Letters from an American - December 2, 2024

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

December 2nd, 2024. Last night, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported that Trump's choice for Secretary of Defense, Fox News Channel Weekend host Pete Hegseth, had been forced to leave previous leadership positions at the advocacy groups Veterans for Freedom and Concern Veterans for America because of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct. Under his direction, Veterans for Freedom ran up huge debt for what appears to have been inappropriate expenses. The group's donor squeezed Hegseth out of his job and then shuttered the organization. He moved to Concern Veterans for America.

A whistleblower for Concern Veterans of America reported that Hegseth was repeatedly so drunk at events that he had to be carried out and that he once tried to join dancers on stage at a strip club to which he brought his work team. Their report said that Hegseth and other members of his team divided the female staffers in the organization into party girls and not party girls, and sexually pursued them, leading to allegations of sexual assault.

Another complaint said that at a bar in the early hours of May 29, 2015, Hegseth began to chant drunkenly, kill all Muslims, kill all Muslims. An email from one of the whistleblowers to Hegseth's successor at Concern Veterans for America said that, among the staff, the disgust for Pete was pretty high. The letter detailed Hegseth's history of alcohol abuse and said he had treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account for partying, drinking, and using CVA events

as little more than opportunities to hook up with women on the road. By 2016, Hegseth was out at Concerned Veterans for America, but had joined the Fox News channel as a contributor. It was during this period that he appeared in October 2017 as a speaker at the California Federation of Republican Women's Convention where he allegedly sexually assaulted a woman. Also last night, President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden after repeatedly saying that he would not. Trump appointed special counsel David Weiss charged Hunter Biden on firearms and tax charges, but his former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance made clear

in her civil discourse Hunter Biden would not have been charged if he had been anyone other than the president's son. He was charged with possession of a firearm by someone who is addicted to illegal drugs, a charge that prosecutors do not usually bring. Biden owned a gun for 11 days and apparently lied on the paperwork for it by saying he was not a drug addict when he was, in fact, in the throes of addiction. The other charges stem from Hunter Biden's failure, while dealing with addiction, to pay about $1.4 million in federal income taxes, which he has since paid in full plus interest in penalties. Vance explains that the government usually handles cases like his with administrative

or civil penalties rather than criminal prosecution, as it did in the case of Trump henchman Roger Stone, with whom the government reached a settlement in 2022 for more than two million dollars in unpaid income taxes, interest, and penalties without criminal charges. But President Biden's pardon covers not just those charges, but also But President Biden's pardon covers not just those charges but also those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024. The pardon's sweeping scope offers an explanation for why Biden issued it after saying he would not. Ron Filipkowski of Midas Touch notes that Biden's pardon came after Trump's

announcement that he wants to place conspiracy theorist Cash Patel at the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI. Filipkowski studies right-wing media and points out that Patel's many appearances there suggest he is obsessed with Hunter Biden, especially the story of his laptop, which Patel insists shows that Hunter and Joe Biden engaged in crimes with Ukraine and China. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky, spent two years investigating these allegations and turned up nothing,

although Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia used the opportunity to display pictures of Hunter Biden naked on national media. Yet Patel insists that the Department of Justice should focus on Hunter Biden as soon as a Trump loyalist is back in charge. Notably, Trump's people, including former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his ally Lev Parnas, spent more than a year trying to promote false testimony against Hunter Biden by their Ukrainian allies. Earlier this year, in the documentary From Russia with Lev, produced by Rachel Maddow, Parnas publicly apologized to Hunter Biden for his role in the scheme. As legal commentator Asha Rangappa noted, people criticizing the Hunter Biden pardon need to

recognize for the first time the FBI and Justice Department could literally fabricate evidence or collaborate with a foreign government to find evidence of a crime with zero accountability. That's why the pardon goes back to 2014. And yet much of American media today has been consumed not with the story that Trump has appointed a deeply problematic candidate to run what could be considered the nation's most important department, overseeing about 3 million personnel and managing a budget of more than $800 billion, or with the reality that Biden's distrust of our legal system under Trump is a profound warning for all

of us. Instead, they have focused on President Biden's pardon of his son, many of them condemning what they say is Biden's rejection of his son, many of them condemning what they say is Biden's rejection of the rule of law. Some have suggested that Biden's pardoning his son will now give Trump license to pardon anyone he wants, apparently forgetting that in his first term, Trump pardoned his daughter Ivanka's father-in-law, Charles Kushner, who pleaded guilty to federal charges of tax evasion, campaign finance offenses,

and witness tampering, and whom Trump has now tapped to become the U.S. ambassador to France. Trump also pardoned for various crimes men who were associated with the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian operatives working to elect Trump. Those included his former national security Advisor Michael Flynn, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and former allies Roger Stone and Steve Bannon. Those pardons, which suggested Trump was rewarding henchmen, received a fraction of the attention lavished on Biden's pardon of his son.

In today's news coverage, the exercise of the presidential pardon, which traditionally gets very little attention, has entirely outweighed the dangerous nominations of an incoming president, which will have profound influence on the American people. This imbalance reflects a long-standing and classic power dynamic in which Republicans set the terms of public debate, excusing their own objectionable behavior while constantly attacking Democrats in a fiery display that attracts media attention, but distorts reality. The degree to which the media endorsed that abusive power dynamic today does not bode well for its accurate reporting during Trump's upcoming term. It also leaves the public badly informed about matters that are important for understanding modern politics. Among other stories that received less attention than Biden's pardon of his son was that today right-wing activist Dinesh D'Souza publicly apologized to a man

depicted in D'Souza's film 2000 Mules. That film claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen and Trump used it to push the big lie that he was the true winner of that election, a lie that by 2023 close to 70 percent of Republicans believed. While he continued to stand by the lie, D'Souza admitted that the film's claim that the mules shown delivering ballots to drop boxes had been located through geolocation of their cell data was false. Earlier this year, after a man depicted in the film sued,

the publisher of the film and the book on which it was based withdrew the book and the film from its platforms and issued a sweeping apology. On X, D'Souza's own comment about Hunter Biden's pardon pointedly illustrated the partisan double standard. No one is above the law except my son Hunter, he wrote above a picture of Biden and his son. This prompted progressive journalist Brian Tyler Cohen to reply, You were literally pardoned by Trump. Cohen was right.

Trump pardoned D'Souza in 2018 after his conviction for committing campaign finance violations. Another important story today was that the European Federation of Journalists, or EFJ, announced that on January 20, 2025, it will stop posting content on X. EFJ's president, Maja Sever, explained that the organization could not continue to participate in the social network feed of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists. General Secretary Ricardo Gutierrez noted the threat to democracy and freedom of expression posed by the cooperation between the president of the most powerful country in the world, Donald J. Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who is also the owner of social network X. Sever added, the social media site X has become the preferred vector for conspiracy theories, racism, far-right ideas, and misogynistic rhetoric. X is a platform that no

longer serves the public interest at all, but the special ideological and financial interests of its owner and his political allies. Indeed, the extraordinary growth of the blue sky social media site as the right wing has taken over X is turning X into another right wing echo chamber. It was there that Representative Comer turned to post his reaction to Biden's pardon, using it to resurrect the claims he could not substantiate in two years of searching from the head of the Oversight Committee. Joe Biden lies for a living, he wrote. He lied about not talking to his son about his shady business dealings. He lied when he said his family didn't take in money from China and Russia. He lied when he said he wouldn't pardon

Hunter. And then, after stating claims his own hearings had proved false, Comer got to the heart of the matter. Joining Sean Hannity at the Fox News Channel tonight, 9 p.m. Tune in. Michael Moss.