The Patriot Post® · Garland Stonewalls Congress

By Douglas Andrews ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/100633-garland-stonewalls-congress-2023-09-21

It was all Donald Trump’s fault. That was Attorney General Merrick Garland’s message yesterday as he was being grilled by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan.

When asked why his Department of Justice had slow-walked the Hunter Biden investigation and allowed the statute of limitations to expire on his federal tax-evasion charges, Garland said, “There’s one more fact that’s important, and that is that this investigation was being conducted by Mr. Weiss, an appointee of President Trump. You will, at the appropriate time, have the opportunity to ask Mr. Weiss that question and he will no doubt address it in the public report that will be transmitted to the Congress.”

Garland is right that David Weiss was a Trump appointee, recommended to him at the time by Delaware’s two Democrat senators. And Garland is also right that House Republicans will have a chance to question Weiss — on October 11, if Garland keeps his word and allows it. But he’s wrong when he tries to blame the Trump DOJ for the investigative slow-walk. Remember: Trump actually got impeached for calling attention to the Bidens’ Ukrainian enrichment scheme.

The tax violations, which involve unpaid taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars that Hunter Biden was paid while on the board of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, date back to the last years of Barack Obama’s administration, when Hunter’s dad was vice president and was overseeing the administration’s policy toward Ukraine.

It was at this same time, in December 2015, that then-VP Biden traveled to Ukraine and threatened to withhold $1 billion in earmarked aid unless Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired. And it was at this time that the VP’s son was getting money for nothing while serving on the board of the company, Burisma, which Shokin was investigating.

“We all know why they did it,” Jordan said in response to Garland’s non-answer about the expiration of the tax charges. “Everyone knows why they did it … those tax years, that involved the president. It’s one thing to have a gun charge in Delaware. That doesn’t involve the president of the United States. But Burisma? Oh my, that goes right to the White House.”

Shokin was ultimately fired in March 2016, and Joe Biden later bragged about it to the Council on Foreign Relations. And while we have to tip our cap at the audacity of Merrick Garland’s attempt to blame Donald Trump, the statute of limitations on Hunter Biden’s tax-evasion charges expired on Garland’s watch.

Why was Jordan so focused on this matter, which is just one of many acts of malfeasance and subsequent stonewalling by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, such as the targeting of concerned parents at school board meetings and “radical-traditionalist Catholics” at their churches? Because the Burisma quid pro quo is the Rosetta Stone of Biden Crime Family corruption. If Joe Biden is ultimately impeached by the House of Representatives, it’ll be in large part due to his corrupt actions involving Ukraine while his son was on Burisma’s board of directors.

Texas Republican Troy Nehls also got into the Burisma act, “telling” Garland a question: “Joe Biden threatened the Ukrainian president and prime minister to fire Shokin. If that is not quid pro quo, sir, what is? It’s bribery, and it’s impeachable. Are you gonna do something about it? I bet you’re not. And that’s why you also need to be impeached.”

Asked and answered. Garland does deserve to be impeached. He is, it’s fair to say, the most corrupt attorney general in our nation’s history. Nixon’s AG, John Mitchell, served 19 months in prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up, but this guy makes Mitchell look like a piker.

Elsewhere during yesterday’s hearings, Garland gave conflicting answers about whether Weiss had full investigative authority over the Hunter Biden case. Garland has maintained that Weiss had full charging authority, but that claim is entirely at odds with what Weiss told a room full of IRS agents, according to whistleblower testimony.

Someone is lying, and if it’s Garland, again, it ought to be impeachable. And as for the strength of the testimony of those two IRS whistleblowers, Jordan noted it last night on Fox News: They’re the only people in this whole affair whose story hasn’t wavered.

Things haven’t exactly gone according to plan for Garland and his “Justice” Department in its dogged defense of Hunter Biden. Plan A was for the aforementioned Weiss to slow-walk the federal tax-evasion and gun charges against the first son, let the statute of limitations expire on the tax charges, and simply not charge him at all on the gun rap. But that plan became untenable as House Republicans turned up the heat and two IRS whistleblowers shed damning light on the DOJ’s malfeasance. So it was on to Plan B, which was a sweetheart plea deal, which was ultimately blown up by a gritty Trump-appointed judge, Maryellen Noreika. And finally, we now have Plan C, which necessitated that now-Special Counsel Weiss indict Hunter on the tightly defined gun charge, which has nothing to do with the tax charges and the Ukrainian influence peddling and the Big Guy.

But, as Garland testified, he doesn’t know anything about any of this. Actually, Garland claims he doesn’t know much about anything. “Have you had personal contact with anyone at FBI headquarters about the Hunter Biden investigation?” asked Louisiana’s Mike Johnson.

“I don’t recollect the answer to that question but the FBI works for the Justice Department,” Garland meekly replied.

To which Johnson shot back incredulously: “I’m sorry, you don’t recollect whether you talked to anyone at FBI headquarters about an investigation into the president’s son?”

Uh-huh.

In yet another example of Garland’s phony cluelessness, he got himself in a bit of a perjury bind yesterday. In this case, it was Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie who pressed Garland on his prior testimony regarding the FBI’s involvement in the events of January 6, 2021.

"How many agents or assets of the government,” asked Massie, “were present on January 5th and January 6th and agitating in the crowd to go into the Capitol, and how many went into the Capitol? Can you answer that now?”

Garland: Dunno.

Massie continued to press: “You don’t know how many there were? Or there were none?”

Garland replied: “I don’t know the answer to either of those questions — if there were any, I don’t know how many. I don’t know whether there are any.”

Massie then grinned in disbelief: “I think you may have just perjured yourself,” he said, “that you don’t know that there were any? You want to say that again, that you don’t know that there were any?”

Here we might call AG Garland’s attention to a story published earlier this week by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine — a story whose headline reads: “FBI lost count of how many paid informants were at Capitol on Jan. 6, and later performed audit to figure out exact number.”

Apparently, as Devine reports, “The FBI had so many paid informants at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that it lost track of the number and had to perform a later audit to determine exactly how many ‘Confidential Human Sources’ run by different FBI field offices were present that day, a former assistant director of the bureau has told lawmakers.”

As we pointed out yesterday and as far back as March 2022, if we’re to believe the unguarded words of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Matt Rosenberg, who was there himself that day and who said, “There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol.”

Perjury? It sure sounds like it. Although we doubt anything will come of it. Perjury just doesn’t seem to be as big a deal as it used to be. At least not for a sitting attorney general.

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