The Daily Signal - What’s Next for Hunter Biden, Emotions High at Transgender Hearing, Possible Third Indictment of Trump | July 27

Starting point is 00:00:01 I'm Virginia Allen, and this is the Daily Signal Top News for Thursday, July 27th. Here are today's headlines. Emotions were high today during a hearing on Capitol Hill focused on transgender treatments for children. A judiciary subcommittee held the hearing and detransitioner Chloe Cole was one of the witnesses. Cole started taking testosterone and puberty blockers at the age of 13. She had a double mastectomy at 15, and at 16, she decided to detransition. Today, she pled with lawmakers saying that she hoped she would be their final warning to protect children. Take a listen.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Doctors are human, too, and sometimes they are wrong. My childhood was ruined, along with thousands of detransitioners that I know through our networks. This needs to stop. You alone can stop it. Enough children have already been victimized by this barbaric pseudoscience. Please let me be your final warning. Also testifying before the subcommittee was a mother whose child identifies as transgender. At one point during the hearing, Cole asked to address the mother and became emotional doing so, saying she had no ill will towards the mother.

Starting point is 00:01:30 I just want to set the record straight that I don't hate her. I don't think anybody in this room hates her. In fact, I see my own mother and my own father and her, and that she, clearly, she dearly loves her child, and she's doing the best with what she's been given. And unfortunately, it's not much. And for that, I'm sorry. I mean, I think every parent deserves the utmost grace

Starting point is 00:02:01 and guidance with how to help their child. that being said, I don't wish for her child to have the same result as I did. I don't wish for anybody to regret transition or detransition because it's incredibly difficult. It comes with its own difficulties, and it's not easy. And I hope that her child gets to have a happy and fulfilling adulthood. Cole is now suing Kaiser Foundation Hospital's Permanente Medical Group

Starting point is 00:02:32 and the doctors, who pushed her along the path to hormonal and surgical transgender procedures. We will leave a link in today's show notes for the Daily Signals, full coverage of today's hearing. Yesterday, Hunter Biden and his lawyers walked into a courtroom prepared to enter a plea deal with the Justice Department, and to everyone's surprise, the deal fell through. What everyone thought was going to happen was that the president's son would plead guilty to two misdemeanor taxes, charges and to lying on a gun purchase form. The DOJ lawyers and Biden's lawyers, they were ready to sign off on that deal in court, but the judge said that she had no plans to rubber stamp the plea deal.

Starting point is 00:03:18 Hunter Biden ultimately pled not guilty to the tax charges, and now everyone's going back to the drawing board on this. So why did the judge refuse this plea deal and what happens next? Kyle Brosnan is chief counsel for the Oversight Project here at the Heritage Foundation. He was in that courtroom in Delaware yesterday. He joins us now. Kyle, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. So explain what happened yesterday.

Starting point is 00:03:48 Why did this judge not accept this plea deal? Because there was something rotten in the state of Delaware and the judge sniffed it out. Okay. This sweetheart plea deal had a number of problems. with it. And the first is sort of the form in which both parties, the Justice Department and Hunter Biden's lawyers tried to present it to her basically took a lot of power that she normally has under these procedures out of her hands. And that's significant because the way they structured the agreement made it seem like it should have been in the form of the way that gave her more

Starting point is 00:04:26 authority to rule on it. So she thought something was fishy there. And I don't want to get into legalese, but basically she sniffed out sort of the bad deal that the parties came forward with and told them to go back to the drawing board to come back to it. Another significant point there is that part of the deal included sort of this blanket immunity provision, preventing the Justice Department from prosecuting Hunter Biden for additional crimes in the future. The judge specifically asked under the terms of the deal, can you charge Hunter Biden for being an agent of a foreign country, it's called the FARA Act for failing to register as a foreign

Starting point is 00:05:04 agent because a lot of these transactions at issue focused on his foreign business practices. The government said, no, we would be able to prosecute him moving forward. And Hunter Biden's attorney said, if that's the case, then the deal is off. So typically, when you're admitting into a plea, when you're agreeing to a plea deal, the government and the defense counsel have an agreement on what they're actually agreeing to. And there was no such connection here. And so there was people gasped in the courtroom when they almost called the deal off. And so they're back to the drawing board.

Starting point is 00:05:38 The judge sniffed out the corrupt deal and Hunter Button pled not guilty. A 20-minute pro forma rubber stamp session turned into a three-hour open courtroom debate. Wow. Okay. So you were there in the courtroom. You said people were gasping. Describe the atmosphere. So it was very tense.

Starting point is 00:05:54 This is supposed to be a pretty mundane agreement. We expected to be in and out of there in 20 minutes, like I said. And, you know, the judge put Hunter Biden under oath and asked him a series of questions, you know, discussing his drug use, discussing, you know, because it's part of these plea deals, you are pleading guilty to a crime. And so that plea has to be voluntary and knowingly, and you have to know what it is you're pleading guilty to. And so they read out a statement of facts. They read out sort of his business practices, what he did for the tax charges, his drug abuse during possession of the gun for the gun charge. And what the issue was was the parties tried to tie the agreement on the tax charge to not sentencing him to jail time on the gun charge. And that sort of was the legal defect in that, in that she put him under oath and asked him,

Starting point is 00:06:56 would you agree to this plea deal if the condition of no jail time when the gun charge was not attached to it? And he said no. And that's when all the fireworks started. And so that's when the parties sort of, we took a recess. They went to the drawing board. They negotiated a deal. She put him back under oath and asked him the same question and he gave the exact opposite answer. Interesting.

Starting point is 00:07:17 Interesting. Okay. So the Herod Foundation Oversight Project, you all have been following this case closely. And you actually filed a brief. talk a little bit about that and what is going to happen next. That's right. So I want to take everyone back to March. In March, the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project submitted a FOIA request under the Freedom of Information Act seeking records on two categories of communications.

Starting point is 00:07:41 First, we sought communications on any communications that the Delaware attorney, David Weiss, who is a Trump holdover, had with the Biden Justice Department seeking special counsel status. and two, any communications that Mr. Weiss had seeking to bring charges in a venue other than Delaware. So that's important for a couple of reasons, these two categories of communications. First, we've heard from the Attorney General himself throughout this process that the fact that he kept Weiss on, who was an appointee of President Trump, shows that it's independent. The White House has said that it's an independent investigation because he didn't fire him. Typically, when a new president comes in, they fire all the old U.S. attorneys and appoint their own people in there. Second, the IRS whistleblowers who came forward to the Ways and Means Committee in early June,

Starting point is 00:08:34 directly contradicted prior statements of the Attorney General about Weiss's independence. They said that Weiss tried to, as sought special counsel status and was denied, and he tried to bring charges in a jurisdiction other than Delaware. So Hunter Biden filed taxes in California and the District of Columbia throughout this process, and you need to be able to try somebody in a what's called proper venue. So venue was not proper for some of those tax years in Delaware. And so the IRS whistleblowers saying those two things kind of blew this up immediately because they directly contradicted the attorney general.

Starting point is 00:09:07 It has set off a flurry of congressional investigations and oversight letters. The two whistleblowers testified before Congress. They provided documents to Congress saying exactly what has happened, that Weiss's investigation was not independent. So we filed a lawsuit for those two categories of records, basically immediately once the virus was a blowers came forward. Through the course of that lawsuit, the Justice Department admitted to us,

Starting point is 00:09:34 the Heritage Foundation, that there are 2,500 pages of records responsive to those two questions. So there's 2,500 pages of records where Weiss sought special counsel status and was denied and tried to bring charges outside of Delaware. That seems like an awful lot of communication for an independent investigation, right? So we filed a brief in the Delaware court to make the judge aware of this reality in that, hey, our argument there was, hey, judge, we don't think the Justice Department or Hunter Biden's attorneys have much interest in bringing this information to your attention because they don't want to blow up their sweetheart plea deal. and so we filed it and said,

Starting point is 00:10:17 Judge, there's 2,500 pages of documents that potentially show that this investigation was corrupted, not independent, and we urge you to delay ruling on this. Accepting this plea deal is premature at this juncture. We need more information to come out. And she did borrow that rationale in her ruling yesterday, saying, look, I need more information as to what exactly is you're trying to do here. There's something rotten here, and you need to go back to the jury. drawing board to help us figure out what it is exactly this agreement is. And so both sides are going to come back in 30 days and try and come up with a new agreement and the judge will then consider

Starting point is 00:10:54 it again. But he pled not guilty yesterday and the case goes on. The case goes on. We're going to be following this closely. Kyle Brosnan, we really appreciate you being with us today and breaking this down for us. Thank you. Is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell okay? That is the question Americans are asking after McConnell froze during a press briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday, take a listen per News Nation. Good afternoon, everyone. We're on a path to finishing the NDA this week. It's been good by partisan cooperation and a string of... McConnell stood silent, staring straight ahead for about 20 seconds, before the... those around him stepped in and asked if he was all right. McConnell was asked if he wanted to say anything else to the press, and he appeared to mouth the word no before moving away from the

Starting point is 00:12:00 microphone. McConnell is 81. He did come back to the press conference a few minutes later to answer questions, and he told press last night that he was fine. President Joe Biden reportedly called McConnell yesterday to check on him. In another news, another indictment of former president, Donald Trump, may be coming soon. This morning, Trump's lawyers met with Justice Department officials regarding a possible indictment related to January 6th and the investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. The meeting between Trump's lawyers and the DOJ officials reportedly lasted about an hour. After the meeting, Trump posted on true social, my attorneys had a productive meeting with the DOJ this morning, explaining in detail that I did nothing wrong,

Starting point is 00:12:49 was advised by many lawyers and that an indictment of me would only further destroy our country. As of right now, no formal indictment has been issued, but if Trump is indicted, this will be the third time. Trump was, of course, indicted earlier this year in New York for alleged payments to Stoney-Daniels, and then in Florida for his handling of classified documents. Finally, today, Starbucks is facing legal trouble after hiring Eric Holbrod, to address the civil rights concerns at the coffee company. The Washington Free Beacon reports that back in 2018, Starbucks launched efforts to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Starting point is 00:13:33 Starbucks started doing civil rights assessments that were conducted by the law firm, Covington, and Burling. Former Attorney General Eric Holder was overseeing the assessments as senior counsel at the firm. In 2021, Holder issued a report. detailing the steps that Starbucks had taken to achieve equity. According to the free beacon, these steps included tying executive pay to diversity targets, setting spending goals for diverse suppliers, and launching a mentorship program for black, indigenous, or people-of-color employees.

Starting point is 00:14:09 But a year later, Starbucks was sued for violating civil rights law. The National Center for Public Policy Research sued Starbucks, saying the programs that Eric Holder signed off on violate non-discrimination laws. The lawsuit is ongoing, so stay tuned. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode of the Daily Signal's Top News. And if you've never had the chance to check out our morning show, be sure to do so. Every weekday morning, we bring you interviews with experts, lawmakers, and leading conservative voices. Tomorrow morning, Rob Bowie is sitting down with Tom Lewis to discuss an interesting situation out of Arizona State University. The university seems to be promoting some pretty woke policies, and Tom Lewis has put his foot down.

Starting point is 00:14:59 We'll find out more tomorrow morning. Also, make sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal. Wherever you like to listen to podcast, it really helps us to reach more listeners. So please take a moment to leave us a five-star rating and review. Have a great night. We'll see you right back here. tomorrow morning. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to by more than half a million members of the Heritage

Starting point is 00:15:21 Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Luey and Kate Trinco. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheras. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.

The Daily Signal - What’s Next for Hunter Biden, Emotions High at Transgender Hearing, Possible Third Indictment of Trump | July 27

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