Episode 49: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

So all I want to hear online are the superlatives attached to the various articles, particularly my own. But it's it's going well. And who would have thought that a newspaper that doesn't go on the internet? That looks like something from 150 years ago would have immediate appeal? But it seems well-deserved.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's great news. So this is this was a a crazy, yet another crazy news week. We. We had difficulty even deciding what to discuss this week until this bomb dropped just before the show. Basically, this is going to come out on Friday morning, so everyone's going to know by now. But there was a bit of a shocking decision in the Hunter Biden plea deal, which was supposed to go through on Wednesday, and did not.

And the judge, in case, in something that's very rare, rejected a plea deal, basically saying that she didn't want to be a rubber stamp. Now, there's varying interpretations of what actually happened there, but in my lifetime of, I only remember one instance of this happening. There was a famous instance when a judge, a very principled judge named Jed Rakoff, threw out a sweetheart deal for a city group. And got himself in very hot water for doing that. But this is going. This decision to reject Hunter Biden's plea deal is going to start a gnashing of teeth that will echo through Washington for quite some time. Because now people are going to read this case and wow, is it crazy?

I think we're both learning about it. Walter, what are your impressions of this whole thing? Well, I told you before the.

Right, exactly, it's just flabbergasting. I mean, here we have dealings with a country which we are now funding, whose government we are now funding, and whose, you know, war efforts we are now funding. To the tune of, you know, 100 billion plus dollars. And we have this country sending money to this panoply of cut-out corporations put together, I guess, by Hunter or his people.

And it's kind of a lot of money, though it's not a lot of money if it buys you, you know, the U.

S government and its good graces sums over 100 billion dollars. It's kind of amazing how good a deal that is for the corrupt people of, you know, Burisma and so on. But in any case, you get the sense that it was a deal of a century. And these payments were so thinly disguised as to be, you know, laughable.

It was the thinnest pretext that there was actual business involved here, you know, but we can get to the case itself. Then what's crazy is that this plea deal basically offered a kind of.

Widespread, ongoing in perpetuity immunity to prosecution for all this stuff.

The United States agrees not to criminally prosecute Biden outside the terms of this agreement for any federal crimes encompassed by the attached Statement of facts.

I don't know that.

I don't know, I didn't even know that. There's a side deal, well in the diversionary, I think, in the diversionary segment.

I'll have to have to take a look. Well, I don't think I'm spreading the dread, misinformation there, but from my reading, it appeared that this wasn't a very transparent.

Deal at all, even though it was ultimately a rather simple one. As you just stated, you know, you're free as a bird, basically, and.

So what's making me laugh are three things one, the nature of the alleged crimes. I mean, they're shockingly, they're brazen, they're brazen millions and millions of dollars flowing into a crazy quilt of cut out shell corporations.

And you know, then number two, there's a sense that no one was watching, I mean, no one was watching. This went on for so long and was, and there have been eyes on this, these people for a long time now. I mean, it's not like we just heard the name Hunter Biden, or we just heard these allegations. In general, you would imagine that a lot of this stuff has been known in some way for a very long time.

So you read through the exhibits, which are now on the docket of the court case because they've been filed in this amicus brief. And here is that there is where you see all the details now. A lot of people have been paying attention over the course of this spring, especially as this stuff has come out. There have been news stories about these whistleblowers, but if you actually read all this testimony from the I.R.S whistleblower, especially Gary Shapley.

It's just shocking how a how primitive some of this corruption and scheming was, and b how craven the behavior of all the law enforcement figures were in response to this. It's almost like the member that Dave Chappelle skit, where he tries to turn the justice system on its head. And, you know, shows what it would look like to if the government started treating Black drug dealers the way they treat like the heads of banks. And, you know, they sort of apologetically call up, you know, crack dealer Tron Carter and say, Can you come in on Thursday for your plea deal? And he says, No, I've got some punani, I need to come in later. And they're like, Okay, well, that happens in this case.

There's a situation, basically, Hunter Biden is getting these gigantic payments from Burisma, from Ukraine. Like it's like a million something dollars a year, 83 grand a month for nothing. It goes to him, he gives the money back to Burisma, Burisma then gives the money back to him.

I mean, not to Burisma. He gives the money to Rosemont Seneca, which is this sort of shell company that he has with his partners, Rosemont Seneca gives the money back to him. And then Hunter says to the tax authorities, Oh, it's a loan, it's not an income.

It's not income, it's a loan, it's a loan, it's a loan. And so this guy Shapley is looking at this and he's listening to all these other people in his orbit. Including, like, you know, the people representing Biden, but also people within both the DOJ, the IRS. And they're all trying to tell him how complicated it is.

And he's like, it's not complicated. As soon as he got the money, that's a taxable event, like, that's it. But everybody's pretending that there's something more there than him getting a huge payoff. And then there's a whole list of shell companies like Rosemont, Seneca that exists for this exact purpose.

And he says this explicitly, like that all these different companies exist for him to give money back to, and then, like, return to him as loans. And should we just read up this list of shell companies? Yeah, a lot of them have. Rosemont.

Ghanai Atlas LLC, YES, Seneca Global Partners, YES, Rosemont Seneca Partners, Rosemont Seneca Principal Investments, Rosemont Reality, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners. It just goes on and on and on, we can't even do it.

The show, we'd be doing it all day.

The guy exists basically to take payoffs from all these different actors. Romania, China.

It looks bad.

So people are not going to look at this, I imagine. And I think the myth that there is nothing to this case is going to come to a close at this point.

What was the first line of defense against this being a serious set of allegations? I don't remember now.

And at most, it's soft corruption, right, what you call soft corruption, right? He's taking a position on a board and getting paid, but there's no evidence that he did anything wrong.

And they're not charging him with picking a no-show job or bribery or any of those things. They're just charging him with tax offenses, basically not filing his tax returns.

Right, and that they were trying to immunize in this deal.

Right, right, I mean.

And there's a version of this story that we have to clarify. But there's a version of this story where it was both the judge and the defense that objected to the plea deal in the end.

But the statute of limitations, I guess, is for these kinds of tax offenses, six years.

And Shapley says, Yeah, I can do that. But let's take a look at the global arrangement.

And just the reading of this is amazing. So, he says, global income streams for everyone altogether, so it's for the period of 2014 through 2019..

So the total global transfers that Hunter and his associates would have received from Ukraine, Romania and China was $17.

3 million approximately, so a staggering amount, so Burisma paid everyone involved $6.5 million.

Then he goes on to list the lawyers, some other people who got money from Burisma. Then, he says. Approximate total transfers from the Romania company, I say, the Romania Company, I just want to keep it at that to everyone was $3.1 million the total transfers from HW3. I don't know what that is to everyone. Was. I think that's the Chinese entity, right?

To everyone was $3.

7 million total energy, and total transfers from State Energy HK to Rob Walker was $3 million, or Robinson Walker LLC. Correct that, so that gives you $17.3 million. So I'm assuming this is only a partial. I mean, again, this all came out of an investigation of one thing in particular. So I'm sure they don't have the global picture of everything.

And this just involving Hunter, from what I understand, so they haven't even gotten to the other members of the family or other things. And if the structure is the same with all of those companies that I listed before, as it is with Rosemont, Seneca. What he described, then, basically, it's just a series of shell companies that exist to accept payments from various entities. And for what, it's not clear.

Like, I don't think they're actually doing any work. And then you add that to the fact that Devin Archer is going to testify his business partner, Rosemont, Seneca. And he's about to go to jail for ripping off, for the great American, politically corrupt tradition of ripping off Native American tribes. And there have been rumors going around for a while that he had some explosive things to say. And there was a New York Post article this week basically saying that he's going to testify to 12 phone calls to Burisma from Joe Biden, or that involved Joe Biden during this period.

So it sounds like what the Republicans are trying to do is bring on all this stuff in Congress because they're not doing it through the justice system. And to force somebody's hand to make it happen there, and that's kind of a hail, Mary, given the circumstances. But it looks like they, you know, they won round one. It looks like, is that a wrong interpretation of this?

Hunter would say you can get him on the phone right now, and he would prove his access by getting his dad to. You know, speak to the group wherever it was. And I mean, that's about as damning, if that's true as I can imagine. I mean, everyone understands that.

There are no dead drops involved in that, there's no tradecraft involved in. Hey, you know, here we are here. I am peddling influence, and just in case you don't think I have influence to peddle, here's my dad on the phone, right? Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, and so, you know, you look at this, Matt, and you really wonder why impeachment isn't being discussed more loudly. I do, you know? They have the ability to investigate this, they don't have to go through the criminal system. They have their own constitutional ability to judge these matters. High crimes and misdemeanors, and so on.

They don't have to wait.

And so why are they? And I'm starting to see from certain Congress people that word being used more emphatically.

It feels to me, just looking at it from afar, like there's some kind of a pressure campaign on Biden. You know, don't make us do this, do the right thing. Yeah, this is the Frankie.

There's it certainly feels like.

That could be possible.

Well, and being pressured, and this goes back to Joe's.

I mean, the whole thing looks like a rat's nest, almost beyond imagining. And and yeah, you read about it and in every Twitter thread and so on. The third, the third comment is, But Trump, you know, as though that's going to be the defense of all bad behavior going forward in the history of America. But Trump was worse, so it's unclear how, in this case, he rivaled any of this behavior.

And but, but, but yeah, I mean, frankly, I read some of this stuff and I go, they should ask for more. I mean, if this was truly a quid pro quo. And and the thing that they got in return for, it was, you know, infinite backing from the U.S. Treasury. Let's let's imagine, right? I would, I would ask for more than $1 million a year, you know right, doesn't that seem so amateur? How much do you want?

A million dollars a year, you know? Like, why not? 3.4, you know, yeah.

And one of her points in the piece was that Burisma was at the very, at the bare minimum. When they were paying Hunter, they were buying what the Russians call a accretion, a roof, they were the the appearance of protection. So what? Whether he actually delivered or not, it's it's like, incredibly valuable to Burisma. To have, you know, the former president of Poland, and you know that, and Hunter Biden on the board. Because it announces to the world like, you know, if you're going to try to bring international criminal charges against us or whatever like, there might be complications. And that's incredibly valuable, even if they're not delivering.

But, you know, if they can show that they're actually getting Joe on the phone in, say, a Burisma board meeting? I mean, that's a that's game over, isn't it?

I got your back, see ya. Or is it anything that's thought to be specific?

Story And I guess Hunter and Archer are at the four seasons bar somewhere. And Vadim Pazarski, who's a you know, Burisma executive, says, Can you get your? Can you ring your dad? And Hunter then called his father, put him on speaker, placed the phone at the table and introduced the Ukrainians to Joe Biden. By name as Nikolai and Vadim. He also said words to the effect that the Burisma bigwigs need our support.

VP Biden greeted the Ukrainians, but spoke only in vague pleasantries during the short call. And then other such interactions and other such interactions with Hunter's overseas business partners. Archer is expected to testify. So, you know, she doesn't really describe anything in particular that they asked for, but it's just the the idea that they need our support. Um, you know, maybe there's more I.