The Duran Podcast - Merrick Garland's special counsel cover up

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Merrick Garland's special counsel cover up

All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is going on with Hunter Biden and the Biden family. Let's see here. We have a special counsel, David Weiss, I believe a Delaware attorney as well. And he was also the attorney who was involved in Hunter Biden's sweetheart plea deal, which fell apart. and we have the Republicans saying that this is some sort of a setup that's taking place right now with Garland and by appointing Weiss and trying to take some of the investigative heat off of Biden, Hunter, and the entire Biden family. So what is your take on this Hunter Biden saga and the appointment of David Weiss as special counsel? Right, well, I agree with the Republicans, and I don't think it's just the Republicans who are saying it. I mean, there are various people in the legal community who are saying it as well.

Andrew McCarthy, who is a Republican, it must be said, but he's an attorney who writes for National Review, which is, of course, a Republican journal. Jonathan Turley, who frequently comments and discusses these things, and who's been campaigning for special counsel to be appointed to investigate the Hunter Biden affair. They're both saying the same thing. And there are other legal people who are saying the same things. I believe, by the way, Alan Dershowitz, who is a Democrat, is also saying it. But I would have qualified that. I haven't seen his comments. He's been making lots of other points about many things about the Trump indictments. But I think he's also made this particular

point. Objections to David Weiss's appointment. Firstly, the whole point about appointing special counsel. In fact, what the law that allows for the appointment of special counsel, the whole says the whole point is to have special counsel who is independent of the Justice Department. David Weiss is not independent of the Justice Department. He is a employee of the Justice Department. As I understand it, he is the federal prosecutor. in Delaware. And that is why he has been investigating Hunter Biden. And as I understand it, his investigations of Hunter Biden go way back to 2018. So this is an incredibly long investigation that's been underway, five years old now. David Weiss has been running it all of this time.

He's been running it as an official of the Justice Department. And contrary to what the law says, And I'm taking this now from Andrew McCarthy, who, as I said, is a US attorney and somebody who's worked as a federal prosecutor, or at least in a federal prosecutor's office as well. Anyway, that is contrary to law. That's not, he's not the sort of person who ought to be appointed. The second point to say about David Weiss is that David Weiss, as we said, has been investigating Hunter Biden to five years. it's in every respect, as far as I can see, a straightforward case. He's never got past First Base here. He's never brought any really strong claim case against Hunter Biden.

He kept his silence whilst the business of the Hunter Biden laptop blew up during the election campaign. I mean, all right. Improper for him to comment, perhaps. But, you know, there were things he could have said. He could have said that there was an investigation underway. I think that would have been an entirely proper thing to do, given the particular circumstances. That's my view.

But anyway, he's proved an entirely ineffective attorney. And he was also the attorney who negotiated that sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden, which the judge in the case that has been brought against Hunter Biden thought was unacceptable. because it basically allows Hunter to plead to certain, not insignificant offences, you know, firearms offensives and those kind of things, but plead guilty, avoid a prison turn,

and then all other cases against him, including a potentially very powerful case under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, would be stopped, would be blocked, from being proceeded with. So the judge wasn't happy with that sweetheart deal, The sweetheart deal has collapsed. Weiss has now been obliged to say that he's not going ahead with it.

There's complaints from Hunter Biden's lawyers over it. But anyway, the point is that Weiss was prepared to go along with it. So from every point of view, this looks like a bad appointment. When Merrick Garland was asked to explain why, of all people, Weiss had been appointed. Garland, all that he was all that he was prepared to say was well, there is no legal mechanism for anybody to challenge my appointment

of this man, David Weiss, to continue this investigation. And that's all that Garland apparently has been prepared to say about Weiss's appointment. The key point is the administration hopes to argue

that with special counsel now appointed further investigations by Congress, are no longer appropriate, and they can block release of papers to the House committees by saying that those papers are now the objects of an investigation. So that's what this all looks like to me. So they're protecting Biden in essence.

I mean, that's the general, this is all about protecting Biden. Not so much Hunter, I would say it's about protecting Biden. Absolutely, because now we have an accumulation of evidence. I'm not the only person saying this. Jonathan Turley, attorney in the United States, Shapiro Professor of Law at George Washington University, he's saying it. Andrew McCarthy, a person who's worked as federal prosecutor,

the Office of a Federal Prosecutor, and the Southern District of New York. He's also saying it. The point is that it's now conclusively established. It's even acknowledged by the administration themselves, that Joe Biden's previous denials that he knew anything at all about his son's business deals

are unsustainable. We now have an accumulation of evidence. People like Devon Archer, who we've talked about in the past, have come along and said it, that Joe was involved in some of these telephone calls. He was there when those telephone calls were made. He was present when some of these meetings took place.

It's not clear yet what role he had and what he said, but there's no doubt at all that the president himself has given misleading information about this affair in the past and that he is in some way connected to his son and is implicated in his son's

activities, as you will appreciate and as our viewers will appreciate, I am choosing my words extremely carefully, but in a word, you are right, they are protecting the president. Okay, so the argument from the Democrat is that, and from the mainstream media, which is also protecting Biden, is that all of this is

well and good. Hunter Biden was doing business deals with Burisma, and he was involved with some shady characters, and he was making money for books and art and investments and real estate with the Moscow mayor's former wife, who's now a multibillionaire, and all of these things were going down in and around Hunter Biden. He was involved in all of these things. But there's no evidence that any of this leads back to Biden. So what if Biden would call his son during a business meeting to see how his son's doing? He's a loving and caring father. You know, this is the argument now is all of this stuff is in and around, is going on around Hunter Biden,

but there's nothing that connects it to Joe. Nothing. There's no evidence that connects to. any of these business dealings to the U.S. president or at the time the U.S. vice president. What do you say to that? It's very interesting that the Democrats are saying all of this because, of course, before they were saying something completely different when the person involved was none other than Donald Trump.

Now, I can remember very well because I have this extraordinary memory about the scandals, you know, the Russia Gates scandal. One particular episode in it, which is that Michael Cohen, remember him, Trump's and the man who worked for Trump as an attorney who was finally proved to be an absolute crook and who was not apparently anywhere as close to Donald Trump as he pretended. Anyway, he had some involvement with some people in Russia. He made a number of telephone calls and there was talk about setting up a Trump tower, a Trump hotel apparently in Moscow, which never actually saw the light of day.

And that never amounted to anything. But the Democrats at the time, as I very, very well remember, were talking about how this was going to be the sweetheart deal. This was going to be the thing that solidify the business relationship between Donald Trump and the Russians. Now we have an established relationship between Joe Biden's son and the wife of the mayor of Moscow. A person, Butina, I think is her name,

well, why I can't remember her name exactly, but a person who, Paturina, Yelena, Baturina. Baturina. A billionaire in her own right, acting largely on behalf of her husband. If you go to Moscow today, you will find the whole city scarred

with the remnants of her, the relics of her activities. You know, she knocked down the Moscow. and rebuilt it. She disfigured the whole of Manage Square near the Kremlin. She built up the Moscow business center, the one that the Ukrainian drones had been colliding with. She did all of these things on a simply humongous scale. And, you know, the President's son has had apparently contacts with this person. And of course, we're told by the Democrats that there's nothing to here at all. So there you see

the contrast. You see how things when they involve one person, Trump, are perceived in one way when they're involved with Hunter, they're perceived in a completely different way. So I just wanted to say that in advance. Now, let's... And she was left off the sanctions

list, by the way. And she was also left and she was, absolutely, and she was also left off the sanctions list. So there you go. So just, just, just making those particular points. Now, I would say that there is a huge amount of evidence implicating the father. What it is true to say is that the evidence at the moment is entirely circumstantial.

There is his presence in meetings, his participation in telephone conversations, the interesting coincidences of how events, particular events take place, you know, the sudden dismissal of the Ukrainian prosecutor general, Mr. Shokhin, at the very time when Burisma is being investigated by Shokhin, at a time when, of course, the president's son has been appointed to the board of Burisma. All of these kind of things. So there's lots of things which are circumstantial evidence. What it would be fair to say is that without a...

investigation, we cannot weigh, we cannot judge the weight of this evidence. But to say that there is no evidence at all is simply not correct. And in fact, there is more than enough evidence now to justify an investigation. Okay, so what needs to happen from the Republican side of things. And what what would it take to or what needs to be found in order to make the evidence from circumstantial to like actual evidence? This is, we've got the connection now. This is money in Biden's account, in Joe Biden's account. What is it, what needs to happen now in order to get this thing to where it needs to go for the Republicans?

Well, I think there's two things to say. There is, of course, criminal or potential criminal investigation. And I think if we're talking about a criminal investigation, then it is always follow the money. If it turns out that the son is receiving vast sons of money from all kinds of people in China and Ukraine, all sorts of other places, no doubt, and that some of that money is being used to benefit the father. Okay?

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean it's transferred directly into the father's bank accounts, but it could be used for other things. If you can show that, and if you can show that this is happening on a regular, consistent, systematic basis. So the son, for example, I'm making, here, you know, I'm just wanting to make it clear. These are not actual events. These are possibilities that I'm simply floating. But say the son buys clothes for the father, or cars for the father, or. or pay secretaries with the father, or pays the father's bills, that kind of thing, then I think you are able to start to create a case which is more than just a circumstantial case.

It begins to look like a case you can take to court and argue that all of these connections actually point to a relationship, an actual relationship between father, and son in which the father is the agent, sorry, the son is the agent and the father is the principal. And then, then, as I said, I think you have potential in criminal case. Now, remember, the House of Representatives is not a criminal investigatory agency. It's not there to second guess that kind of investigation. That's for the Justice Department to do. and we've already talked about that. The House, however, can do something else

and they can look at whether the President has acted in a way that might justify perhaps impeachment proceedings being brought against him. Now, it seems to me that there are two things where there are serious concerns. First of all, the father, during the election, the President of the United States, allowed a story to spread when the son's laptop was found that this laptop, you know,

there's all that information about the laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign. If it can be established that the father knew about that, that, you know, that story wasn't true and was misleading the American people during an election. I personally think that that is a potential. grounds for impeachment because it goes to the root of how the president won the election and gained office. So that is one. The second is that if all of these various things that we're seeing with Mr. Weiss and all of those kind of things, if the appointment of Mr. Weiss, the refusal to provide papers, all of those kind of things,

are a device to obstruct a congressional investigation whose objective is the eventual impeachment of the president because he's been involved in basically a activities to gain influence in return for favours. If that's what is actually going on, then of course that would be a very serious matter indeed. It would take us into Nixon-Watergate territory where there's an attempted cover-up, where the institutions of the Justice Department are being used to engage in a kind of cover-up.

And that would, I think, both be a criminal matter, possibly. I mean, I'm not an expert on this, but I think it would be a criminal matter. And it would certainly justify the president's impeachment. and might also open up claims against any Justice Department officials who were involved. But I want to stress again, we're not close. We're not at that point yet. But one can see how we might get there. I'm going to say one thing.

Weiss's appointment to special counsel, it might be a device to try to close everything down. But actually, I think it's a sign that the President's defences, his legal defences, are starting to crumble as the accumulation of evidence builds. They've been forced to take this step, which they didn't want to do. The very fact that special counsel is appointed now opens up Congress to start saying this is a very serious matter that is taking place. They can, for example, demand that special counsel comes. and testify to Congress about the results of the investigation, it can open up all kinds of possibilities in the future which have not existed up to now. And that is why, despite the apparent advantages, I think the President and the Attorney General have not taken this course up to now.

Yeah, the Special Council could close everything down, but it could open things up as well. And I think that's probably where we might be heading. And you have Gavin Newsom kind of waiting in the wings to become the presidential nominee once everything hits Biden. But, you know, maybe. That may be one scenario. But, you know, you have the Biden, DOJ. They're going after Trump. They're trying to bury Trump in a mountain of court cases.

And they're trying to remove him by using lawfare to get him out of the race. for the Republicans. You have Merrick Garland, the special counsel, you have the Republicans investigating now what's going on with Biden. And we still haven't even started the real campaign for president in 2024. Things are getting absolutely crazy now. And I think it's going to get a lot crazier, closer to the real campaigning. This is absolutely correct. And can I just say about, you know, the indictments against Trump and the investigations into Hunter, Hunter Biden, and potentially conceivably into the president himself. The important thing to understand about the indictments against Trump is that the American

people have already formed views about these indictments. I mean, those people who reject them and see them as political are not going to change their minds about this, because pretty much all the facts that underpin these indictments, are already known. The investigations into Hunter-Buyzen and into the President are of an entirely different character. We don't know, I suspect,

more than a fraction of the facts. But we already know that there are some facts. In fact, there is some material on Hunter's laptop which I think, if it were to be more, made public and shared with the American people, it would have a very profound effect on the American people in a way that nothing that has been alleged against Donald Trump has done. So there is that difference. Now, you know, most people in the United States have not seen some of the images that we

have seen on that laptop. I'm not encouraging anybody to go search out and find them. but there are some extraordinary things there. And the one thing, neither the president nor his officials, nor the Hunter's lawyers will want, is to have all that material starting to appear as a result of a congressional investigation and as part of impeachment proceedings.

If that happens, the American people are confronted with that kind of thing. I suspect even people with extremely liberal views will be shaken by what they've seen. Now, that may surprise people when I say that, but some of these things that one sees on that laptop are pretty, pretty extreme. All right, we will leave it there. The durand.com. We are on Rumble, Odyssey, bitch shoot, telegram, and Rock Finn, and go to the Duran shop. 10% off, use the code. Good day.

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