Tag: corruption
James Comer

Comer's Family Business Is Far Shadier Than Biden's Finances

In the last two weeks, Rep. James Comer has claimed that President Joe Biden “laundered China money,” accused Biden of “influence peddling,” and issued subpoenas to members of Biden’s family. Comer has based these actions on the “discovery” of transactions that Biden made no effort to disguise, including a $200,000 loan Biden extended to his brother and which his brother later repaid.

However, as The Daily Beast reports, Comer was engaged in a series of business dealings with his own brother. Those dealings, which included a $200,000 payment, were nowhere near as straightforward as the dealings between Joe and James Biden. Comer’s deal involved not only a big payment but multiple land swamps, shell companies, and requests for special tax breaks.

As members of the Biden family were being accused of “shady business practices,” it seems that Comer has a forest's worth of shade.

In a press release about the check from Biden’s brother, Comer stated, “Even if this was a personal loan repayment, it’s still troubling that Joe Biden’s ability to be paid back by his brother depended on the success of his family’s shady financial dealings.” By this, Comer seems to mean that Biden was repaid soon after his brother received a payment from an American health care company.

But what happened between Comer and his brother is a lot more mysterious. According to The Daily Beast, Comer’s family has for years been identified in news accounts as owning “Comer Land & Cattle.” As of 2018, Comer listed this as an asset worth $3 million.

However, no such entity appears to exist in business filings. It reportedly did at one time, but there’s been no such business for years. At least, not legally. It’s not registered as a business in Kentucky. It’s not registered anywhere else. A past press release showed him as the owner of “James Comer Jr. Farms,” which also doesn’t appear on paper to be a business entity. Comer’s Facebook page also lists him as the owner of “Comer Family Farms,” which isn’t listed as a business entity in Kentucky, according to the secretary of state’s website.

Much of Comer’s business activity seems to follow inheriting land in Kentucky following his father’s death in 2019. But exactly what happened with that land is the opposite of transparent. In one case, Comer reportedly sold his interest in a piece of land to his brother, then bought it back five months later, slipping his brother $18,000 in the process. That purchase ran through a shell company owned by Comer, the value of which doubled in two years. That company appears to have dealt exclusively with agricultural land deals at a time when Comer was on the House Agriculture Committee.

Comer’s family also swapped large tracts of land in Tennessee. That includes handing his brother one tract valued at $175,000 as a “gift.” In exchange, Comer reportedly got another tract that The Daily Beast describes as “apparently more valuable” without recording the cost of that land. The value of these transactions appears to be larger than even the largest loan that Biden gave to his brother.

Comer also seems to have benefited directly from a “tobacco buyout” of land he purchased while serving on the Kentucky legislature’s Tobacco Settlement Agreement Fund Oversight Committee. This means that he helped set the rate for the purchase of his own property.

Much of Comer’s story seems to be a more rural version of the Donald Trump story. He started out making small land purchases with the help of his father and brother, inherited larger tracts of land when his father died, and has made millions engaging in land speculation. The difference is that for much of this time, Comer was either involved in the Kentucky legislature or the House Agriculture Committee in positions that gave him insider knowledge and a direct advantage.

Comer also has his own Trump-style bank connection. When he sought a line of credit up to $1 million, he found it at South Central Bank—the same bank where Comer had been on the board of directors for 12 years.

If all of this makes Comer look like a country mini-Trump, that’s probably a description that would make him proud. But it would also seem to make his family finances much more worthy of scrutiny than anything he’s claimed about Joe Biden.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Bob Menendez

Menendez Indictment Highlights Contrasting Partisan Reactions To Corruption

Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey isn't backing down as he faces a lurid set of corruption charges—complete with gold bars and stacks of cash—and many prominent Democrats have had nothing to say. That silence is troubling, but it’s also a departure from the previous time Menendez was indicted, when Democrats rallied around him. But Friday evening, the dam may have started to burst, with New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy and the speaker of the state Assembly calling on Menendez to resign, along with Rep. Mikie Sherill (D-NJ).

Even with silence from Senate Democrats thus far, the difference between the Democratic response to Menendez’s indictment and the Republican response to Donald Trump’s indictments—or, for that matter, to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ raging corruption—is not hard to see.

For one thing, few high-ranking Democratic officials are rushing to call on Menendez to resign, but neither are they in front of cameras swearing to investigate the prosecutors who indicted him or ranting about political prosecutions. And as the hours passed, a few Democrats began to speak out. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) was the first member of Congress to call for Menendez to resign. (Then again, Phillips has called for a primary challenge to President Joe Biden, so whatever.)

“As both a leader in the Democratic Party & the former Attorney General and given the nature of the charges, I call upon Senator Menendez to resign,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. “The nation will be better served if he steps aside and allows a transition to occur that will best serve the people of New Jersey.”

But a bigger difference is visible if you compare the responses of liberal commentators to the immediate Republican rush to defend Trump:



As for the Republican response to the Menendez charges …

Republican voters have largely shrugged off Trump’s indictments, except for the loyalists who’ve made posturing threats of violence in response. Republican commentators have largely defended him, as have Republican lawmakers. It’s important that Democrats do better. So far, the signs are good, but we need more from our leaders.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Jim Jordan

GOP 'Star Witness' Shot Down Claims Of Biden Corruption

When Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer gave closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee on July 31, it quickly seemed clear that none of it implicated President Joe Biden, and nothing much implicated Hunter Biden himself in any corruption shenanigans related to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. For a few hours after Archer gave his testimony, Republican officials kept mum. In contrast, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) spoke with reporters about how much of a bust this witness was for conservatives trying to use their House majority to frame the Biden family.

Later that evening, Republican Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and claimed that the testimony, while not a smoking gun, was filled with all kinds of circumstantial evidence of corruption. Comer told Hannity that Archer said, “Hunter Biden was under immense pressure while they both served on Burisma’s board to call Washington, D.C., immediately and try to get Shokin fired. That’s the Ukrainian prosecutor. Not many days later, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine, and we’ve all seen the video where Joe Biden brags about withholding foreign aid to Ukraine in exchange for the Ukrainian president firing the prosecutor who was investigating his son’s corrupt energy company.”

Calling bullshit, Democratic leaders demanded that Comer and Jordan release the transcript of the testimony to the public. “Release the transcript” became a trending topic on social media and finally, Republicans released the transcript for all to see. Surprise, surprise: Archer’s testimony not only doesn’t imply any of the things Comer and Jordan claimed, it supports the existing evidence showing the accusations against President Biden are ludicrous.

During his testimony, Archer insisted that he never witnessed any bribery talk involving the president or his son. Archer also told the committee that the president’s son was very clear that he wanted to follow the letter of the law. In fact, the Catch-22 being faced by conservatives is that for all of Hunter Biden’s personal problems with addiction, he understood that the Biden “brand”—the reason he was being paid a lot of money for his lobbying expertise—was tied up with his father’s integrity.

That led to this exchange about the strains on Hunter Biden as he was pressured to exert more influence:

Mr. Archer: It was a constant push-pull in that regard, you know.Mr. Goldman: Because Burisma wanted him—
Mr. Archer.:People always wanted more.
Mr. Goldman. Burisma wanted him to do more
Mr. Archer: Right.
Mr. Goldman:—with his connections.
Mr. Archer: Correct.
Mr. Goldman: And Hunter Biden understood that he could not do that, but he
was trying to—
Mr. Archer: Balance it.
Mr. Goldman:—balance it and prove value to a company that expected him to do
things that—
Mr. Archer: Right.
Mr. Goldman:—he was uncomfortable doing.
Mr. Archer: Right.
Goldman: And so as a Biden, it was important for him to follow the law. Is that fair?
Archer: That's fair.

And then there is the false claim by Republicans—the one that is foundational to the entire accusation—that Hunter Biden’s job at Burisma was to get then-Vice President Joe Biden to have Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired. The entire corruption conspiracy Comer and Jordan and Sen. Chuck Grassley have promoted alleges that Shokin posed a threat to Burisma because he was investigating them and putting pressure on the new company, and possibly holding up millions in dollars of assets locked in a bank account in England.

Archer’s testimony explained that the opposite was true. He said it was his understanding that Shokin was good for Burisma:

Mr. Goldman: Let's talk about legally, I think just pivot to that, because you had said earlier that—I believe the direct quote is that Burisma felt like they had Shokin under control.Mr. Archer: Correct.
Mr. Goldman: What did you mean by that?
Mr. Archer: That was like—that was a narrative that was told to me by various of the D.C. team, that the firing of Shokin was bad for Burisma because he was under control.
Mr. Goldman: What did you understand "under control" to mean?
Mr. Archer: Meaning that they were going to maybe give a slap on the wrist as opposed to—
Mr. Goldman: Okay.
Mr. Archer. -- you know, seize all his assets.

Once again, Archer is proving why anyone paying even a tiny bit of attention to the claims against President Biden considers these accusations baseless. Then-Vice President Biden went to Ukraine, pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor because that prosecutor was not investigating possible corruption and potentially dubious assets, and the company Hunter Biden was being paid by not only didn’t benefit from this, they would have greatly preferred the prosecutor stay where he was—at least financially.

Whether or not the Republican witch hunters are taking their “investigation” behind closed doors because they are tired of being publicly embarrassed isn’t known. What is known is that when any of the facts are revealed to the public, it quickly becomes very clear that Comer and Jordan are trying their best to finish the fabricated narrative started by their swamp-king leader Donald Trump.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Rudy Giuliani

Former Giuliani Associate Says He Offered To Sell Trump Pardons For $2 Million

Noelle Dunphy, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani, is suing the onetime Donald Trump attorney over a litany of misconduct, including sexual assault, harassment and wage theft, ABC News reports. Dunphy joined Giuliani’s team in 2019 as his director of business development.

In a 70-page complaint filed with the New York Supreme Court, Dunphy recalls “alcohol-drenched rants that included sexist, racist, and antisemitic remarks, which made the work environment unbearable,” and noted many of the former New York City mayor’s diatribes were recorded.

The complaint alleges that in Feburary 2019, “Giuliani forced Ms. Dunphy to have sexual intercourse with him for the first time” after she “had refused and avoided having sex with Giuliani.”

The former associate also claims Giuliani asked her “if she knew anyone in need of a pardon,” because he and Trump were “selling pardons for $2 million.”

Per page 25 of the complaint:

He also asked Ms. Dunphy if she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split. He told Ms. Dunphy that she could refer individuals seeking pardons to him, so long as they did not go through “the normal channels” of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, because correspondence going to that office would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

According to Dunphy’s lawsuit, Giuliani declined to register his communications with Ukrainian government officials under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). When pressed by Dunphy on the matter, “Giuliani told her that he was able to break the laws because, he said: ‘I have immunity,’” the complaint claims.

The lawsuit seeks $10 million in damages.

You can read the full filing here.


Reprinted with permission from Alternet.