Raskin Tears Into GOP Hunter Biden Hearing and Star Fugitive Whistleblower

Representative Jamie Raskin came out swinging Wednesday at the start of the House Oversight Committee’s hearing with two IRS agents on supposed corruption in the Biden family.

House Republicans, led by Oversight Chair James Comer, have for months accused the Bidens of corruption and other forms of wrongdoing, although they have yet to produce any actual evidence. They’ve recently seized on Hunter Biden’s plea deal over his taxes, which will allow him to avoid jail time. IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler testified before the Oversight Committee about Hunter Biden’s alleged wrongdoing.

Raskin, the committee’s ranking member, tore into both Republicans and their star informants during his opening remarks. “I thought we might be here today on the matter that the chairman declared his top priority—the crusade to find evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden—but now, the majority’s long-promised star witness turns out to be a fugitive from American justice,” he said.

Raskin was referring to Gal Luft, whom Comer has touted as a key informant. Luft was charged last week with acting as a foreign agent for China, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, and arms trafficking.

“One thing you will not hear today is any evidence of wrongdoing by President Joe Biden or his administration,” Raskin continued. “Like every other try by our colleagues to concoct a scandal about President Biden, this one is a complete and total bust.”

“In fact, the ongoing case that the majority invites us to interfere with today is actually a striking illustration of the success of the American system of independent prosecutors operating under the rule of law and outside the realm of the kind of political influence my colleagues are trying to exercise today.”

He reminded Republicans that the investigating federal prosecutor, David Weiss, was appointed by Donald Trump and hand-picked to lead the investigation by then–Attorney General Bill Barr (also a Trump appointee). Raskin also pointed out that once Joe Biden took office, he did not call the investigation a “witch hunt”—a clear jab at Trump—but instead let the probe play out.

Raskin warned earlier Wednesday that Shapley and Ziegler had already “undermined this Republican narrative” in previous depositions.

On Wednesday, Trump’s request for a new trial in the E. Jean Carroll case, after he was found liable for sexual abuse, battery, and defamation, was rejected. And in his desperate attempt to avoid accountability, the twice-impeached and twice-indicted former president may have unintentionally allowed himself to now be formally known as a rapist.

Trump’s team had requested a new trial in the case, arguing that the $5 million in damages he was ordered to pay Carroll was excessive, because he was only charged with sexual abuse. The jury had not found that Trump “raped” Carroll, a talking point Trump’s team often parroted.

But Judge Lewis Kaplan called Trump’s semantic argument “entirely unpersuasive.” He clarified that the jury found that the former president did indeed “rape” Carroll based on the common definition of the word.

Kaplan noted that New York penal law (the jury in the Carroll case was based in New York) has a “far narrower” definition of the word “rape” than in “common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.”

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote.

“Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that [rape, as ‘commonly’ understood].”

“A United States District Judge has now formally held, in a lengthy written opinion, that it is perfectly appropriate, and, indeed, entirely accurate, to call a certain former President of the United States a rapist,” noted George Conway, lawyer and husband to former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway.

All that to say, based on the legal language, a rapist—for the third presidential cycle in a row—is leading the 2024 Republican primary.

Wednesday marks the twentieth day in a row that Phoenix eclipses 110 degrees Fahrenheit—and the next seven days are projected to maintain the record-breaking horror. Thousands of Texans have been going to the emergency room because of heat illnesses. And a rotating cast of some 100 million Americans have been under heat wave and smog alerts for over a month.

Amid all that, Republicans are trying to stop the president from being able to declare a national emergency over climate change.

Last month, a group of Republicans introduced a bill, insultingly known as the “Real Emergencies Act,” to prevent President Joe Biden from mobilizing the nation to take necessary action to stave off life-threatening climate change.

As The Lever notes, “If Biden were to declare a national emergency over climate change, he could take aggressive action to cut fossil fuel production and speed up clean energy manufacturing by reimposing the ban on crude oil exports, halting oil and gas leasing, investing in public transit infrastructure, and requiring private companies to manufacture renewables.”

This kind of strong, collective action—to stand up against fat-cat fossil fuels, to make our public transportation actually serve the public, to make our systems and thus lives cleaner—is what Republicans are furiously opposing.

And these do-nothing Republicans are buttressed by their fossil fuel friends who have known for decades the climate and environmental risks of their vampiristic activities—and have kept on drilling anyway.

The bill was introduced by West Virginia Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito and Texas Republican Representative August Pfluger.

As we noted Tuesday, Pfluger’s own district has been at the center of some of the most severe heat in the country—in, again, a state sending thousands of people to the emergency room. Yet he has been busy using taxpayer-funded time introducing legislation to stop action on climate change, or to pledge American support to Israel while it maintains an apartheid regime over Palestinians.

Pfluger has taken in over $1.1 million from the fossil fuel industry and another $28,050 from pro-Israel, election-denialist-supporting AIPAC. He has collected all that and more while only taking office three years ago.

As The Lever also points out, Pfluger is the House’s second-highest recipient of oil and gas money, behind none other than Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And the Texas Republican has a personal conflict of interest, being a director of “an energy company engaged in pipelines and infrastructure” and an investor in a pipeline company that  celebrated the passage of another one of his bills to repeal a methane emissions tax.

The swamp is swamping.

Capito, meanwhile, is no different; she has been a major backer for the natural gas Mountain Valley Pipeline while also being invested in one of the companies constructing the whole thing.

Overall, the House and Senate sponsors of the bill to stop the government from declaring a climate emergency have collected at least some $5 million from fossil fuel interests in the past five years alone.

This—bought-out officials fighting to stop the government from calling a crisis sending thousands of people to the emergency room an “emergency”—is what is wrong with American politics. Not wokeness, not diversity, not gay people. Don’t let anybody tell you differently.

E. Jean Carroll has a message for Donald Trump: Pay me what you owe me.

Trump was unanimously found liable in May for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. He was ordered to pay her about $5 million in damages.

But the former president simply could not accept the fact that he was being held accountable, and he and his lawyers asked in June for a new trial in the decided case. Trump’s lawyers argued in court documents that the damages were “excessive” because the jury determined Carroll had not been raped and that his assault had not caused her any mental injury.

But presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan denied the request on Wednesday, calling Trump’s arguments “entirely unpersuasive.” The request “ignores the bulk of the evidence at trial [and] misinterprets the jury’s verdict,” Kaplan said in his decision.

Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) hailed the decision, saying in a statement, “Now that the court has denied Trump’s motion for a new trial or to decrease the amount of the verdict, E Jean Carroll looks forward to receiving the $5 million in damages that the jury awarded her.”

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She initially sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media. Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her first case was the first to make it to a courtroom.

Trump continues to vehemently deny all of the allegations and launched fresh vitriol at Carroll during the disastrous CNN town hall. She amended her second lawsuit, which is still pending, to include those comments.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly tried to thwart Carroll’s lawsuits, but he has been denied at every turn. And last week, he lost a major battle: The Justice Department said that it no longer considers him immune in the second defamation lawsuit.

As the House Oversight Committee prepares to interview two IRS agents Wednesday on supposed corruption in the Biden family, Ranking Member Jamie Raskin has already debunked Republicans’ star whistleblowers’ testimony.

House Republicans, led by Oversight Chair James Comer, have for months accused the Bidens of corruption and other forms of wrongdoing, although they have yet to produce any actual evidence. They’ve recently seized on Hunter Biden’s plea deal over his taxes, which will allow him to avoid jail time. Republicans are livid over the deal and have accused the Justice Department of blocking the probe.

Two IRS agents, Gary Shapley and a person identified only as “Mr. X,” are set to testify on how the investigating prosecutor, David Weiss, and the Justice Department allegedly dragged their feet in the investigation. But Shapley and Mr. X have already “undermined this Republican narrative in their depositions” during testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee in May, Raskin said in a memo to other Oversight Democrats.

“Both witnesses acknowledged it is very common for agents, supervisors, and prosecutors to disagree about investigative steps and charging decisions,” Raskin said in the memo, which was sent late Tuesday and obtained by The New Republic.

Shapley previously testified that such disagreements happened with “90-plus percent” of his work. Meanwhile, Mr. X said that even his direct supervisors disagreed with his conclusion about the strength of the case against Hunter Biden.

“That was a huge disagreement,” he testified. “I met with top, top officials on presenting the evidence and presenting the case. And at the end of the day it was still a ‘no.’”

Both agents even previously acknowledged that the evidence wasn’t strong enough in certain cases to merit charges. But they have continued to cry foul over the investigation.

Raskin also noted that many of the investigative decisions that the two IRS agents took most issue with actually happened under former President Donald Trump. Shapley and Mr. X disagreed with decisions made from September to December 2020, when Bill Barr was still attorney general. Weiss is also a Trump appointee.

Weiss has already debunked several of Shapley’s claims, including that Weiss did not have final say on charging Hunter Biden and that the Justice Department blocked him from pursuing charges in D.C. and refused to grant him special counsel status.

“To clarify an apparent misperception and to avoid future confusion, I wish to make one point clear: in this case, I have not requested Special Counsel designation,” Weiss said in a letter to Senator Lindsey Graham last week.

He explained that he would have been granted that status “if it proved necessary,” although he did not say who ultimately decided that it did not. Weiss also said he had “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.”