New York and other states are facing a difficult balancing act as they try to move more toward renewable energy, but are having to force consumers to pay for the projects. It might be a tough issue for Democrats heading into the 2024 elections. | John Minchillo/AP Photo
What part of the more you go to wind and solar, the more expensive it gets? We keep on seeing how the fanatics keep on pushing alternative fuels to replace fossil fuels. But this energy saver is far from it. Just ask New York.
A recent report by the state Public Service Commission’s staff found the transition is already increasing utility bills. National Grid electric customers in upstate New York saw 9.8 percent of their bills go toward climate investments in 2022; for Con Edison customers in New York City, it was 4.4 percent. That amounts to an average of about $9.40 out of a $96 monthly bill for upstate Grid customers and $7.90 out of a $182 monthly bill for Con Ed customers.
A study released by the state’s utility regulators last summer found Murphy’s clean energy policies could increase rates by 10 percent to 20 percent unless people use less energy, buy an electric car and rip out their natural gas appliances to install new electric appliances.
Or how about Washington state? Washington state’s first auctions under a new cap-and-trade program have raised significant revenue. But the program has been linked to rising fuel prices in the state, with farmers saying they’re getting hit despite an exemption in the law.
Finally, California. Programs increase gas costs between 22 and 44 cents per gallon, Newsom is now in the midst of implementing an anti-price gouging law targeting oil and gas companies. How will that work with more and more corporations leaving.
Renewables are not reliable and are more expensive. Regardless of what state you live in, what’s happened to your electric bill since 2021.
Good Bad, and the Ugly.
David Walter Banks/The Washington Post/Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks in the Fulton County Government Center during a news conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on Aug. 14. (John Bazemore / AP)
The chair of Georgia’s Freedom Caucus said that it is time the Fulton County district attorney who has spent more than two years working up to the indictment of former President Donald Trump faced legislative scrutiny.
Trump was indicted last week on conspiracy charges related to his challenge of the 2020 election.
Republican state Rep. Charlice Byrd announced on social media that she is supporting an effort from Republican state Sen. Colton Moore to investigate DA Fani Willis.
“I was elected to do a job, not sit on the sidelines. Given the concerning nature of the recent indictment in Fulton County, I have signed on to Senator Colton Moore’s letter calling for an emergency special session. I encourage my colleagues to do the same,” she posted on her Facebook page.
In a statement posted on social media, she wrote “Having reviewed the evidence of possible corruption in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, specifically regarding the indictment of President Donald Trump and eighteen others, I believe it is time the General Assembly investigated this matter.”
She said that she supports Moore’s call for “an emergency special session of the General Assembly to investigate possible malfeasance.”
“If wrongdoing is found, as a duly elected member of the Georgia House of Representatives I am prepared to begin the impeachment process,” she wrote.
“The people demand this matter be investigated fully,” she wrote, calling upon other members to support the proposal.
“We must seek the truth by doing our constitutional duty of overseeing the judicial system, to ensure the oath of office enshrined in law, that every District Attorney must take before assuming office, is respected and adhered to,” she continued.
Last week, when Trump’s indictment was announced, Byrd posted on Facebook, “It’s a dark day in Georgia but the Georgia Freedom Caucus and our coalition partners won’t sit by and watch this totalitarian corruption.”
“We must strip all funding and, if appropriate, impeach Fani Willis,” Moore said in a statement last week when he announced his call for a special session, according to Breitbart.
“As a Georgia State Senator, I am officially calling for an emergency session to review the actions of Fani Willis. America is under attack. I’m not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors weaponize their elected offices to politically target their opponents,” he said.
The look of desperation.Joe Raedle / Getty
Trump will be arraigned on the charges against him on Thursday.
I guess these single-digit IQs think they can hold on to power forever. Otherwise, they’d be worried about what’s going to happen to them when the other side uses their tactics against them. — TPR
Biden’s involvement in his son’s dealings deserves a serious investigation. WP columnist changes his mind, calls for Joe Biden to be fully investigated over Hunter’s business dealings.
I have long dismissed the Hunter Biden story as an irrelevant sideshow, but recent revelations have changed my mind. There’s more than enough evidence to merit a thorough investigation of President Biden’s involvement in his son’s business dealings.
The Hunter Biden saga started in late 2020 when the New York Post reported that a laptop he had left at a Delaware repair shop contained evidence that he, in 2015, apparently tried to set up a meeting between his father, then the vice president, and an executive at a Ukrainian energy firm with whom Hunter was doing business. The Biden campaign actively sought to suppress the story, devising a public statement from 50 former intelligence officials claiming it was Russian disinformation. That wasn’t so.
It’s also clear that Hunter received millions of dollars from Chinese and Ukrainian businesses for which he could offer little to no prior experience. His value to them was clear: his relationship with his father.
None of this directly implicated the elder Biden in any wrongdoing, which is why I — and many Americans — have largely ignored the story. But recent developments have gotten my attention.
Hunter Biden
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Who is David Weiss, lead prosecutor in the Hunter Biden case?
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Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner, recently testified before the House Oversight Committee that Hunter’s value to these firms was his family’s “brand” — his presumed access to the then-vice president. At the time, according to Archer’s testimony, Joe Biden attended dinners in Washington with Hunter and members of Burisma, the Ukrainian firm on whose board Hunter served. Joe Biden also regularly participated in phone calls with Hunter and his clients, Archer said.
That might not have been illegal, and Archer noted that the vice president had not changed policy to help Burisma. But it sure does stink.
The House Oversight Committee also claims Joe Biden used aliases in email conversations about Ukraine policy. In one instance, the committee reports, a document that included information about a call between the vice president and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was forwarded to one of Biden’s supposed aliases, with Hunter copied.
Again, this doesn’t prove Joe Biden was changing policy to fit with Hunter’s clients’ preferences. But it does suggest he was aware of Hunter’s dealings and wanted to keep his son in the loop.
One could dismiss this as simply another tawdry example of access-peddling. Maybe that’s all it is. But only a complete investigation can ensure that it’s nothing worse.
Hunter selling access to his father is disreputable but completely legal. Similarly, Joe Biden participating in meetings that his son asked him to attend would constitute questionable judgment but not illegal conduct. The trouble comes if it moved beyond that to a shared business relationship in which the vice president was an active partner.
CLARKSBURG, W.Va. (WBOY) — Persistent inflation has almost 40% of Americans telling Gallup that they believe economic problems are the most important issue facing the country today.
Inflation has been making the headlines since at least September 2021. Between 2020 and 2022, prices for all items on average surged by 12.45%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That means, per in2013dollars.com, that a $200 purchase in 2020 would cost $224.90 now.
But some items have been impacted by inflation worse than others, especially food and energy prices, which people cannot go without.
Recent economic reports have shown a decrease in consumer confidence amid rising rents and food prices leading to an unchanged pace of sales between September and August.
House Panels Subpoena IRS, FBI Officials Over Weiss Meeting.
Two House committees on Monday subpoenaed IRS investigators and Biden administration Department of Justice officials present at or with direct knowledge of a meeting in 2022 in which U.S. attorney for Delaware David Weiss allegedly claimed he was prevented from bringing charges against Hunter Biden for tax crimes.
The subpoenas issued by the Ways and Means and Judiciary committees came after the DOJ and IRS refused to comply with multiple requests for voluntary transcribed interviews with the witnesses, according to a news release from the committees. Weiss was recently appointed special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden.
The subpoenas were issued to IRS Director of Field Operations Michael Batdorf, IRS Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon, Baltimore FBI Agent in Charge Tom Sobocinski, and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ryeshia Holley.
“Our committees, along with the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, have sought these interviews since IRS whistleblowers came forward with concerning allegations of political interference in the investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign influence peddling and tax evasion,” Ways and Means Chair Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., and Judiciary Chair Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in the news release.
“Unfortunately, the Biden Administration has consistently stonewalled Congress. Our duty is to follow the facts wherever they may lead, and our subpoenas compelling testimony from Biden Administration officials are crucial to understanding how the president’s son received special treatment from federal prosecutors and who was the ultimate decision-maker in the case.”
The news released stressed that “Americans deserve to know the truth, especially now that Attorney General [Merrick] Garland has appointed as special counsel the same U.S. attorney who oversaw Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal and botched the investigation into his alleged tax crimes.”
According to sworn whistleblower testimony, Weiss said during an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting with DOJ and IRS personnel that “he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed” against Hunter Biden and that in multiple instances his efforts to bring charges in multiple jurisdictions were denied. This was documented in an email sent the day of the meeting, and provided to the Ways and Means Committee, according to the news release.
This contrasts with previous congressional testimony from Garland, who said Weiss had all the authority necessary to pursue charges. Weiss also told Congress that he had “ultimate” authority over the case.
Biden Kicks Off Maui Trip by Making It About Himself, Cracking Jokes Where People Died.
Peter Partoll is a commentary writer for the Western Journal and a Research Assistant for the Catholic Herald. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Hillsdale College and recently finished up his masters degree at Royal Holloway University of London.
President Joe Biden began his visit to the fire-ravaged Hawaiian island of Maui by making it look as if he was completely indifferent to their plight.
After a week of silence and dodging questions about the horrific and deadly wildfires on Maui, Biden finally made the effort the fly out to the island to survey the destruction for himself.
Except, Biden did not seem to offer much in the way of sympathy or inspiration to the residents and officials of the devastated island. Instead, he used the occasion to tell stories about himself and crack jokes.
During his Monday speech to the officials and residents of Maui, Biden tried to relate to them by telling the story of how his son and first wife died in a car crash while he was a congressman.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1693759039748907434
While it certainly is a tragic story, this has nothing to do with the situation in Hawaii. People lose loved ones all the time, and it’s not as if his wife and son died in a wildfire. It seems as if Biden was merely telling to story as a way to talk about himself.
Pretty typical for a president who constantly talks about the death of his son Beau Biden to try and relate to military veterans, despite the fact that Beau died of cancer and not in combat.
But the speech only got worse from there. Biden then proceeded to mispronounce the names of several Hawaiian officials and joked about Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono’s name.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1693757794451951936
Biden then joked with the mayor of Maui County about how he looked like he was a football player and called the fire a “national travedy.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1693758349802668384
Then, while touring the devastation, he joked about how hot the ground was and his boots.
Absolutely shameful behavior from the president. Not only does this speech add to the never-ending series of Biden gaffes, but it also demonstrates the complete disregard that the president has for the concerns of the American people.
The people of Maui are aware that he has no real sympathy for them, and many have even said that they do not want Biden visiting because he is just doing it for the cameras.
But it is not only the Hawaiian people who have experienced this callousness. The families of the Gold Star servicemembers killed in Afghanistan in 2021 have also been treated coldly by the president in the face of their tragic losses.
Biden clearly has little to no concern for the well-being of ordinary Americans, and now, even people in a liberal state like Hawaii are starting to notice it.
Roquishia Lewis, Tyler Lewis' mother, holds a photo of her son during a news conference calling for the investigation to lead to an arrest in her son's killing, Monday, March 6, 2023. Lewis was stabbed and killed on the North Campus of University at Buffalo in October 2022. Joshua Bessex/Buffalo News
SUNY Buffalo State University decided to expel 44 migrants from its dorms after parents voiced concern over student safety following two alleged sexual assaults by migrants.
According to The Daily Wire, the university abruptly canceled an agreement with a local community group that placed the migrants in the student housing.
“As we are welcoming our students back to campus Tuesday, we wanted to ensure the best possible learning environment for our students and smooth functioning of our university operations,” Buffalo State President Bonita Durand said in a statement. “I made the difficult decision to discontinue the revocable permit and want to reassure our university community that, as our students return to campus Tuesday, they will find their learning environment as they expected.”
Dr. Myron Glick, Jericho Road Community Health Center’s founder and CEO, told The Buffalo Newsthat SUNY Buffalo State had agreed to shelter migrants in dorms beginning in May because Jericho Road’s migrant shelter was over capacity.
“We live in a community where there’s prejudice,” Glick told The Buffalo News. “And this decision was made, really, in my opinion, as – what’s the right word? – in reaction to that prejudice.”
The school’s decision comes after parents expressed alarm about two separate alleged sexual assaults that involved migrants in the nearby town of Cheektowaga.
“I felt compelled to speak out about this action by Buffalo State because it was discriminatory against these asylum-seekers who are human beings just like you and me,” Glick said. “We do worse by the families we are serving if we don’t speak up for them. They need to know we stand with them as fellow human beings. We cannot be silent in the face of injustice.”
Durand did not mention the alleged sexual assaults in commenting about the decision.
Authorities announced on Aug. 8 that a Venezuelan migrant was charged with raping a woman in front of a 3-year-old child. The alleged incident occurred after the suspect had traveled to Erie County from New York City.
Three days later, a second migrant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo was arrested and charged with sex abuse and unlawful imprisonment for allegedly sexually assaulting a 27-year-old woman who had been working with a community group to aid the migrants.
In the wake of the alleged sexual assaults, Erie County, which includes Buffalo, demanded New York City Mayor Eric Adams stop transporting migrants to the area.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the Democrat mayor “agreed and informed me they will not send any additional persons to Erie County at this time.”
The two New York officials also reportedly discussed “the need for a new and improved security plan.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said this month that Erie County will receive more New York National Guard personnel and assets to help with the migrants. More than 1,800 National Guard members are already deployed across the state to assist with the migrant crisis, according to the governor’s office.
Approximately 540 migrants have been relocated to Erie County thus far.
Roquishia Lewis stepped in front of a row of TV cameras Monday and braced herself to talk about her only child, Tyler, who was stabbed to death in October on the University at Buffalo North Campus.
Hunter Biden, the president’s son, is being investigated by a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
There were signs, subtle but unmistakable, that Hunter Biden’s high-stakes plea agreement with federal prosecutors might be on shaky ground hours before it went public in June, according to emails sent by his legal team to the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware.
When one of Mr. Biden’s lawyers sent over the draft of the statement they intended to share with the news media, a top deputy to David C. Weiss, who had overseen the inquiry since 2018, asked to remove two words describing the status of the investigation, according to interviews and internal correspondence on the deal obtained by The New York Times. “Concluded” and “conclusion” should be replaced with the weaker “resolved,” the deputy said.
Six weeks later, the federal judge presiding over a hearing on the agreement would expose even deeper divisions and the deal imploded, prompting Mr. Weiss to seek appointment as special counsel with the freedom to expand the inquiry and bring new charges.
The deal’s collapse — chronicled in over 200 pages of confidential correspondence between Mr. Weiss’s office and Mr. Biden’s legal team, and interviews with those close to Mr. Biden, lawyers involved in the case and Justice Department officials — came after intense negotiations that started with the prospect that Mr. Biden would not be charged at all and now could end in his possible indictment and trial.
Earlier this year, The Times found, Mr. Weiss appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. But the correspondence reveals that his position, relayed through his staff, changed in the spring, around the time a pair of I.R.S. officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation. Mr. Weiss suddenly demanded that Mr. Biden plead guilty to committing tax offenses.
Now, the I.R.S. agents and their Republican allies say they believe the evidence they brought forward, at the precise time they did, played a role in influencing the outcome, a claim senior law enforcement officials dispute. While Mr. Biden’s legal team agrees that the I.R.S. agents affected the deal, his lawyers have contended to the Justice Department that by disclosing details about the investigation to Congress, they broke the law and should be prosecuted.
“It appears that if it weren’t for the courageous actions of these whistle-blowers, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, Hunter Biden would never have been charged at all,” a team of lawyers for one of the I.R.S. agents said in a statement, adding that the initial agreement reflected preferential treatment.
A spokesman for Mr. Weiss had no comment. He is legally barred from discussing an open investigation, and a senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the situation pushed back on the idea that Mr. Weiss had been influenced by outside pressures, and ascribed any shifts to the typical ebb and flow of negotiations.
The documents and interviews also show that the relationship between Mr. Biden’s legal team and Mr. Weiss’s office reached a breaking point at a crucial moment after one of his top deputies — who had become a target of the I.R.S. agents and Republican allies — left the team for reasons that remain unclear.
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Two I.R.S. officials accused the Justice Department of hamstringing their investigation of Hunter Biden.Credit…Hailey Sadler for The New York Times
Above all, this inside chronicle of the agreement vividly illustrates the difficulty of the task facing Justice Department officials like Mr. Weiss, who have been called upon to investigate prominent figures at a time of extreme polarization, when the nation’s political and criminal justice systems are intertwining in treacherous and unpredictable ways.
No one supervising a comparable inquiry in recent years — like those who oversaw the investigations into Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump — managed to smoothly unwind their investigations when they chose not to indict their targets.
Precisely what happens next is unclear. Mr. Biden’s top lawyer has quit, and accused prosecutors of reneging on their commitments. And Republicans, who waged an all-out war to discredit the deal, are seeking to maximize the political damage to President Biden, seeing it as a counter to the four criminal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, their party’s presidential front-runner.
Mr. Weiss had a few reasons to ask Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to appoint him special counsel. The status could grant him greater authority to pursue leads around the country, and could provide him with added leverage in a revamped deal with Mr. Biden. But he was also motivated by a requirement to produce a report that would allow him to answer critics, according to people with knowledge of the situation — an accounting that could become public before the 2024 election.
David C. Weiss was appointed special counsel after the implosion of an agreement that would have spared the president’s son prison time.Credit…Suchat Pederson/The News Journal, via Associated Press
An Opening Bid
In January, Christopher J. Clark, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, arrived in Wilmington, Del., to push Mr. Weiss to end the investigation into the president’s troubled son that had, at that point, dragged on for more than four years.
Mr. Clark began by telling Mr. Weiss that his legacy would be defined by how he handled this decision.
If his host somehow missed the message, Mr. Clark followed up with an even more dramatic gesture, reading a quote from a Supreme Court justice, Robert Jackson, who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials: Prosecutors could always find “a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone” but should never succumb to pressure from the powerful.
That first face-to-face interaction, between a fiery white-collar defense lawyer who has represented Elon Musk and a late-career federal prosecutor known for keeping his gray-haired head down, set into motion months of intense negotiations that led to an agreement that appeared to end Mr. Biden’s tax and firearms violations, only to derail over the extent of his immunity from future prosecution.
Mr. Biden’s foreign business ventures, especially when his father was vice president and later when he was addicted to crack cocaine, had long raised ethical and legal concerns. In 2018, Mr. Weiss was quietly assigned the Hunter Biden investigation and then kept on by Justice Department officials in the Biden administration to complete the job.
Mr. Weiss cast a wide net from the start, examining a range of Mr. Biden’s business dealings, his finances and personal conduct. But the inquiry eventually narrowed.
By late 2022, Mr. Weiss — who relied on the work of I.R.S. investigators, the F.B.I. and lawyers in the Justice Department’s tax division — had found some evidence but determined that he did not have sufficient grounds to indict Mr. Biden for major felonies, according to several people familiar with the situation.
Mr. Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses. (A senior law enforcement official forcefully denied the account.)
But in January, the two sides hunkered down on the business at hand. Mr. Clark first tried to undermine the gun case, arguing that the charge was likely unconstitutional and citing recent legal challenges after the Supreme Court’s decision last year expanding gun rights.
Then he took on the tax case, laying out with slides how Mr. Trump’s longtime confidant, Roger J. Stone Jr., had failed to pay his taxes for several more years than Mr. Biden but had been allowed to deal with it civilly and had faced no criminal punishment. Mr. Weiss seemed noncommittal.
If he chose not to charge, members of Mr. Biden’s legal team believed Mr. Weiss still wanted something from Mr. Biden — like an agreement to never own a gun again — to show there was some accountability after his long-running inquiry. Mr. Clark would have to wait awhile to find out.
When Republicans took over the House in 2022, they had pledged to conduct investigations into the younger Mr. Biden.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
Four months later, on Monday, May 15, a familiar figure reached out to Mr. Clark: Lesley Wolf, a top Weiss deputy with whom Mr. Clark had developed a rapport over the previous two years. In a conference call with the Biden legal team, she acknowledged Mr. Clark’s core demand: that his client never be asked to plead guilty to anything.
She then made a proposition — a deal in which Mr. Biden would not plead guilty, but would agree to what is known as a deferred prosecution agreement.
Such a deal allows a person charged with a crime to avoid entering a formal plea if he or she agrees to abide by a series of conditions, like enrolling in drug treatment or anti-violence programs, relinquishing ownership of weapons or forgoing alcohol.
The agreements, widely used to avoid clogging courts and jails with low-level offenders, have legal teeth. If the terms are violated, a person can be charged with the original crimes.
Mr. Clark — knowing Mr. Biden wanted to bring an end to the investigation that had hovered over him, his family and the Biden White House — was amenable. He told Ms. Wolf he would draft language for such an agreement, an opening bid that would kick off final talks.
By Thursday, Mr. Clark and his legal team sent Ms. Wolf their version of an agreement. It made no mention of a guilty plea, but included a promise that Mr. Biden would never again possess a gun and a pledge that he would pay his taxes.
Ms. Wolf suggested additions, including a demand for a statement of facts, a detailed and unflattering narrative of an individual’s conduct that had been investigated.
The parties then turned to the most important provision of all, an issue that would ultimately unravel the deal: Mr. Clark’s sweeping request for immunity not only for all potential crimes investigated by Mr. Weiss, but also for “any other federal crimes relating to matters investigated by the United States” he might have ever committed.
Ms. Wolf appears to have discarded Mr. Clark’s language. Mr. Clark pushed back in a call with Mr. Weiss and the language was replaced with a narrower promise not to prosecute for any of the offenses “encompassed” in the statement of facts.
The end seemed in sight. When the basic outline was hashed out, Mr. Clark asked Ms. Wolf if she was serious about finalizing the agreement — if so, he would fly out to California to explain the terms to his nervous client. Take the trip, she said.
Mr. Clark ran all of this by Mr. Biden in a meeting at his Malibu house — in a garage where he works on his paintings. He approved the plan.
That Friday, Mr. Clark asked Ms. Wolf if he should stay in California to finalize the deal in Mr. Biden’s presence over the weekend.
No, she replied, it would take her a few more days.
Mr. Clark, believing that they were on the brink of a deal, flew back to New York.
Gary Shapley, a veteran I.R.S. investigator, tried to pursue what he believed could be a major break in the Biden investigation.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Outcry on Capitol Hill
But on Capitol Hill, the efforts to upend a resolution were gaining momentum.
While Mr. Weiss concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge Mr. Biden with major crimes, not all his colleagues shared that opinion. The perception that Mr. Biden was being treated too softly spurred resistance among some investigators who believed that his office had blocked them from following all leads.
Few were more frustrated than Gary Shapley. A veteran I.R.S. investigator, he had worked major cases and helped take on big bankers. But every time he said he tried to pursue what he believed could be a major break in the Biden investigation, he felt stymied.
When investigators went to interview Hunter Biden, they were told they couldn’t approach the house. An attempt to serve a search warrant on Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s guesthouse? Denied. The request to search a storage unit belonging to Hunter Biden? Derailed.
Finally, he reached out to Mark Lytle, a former federal prosecutor, and the men eventually connected with former Republican staff members who had worked for Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and had knowledge of federal whistle-blower protections.
Mr. Shapley had been raising concerns internally since at least the fall of 2022, but that winter, he took his allegations to the Justice Department’s watchdog, lodging a complaint in February.
By April, Mr. Shapley offered to share insider details with House Republican committee investigators, including his claim that Mr. Weiss had told him that federal prosecutors in Washington and California had refused to bring tax charges against Mr. Biden. His most startling allegation: Mr. Weiss had been so frustrated that he had considered asking Mr. Garland to appoint him as special counsel in late 2022. (Mr. Weiss and Mr. Garland have both denied that account.)
“I am committed to making as much of his report public as possible,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has minimized contact with Mr. Weiss in hopes of insulating himself from the investigation into the president’s son.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Mr. Shapley requested special protections to bypass legal restrictions on discussing ongoing federal investigations.
It all began to explode into public view on May 15 — the same day Ms. Wolf contacted Mr. Clark — when it was reported that the investigative team that had worked on the case, including Mr. Shapley, had been removed. The next day the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee fired off a letter to the I.R.S. commissioner demanding an explanation.
Around that time, lawyers for a second tax investigator sent a letter to the I.R.S. commissioner, claiming the team of investigators on the case had been removed after expressing concerns about political interference from the Justice Department.
The letter was quickly made public. The agents’ claims were the breakthrough House Republicans had long been seeking.
The I.R.S. investigators had given Congress something genuinely new: summaries of WhatsApp messages that appeared to show Hunter Biden involved in a shakedown in which he had invoked his father, firsthand testimony from people who had reviewed Mr. Biden’s finances and the credibility of their long careers at the tax agency.
On May 24, CBS aired an interview with one of the agents. Two days later, he testified behind closed doors before the House Ways and Means Committee, creating buzz on Capitol Hill. The second man testified on June 1. Three weeks later, the committee voted to publicly release transcripts of the testimony, leading to even more news coverage.
Mr. Weiss was quietly assigned to investigate Hunter Biden in 2018, and was kept on by the Biden administration.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Shifting Ground
As the testimony from the I.R.S. agents took hold, Mr. Biden’s legal team felt the ground shift beneath them. The U.S. attorney’s office suddenly went quiet.
Early in the negotiations, Ms. Wolf included what seemed like a boilerplate disclaimer in an email, that her team “had not discussed or obtained approval” from her superiors for the terms of the final agreement.
On Tuesday, May 23, after four days of silence, Ms. Wolf delivered unwelcome news. Mr. Weiss had revised what he wanted in the deal, now demanding that Mr. Biden plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes. It crossed a red line for Mr. Clark.
Erupting in anger, Mr. Clark accused Ms. Wolf of misleading him. He renounced the possibility of any deal, but after consulting with Mr. Biden, reversed course and told Ms. Wolf that Mr. Biden was willing to go along.
Mr. Clark then went to Wilmington to meet the prosecutors, where they hammered out the details of the deal.
By the middle of June, both sides were prepared to announce a deal.
Under the agreement, Mr. Biden would plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and avert prosecution on the gun charge by enrolling in a diversion program.
Mr. Biden’s legal team was eager to issue a statement claiming that the agreement represented the conclusion of the government’s investigation. That Monday, June 19, Mr. Clark sent a draft to Shannon Hanson, another Weiss deputy, which clearly stated the investigation was over.
“I can confirm that the five-year long, extensive federal investigation into my client, Hunter Biden, has been concluded through agreements with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware,” it read.
“With the conclusion of this investigation, he looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward,” it continued.
Ms. Hanson suggested the edit from “has been concluded” to “resolved,” and she also asked Mr. Clark to strike the phrase “With the conclusion of this investigation.”
But hours after the agreement was announced, confusion set in. In a news release, Mr. Weiss’s office said that the investigation was “ongoing,” taking Mr. Biden and officials at Justice Department headquarters by surprise.
It was at this critical juncture that Ms. Wolf began to take a significantly reduced role, although it is unclear whether that had anything to do with the Biden case.
In their testimony, the I.R.S. whistle-blowers claimed that Ms. Wolf — who had made a couple of campaign donations to Democrats — had discouraged them from pursuing lines of inquiry that could lead to the elder Mr. Biden.
Around this time, Leo Wise — a senior prosecutor who had spent nearly two decades in the Baltimore U.S. attorney’s office — was quietly transferred to the department’s criminal division, then detailed to Delaware to add legal firepower to the relatively small Delaware office.
It was his name, not Ms. Wolf’s, that appeared on the plea deal. And it was Mr. Wise who was responsible for defending the deal, one he had not negotiated, in front of a federal judge who proved to be unforgiving.
Hunter Biden’s plea deal fell apart at the courthouse in the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building in Wilmington, Del.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times
A Deal Upended
Hunter Biden walked into the Wilmington federal courthouse on July 26, with the expectation that his long legal odyssey was nearing an end.
But there were signs all was not well. Hours earlier, the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means committee had made one final stab at scuttling the agreement, urging the court to consider the whistle-blowers’ testimony.
It turned out to be unnecessary.
Judge Maryellen Noreika,, repeatedly informed the two sides that she would be no “rubber stamp.” She picked apart the deal, exposing substantial disagreements over the extent of the immunity provision.
Mr. Clark said the deal indemnified his client not merely for the tax and gun offenses uncovered during the inquiry, but for other possible offenses stemming from his lucrative consulting deals. Mr. Wise said it was far narrower — and suggested the government was still considering charges against Mr. Biden under laws regulating foreign lobbying.
The two sides tried to salvage it, Judge Noreika was not convinced, and Mr. Biden silently left the courthouse under a hail of shouted questions.
The question is an urgent one due to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s election interference case against Donald Trump and 18 others, which she has dubiously framed as a racketeering conspiracy.
Why has DA Willis invoked Georgia’s version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which is typically applied to mobsters engaged in the familiar rackets of murder, extortion, trafficking in narcotics and stolen goods, gambling, prostitution and so on? Because there’s a giant hole in her case: the lack of a clear crime to which Trump and his co-defendants can plausibly be said to have agreed.
Let’s put RICO to the side for a moment and focus on conspiracy. Very simply, a conspiracy is an agreement to violate a criminal statute. It takes two to tango, so a conspiracy must minimally involve a pair of people. Beyond that, though, it can involve three people, 19 people, 100 people — any number. Regardless of how many people are said to be implicated, however, there is always one requirement: There must be a meeting of the minds about the crime that is the objective of the conspiracy.
If prosecutors allege a large-scale conspiracy, various conspirators may play different roles. In a conspiracy to sell cocaine, for example, some people may handle importation; others handle sales or security, and still others, accounting and management of the cash proceeds. But what unites these role-players in a single conspiracy is the criminal objective — in our example, to sell cocaine. If there is no agreement about a crime, there is no conspiracy.
Usually, this is not a problem for prosecutors. While constitutional due process guarantees that every American is presumed innocent, it also dictates that no American can be charged with a crime and forced to stand trial unless there is probable cause that a crime has been committed.
As a result, even though prosecutors bear the burden of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt before there can be a conviction, we can easily understand why the defendants have been charged. If they are charged with conspiracy, the indictment will clearly state the crime they allegedly agreed to commit — e.g., drug trafficking, bank robbery, murder, extortion. Whatever the objective crime may be, we understand that the prosecutors, the police, and the grand jury have established to the court’s satisfaction that there is enough evidence to establish probable cause that the alleged conspirators agreed to commit a crime.
Willis’s indictment. She alleges that the 19 people named in her indictment are guilty of conspiracy because they agreed to try to keep Donald Trump in power as president — specifically, to “change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.” Maybe they shared such an aim, maybe their 19 minds met regarding that objective, but in and of itself, trying to reverse the result of an election is not a crime. You may have noticed that neither Al Gore nor Stacey Abrams was ever led away in handcuffs.
To be clear, it’s entirely possible that people can perform criminal acts in the pursuit of a lawful objective. If they do, they may be charged with those crimes — and if the crimes are serious, they should be charged. That, however, does not mean their overarching objective was a crime. And again, if you don’t have two or more people agreeing on an objective that is a crime, you don’t have a conspiracy.
Willis tries to get around this inconvenience in two ways, neither of which works.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks during a news conference at the Fulton County Government building on Aug.14, 2023 in Atlanta.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The first is a tautology: She conclusively asserts, on page 14 of the indictment, that this was a “conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.” That is, the lawful objective of changing the election outcome somehow becomes unlawful because she invokes the apparently talismanic word “unlawful.” But there is no crime of unlawfully trying to change an election outcome — not in Georgia law nor any other American law.
Trying to change an election outcome is legal; the end doesn’t become illegal if pursued by illegal means — instead, those illegal means can be charged as crimes. But there is no conspiracy unless the objective itself is clearly a crime. You don’t see prosecutors alleging, say, that defendants were in a “conspiracy to unlawfully” commit murder or robbery. Murder and robbery are crimes. If two or more people agree to commit murder or robbery, that is an agreement to commit a crime — a conspiracy. To the contrary, an agreement to try to reverse the result of an election is not an agreement to commit a crime.
Willis thus turns to her second artifice, the RICO conspiracy charge. RICO is unique in the criminal law because, instead of targeting crimes, it targets entities — associations of people, referred to as enterprises — that generate revenue through the commission of crimes. The offense is not so much the crimes (referred to as the pattern of racketeering activity), but the enterprise (such as a mafia family) that carries out the crimes. A RICO conspiracy is an agreement to participate in such an enterprise — to belong to the group and sustain the group so that it continues to generate power and profits.
That doesn’t fit the Georgia case. Trump and his 18 co-defendants did not intend or desire to belong to a group, or even see themselves as a group. Their objective allegedly was to maintain Trump in power, not to participate in an enterprise. And unlike a RICO enterprise, the 19 defendants had no intention of sustaining their group — if it even was a unified group. Their only objective allegedly was to keep Trump in office. By Jan. 20, 2021, that objective was either going to succeed or fail, but whatever the outcome, the group would then cease to exist as such. By contrast, a real RICO enterprise must be a continuing threat — one that labors to preserve its existence and operations.
The defendants indicted by Willis did not have an overarching agreement to commit a crime, and they were the antithesis of a RICO enterprise. If, as the DA alleges, they committed discrete crimes in the effort to reverse the election result — such as forgery, false statements, solicitation of others to commit felonies, or hacking into election systems — then they should be prosecuted for those crimes.
But an agreement to do something legal — to reverse the result of an election — is not a conspiracy. And if the presumption of innocence means anything, we must presume people are innocent if the prosecutor fails to allege that they agreed to do something that was actually a crime.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, contributing editor at National Review, and a Fox News contributor.
A federal appeals court on Friday, Aug. 18, 2023, ordered a new sentence for a North Carolina man who pleaded guilty to a petty offense in the Capitol riot — a ruling that could impact dozens of low-level cases in the massive Jan. 6, 2021, prosecution. The appeals court said James Little was wrongly sentenced for his conviction on a misdemeanor offense to both prison time and probation, which is court-ordered monitoring of defendants who are not behind bars. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
Court Tosses Jan. 6 Sentence; Ruling May Impact Other Cases.
https://youtu.be/2XRspHxKTGU
A federal appeals court on Friday ordered a new sentence for a North Carolina man who pleaded guilty to a petty offense in the Capitol riot — a ruling that could impact dozens of low-level cases in the massive Jan. 6, 2021 prosecution.
The appeals court in Washington said James Little was wrongly sentenced for his conviction on a misdemeanor offense to both prison time and probation, which is court-ordered monitoring of defendants who are not behind bars.
Little, who entered the Capitol but didn’t join in any destruction or violence, pleaded guilty in 2021 to a charge that carries up to six months behind bars. He was sentenced last year to 60 days in prison followed by three years of probation.
But the 2-1 opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that probation and imprisonment “may not be imposed as a single sentence” for a petty offense, adding “there are separate options on the menu.” Judge Robert Wilkins, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, dissented.
The decision could invalidate the sentences of dozens of Jan. 6 defendants who received what is known as a “split sentence” for a petty offense. More than 80 other Jan. 6 defendants have been sentenced to both prison time and probation for the same misdemeanor offense as Little, according to an Associated Press analysis.
The practical effect, however, may be limited as almost all of them have likely already served their prison terms long ago. Little’s attorney had asked the appeals court to simply order an end to his probation monitoring since he already served his 60 days behind bars.
An attorney for Little declined to comment on Friday. The Justice Department could appeal the decision. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington said: “We are reviewing the Court’s ruling and will determine our next steps in accordance with the law.”
Some judges who have imposed such sentences in misdemeanor cases have stressed the need to keep tabs on Jan. 6 defendants after they serve their time to prevent them from engaging in such conduct during the next election. While on probation, defendants have to check in with a probation officer and follow certain conditions.
“The Court must not only punish Little for his conduct but also ensure that he will not engage in similar conduct again during the next election,” the judge who sentenced Little, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, wrote in a ruling last year.
“Some term of imprisonment may serve sentencing’s retributive goals. But only a longer-term period of probation is adequate to ensure that Little will not become an active participant in another riot,” he wrote.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Little went to President Donald Trump’s speech ahead of the riot and then walked to the Capitol, where he fist-bumped other rioters and went into the Senate Gallery, according to court records. After leaving the Capitol, he and others prayed on the Capitol steps and sang “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” by Twisted Sister, according to court documents.
More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Jan. 6 riot. More than 600 of them have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials decided by a jury or judge. About 600 have been sentenced, with over half getting terms of imprisonment ranging from three days to 18 years.
