person for spying for the enemy, selling secrets for personal gain, or trying to undermine our way of life. It is to ruin the whistleblower personally, professionally and financially. It is meant to send a message to anybody else considering speaking truth to power: challenge us and we will destroy you.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/06/obama-abuse-espionage-act-mccarthyism

This is a new sort of McCarthyism and I’m glad I’m not on your side. Morally speaking, I put all activities of this sort in the morally depraved category, and any defense of it under the category of deep-state boot licking.

It appears he did file them separately, took them with him, and disputed with NARA over them. If you find that he took something designated as presidential records with him, be sure to let me know.

Whose lives did he put at risk?

What moral standard puts Hilllary's behavior on the bad side, and Trump's on the good side?

Hillary wasn’t elected by the people as the authority of the US government. She was afforded no such right by the people of the United States. Trump was.

So NARA has more authority than the president in deciding what are presidential and personal records. But we’ve already seen that play out in court and it didn’t go well for the plaintiff.

They weren't personal records. The Presidential Records Act doesn't given the President authority to declare that agency records are his personal records.

He was the commander-in-chief and supreme authority of those agencies, though. Someone below him has more authority then?

Do you think the government can take back personal records of a former president, circumventing the presidential records act, if the next administration deems them illegal to retain?

So you’re saying that after the president leaves office, they can retroactively re-classify it and arrest him for having it?

Information that has not previously been disclosed to the public under proper authority may be classified or reclassified after an agency has received a request for it under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552), the Presidential Records Act, 44 U.S.C. 2204(c)(1), the Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. 552a), or the mandatory review provisions of section 3.5 of this order only if such classification meets the requirements of this order and is accomplished on a document-by-document basis with the personal participation or under the direction of the agency head, the deputy agency head, or the senior agency official designated under section 5.4 of this order. The requirements in this paragraph also apply to those situations in which information has been declassified in accordance with a specific date or event determined by an original classification authority in accordance with section 1.5 of this order.

You are clearly reaching.

It says on your page:

WHAT IS THE AUTHORITY FOR AUTOMATIC DECLASSIFICATION?

Executive Order 13526, “Classified National Security Information”.

The documents in question were not automatically declassified.

I do agree with Trump. You’ll remember that he was the commander in chief of the armed forces. He is the only one above those rules. He can declassify what he wants. It doesn’t matter whether it’s classified documents or national defense information, which is a distinction without a difference. None of that is true in any other case.

Sorry, I do think it is an irrelevant technicality. Some bureaucrat or spook marking documents as classified does not have more authority than the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. They cannot re-classify Trump’s documents. They cannot seize them. The documents are no longer theirs. It doesn’t matter what law you evoke, because none of them apply.

Your lengthy post is suspiciously missing one key fact, that Trump was president and has unilateral powers of declassification that neither Hillary nor Biden had. Second, that Trump was elected by the people, that means you and me. So for some strange reason, which I can only assume is propaganda driven, you’ve opted to attack those who are elected to represent the will of the people, while running defense for those who weren’t, the career politicians and bureaucrats who made a living seeking power and telling people how they should live their lives.

I wager that you’ve never made a stink about Patreaus or Panetta, two Obama officials like Clinton and Biden, who leaked and mishandled classified information, but were handled with kid’s gloves, while Assange, Snowden, and now Trump are subject to the espionage act as determined by the very same people. The penalty for that is to rot in prison, but you run defense for those who get off with a light verbal scolding. So you’ve demonstrated that your sense of justice is perverted and backwards.

Now we have an untouchable bureaucracy we have no ability to influence. I much rather an elected politician than an unelected administrative state, personally.

If the president cannot do whatever he wants with documents he is given from agencies over which he is the executive, then the constitution of the United States, the separation of powers, checks and balances, is meaningless, and the people have zero power or representation in government.

Nonetheless, this is all unprecedented, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out in court.

It has everything to do with whether those are his personal records or not.

The point that the archivist cannot determine what are presidential or personal records has been made. These decisions are made by the executive during his term. As she points out it’s there in the law.

Neither Archivist nor congress can determine what are or are not presidential records. From the precedent I linked to earlier:

Plaintiff’s entire APA claim is predicated on the notion that the Archivist of the United States has a statutory duty to make his own classification decision and “to assume custody and control” of all Presidential records. There are a number of flaws with this argument. To begin with, the plain language of section 2203(f) of the PRA does not say what plaintiff claims it does – that the Archivist must assume custody and control of all materials that fall within the definition of Presidential records. Tr. at 29:23–30:2. Rather, it states: “the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.” 44 U.S.C. § 2203(f)(1) (emphasis added).

Court construes this language as requiring the Archivist to take responsibility for records that were designated as Presidential records during the President’s term. Even plaintiff tentatively agreed that the obligation to assume custody and control arises after a determination has been made that the documents are Presidential records. Tr. at 30:3–6. If certain records are not designated as Presidential records, the Archivist has no statutory obligation to take any action at all, and there is nothing to compel under the APA.

In order to accept plaintiff’s theory that section 2203(f)(1) of the PRA creates a mandatory duty for the Archivist to assume custody and control of what he or she considers to be Presidential records regardless of how the President designated the documents, the Court would be required to ignore the rest of the PRA’s statutory scheme. This it cannot do. See Chemehuevi Tribe of Indians v. Fed. Power Comm’n, 420 U.S. 395, 403 (1975) (stating that a statutory provision must be “read together with the rest of the Act”).

Section 2203(a) of the PRA directs the President, not the Archivist, to take:

all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented, and that such records are maintained as Presidential records pursuant to the requirements of this section . . . .

44 U.S.C. § 2203(a). The only reference in the entire statute to the designation of records as personal versus Presidential also calls for the decision to be made by the executive, and to be made during, and not after, the presidency. It provides: “materials produced or received by the President, [and other Executive Office employees], shall, to the extent practicable, be categorized as Presidential records or personal records upon their creation or receipt and be filed separately.” Id. § 2203(b). The PRA contains no provision obligating or even permitting the Archivist to assume control over records that the President “categorized” and “filed separately” as personal records. At the conclusion of the President’s term, the Archivist only “assumes responsibility for . . . the Presidential records.” Id. § 2203(f)(1).8

17. Pursuant to Executive Order 13526, information classified at any level could be lawfully accessed only by persons determined by an appropriate United States government official to be eligible for access to classified information and who had signed an approved non-disclosure agreement, who received a security clearance, and who had a “need-to-know” the classified information. After his presidency, TRUMP was not authorized to possess or retain classified documents.

But during his presidency, Trump was authorized to posses, declassify, and determine as personal records those documents.

A state bureaucrat through and through, concerned with state secrets before the country at large. One of the documents Trump is accused of showing was plans for the invasion of Iran, written by Mark Milley, current chairman for the joints chiefs of staff of the United States. I’m glad we now know. Aren’t you?

Isn't that exactly what he did? If not, how would you describe what he did?

Not during any time when he was not president.

I don't believe he was indicted for stealing documents, but for retaining them, hiding them, and lying about having them.

I’m fairly certain the argument for the defense will be that he has the right to keep them for the same reason he had the right to take them. He was the president. They are his documents. As the top authority on what is or is not classified, what is or is not his documents, nothing can be said that they are not his.

Do you really think Trump walked into the white house and took documents?

I’m fairly certain that the president’s authority can override whoever marks documents as classified, unless executive authority is invested in the Dept. of Justice or someone else I am unaware of.