F**king Mondays: Hunter Biden Freakout, Russia's Economic Collapse, and Crazy Kash Patel
The best round up on the interwebs is now out!
Welcome to the latest edition of “F**king Mondays”! In the round up today:
Hunter Biden pardoned
President Biden has pardoned his son Hunter Biden for his conviction on federal gun and tax evasion charges.
"I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further,” President Biden said in a statement. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision."
Unsurprisingly MAGA world is up in arms, and lots of Very Serious Commentators believe the President has abused his power in office. Alexander Burns wrote in Politico:
President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter almost looks like a fiendish prank on Washington — a Sunday night ambush designed to embarrass and shock.
That was presumably not Biden’s aim. ButHowever unintentionally, the pardon is a kind of sabotage. It is a rich gift to those who want to blow up the justice system as we know it, and who claim the government is a self-dealing club for hypocritical elites. It is a promise-breaking act that subjects Biden’s allies to yet another humiliation in a year packed with Biden-inflicted injuries.
The decision comes at a moment when the capital is girding for an assault on federal law enforcement institutions led by President-elect Donald Trump and his appointees.
Personally, I think Presidential Pardons are obscene and make a mockery of democracy and the rule of law. But them’s the rules and Presidents have been handing them out since George Washington pardoned the ringleaders of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1795.
In other words, Joe Biden has every right to pardon his son and if you have a problem with it, take it up with the authors of the constitution. If you haven’t read it, here is Article II, Section 2, Clause 1:
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
Sure it looks bad for Biden to pardon his son, but it looked bad when Donald Trump pardoned Charles Kushner for 18 counts of falsifying tax returns, retaliating against a witness and lying to the Federal Election Commission. It looked bad when Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger for drug-related charges, and it looked bad when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal.
The idea that President Biden’s pardoning of his son somehow helps “those who want to blow up the justice system” is laughable, particularly when we know what Donald Trump is planning. Does Burns think that Biden leaving his son to languish in prison would have inspired Trump to cancel his plans to turn the DoJ into a personal weapon of vengeance? Of course not. Trump can smash political norms, evade criminal prosecution, and turn the DoJ into a weapon for his personal retribution, but heaven forbid Joe Biden legally pardons his son for extremely dubious crimes no other citizen would have faced jail time for.
The truth is that Hunter Biden was the victim of a vicious right-wing smear campaign used solely to distract the public from Donald Trump’s egregious crimes in office. The charges Biden faced were so anomalous many of the jurors on the case didn’t believe he should have even been in court. As CNN reported after the gun crime verdict back in June:
Other jurors who spoke to CNN after they reached the guilty verdict said that they believed they had no choice but to find Biden guilty but said that they question whether the criminal case ever should have been brought against the president’s son.
The case “seemed like a waste of taxpayer dollars,” one female juror told CNN..
For the record, while I think Hunter Biden should never have been charged, he was technically guilty and deserved a fine and a court ordered stint in rehab. He faced up to 17 years in prison if the judges in each case decided to make an example of him, so a presidential pardon isn’t exactly a grave insult to the rule of law.
President Biden did what any father would have done under those circumstances, and given it was entirely legal, no one should be complaining about it.
The Russian rouble is collapsing
In what looks to be a pretty serious blow to the Putin regime, the Russian rouble is in free fall:
The sudden drop was triggered by the Biden administration on November 21st when it sanctioned at least 50 Russian banks in a move designed to isolate Russia from the International Financial System. As Alexander Kolyandr explains in The Spectator:
On 21 November, the outgoing Biden administration sanctioned some 50 Russian banks and financial companies, including Gazprombank, which serviced payments for gas exports. This created a dollar rush. But make no mistake: the ruble’s devaluation has been on the cards for some time.
As Kolyandr notes, Western sanctions are significantly impacting Russia's financial system by reducing dollar availability and drastically limiting financial maneuverability:
While Russian president Vladimir Putin had done his best to shake off sanctions against his country’s financial system, these are starting to bite badly. The share of the ‘unfriendly’ currencies, which includes dollars, euros, pounds and every other currency issued by Ukraine’s allies, in Russia’s revenue from exports has declined from the beginning of 2022. As a result, there are far fewer dollars to buy, driving up the value.
Western sanctions also prevent carry-trade or a flow of cheaply-borrowed dollars into high-interest-bearing rubles. Previously, a drop in the ruble’s value increased import prices and, consequently, inflation, which the Central Bank combated with a rate hike. In the past, when the ruble was fully convertible, foreigners rushed into the Russian market following devaluations in anticipation of a rise in the Bank of Russia base rate. Now, this is simply not possible due to sanctions. Thus, this means there are even fewer dollars in the market.
Because the rouble has also fallen against the Yen, Russia faces increased prices on military equipment it gets from China. The combination of inflation and increased spending means Russia’s economy is in big trouble heading into 2025, and with the central bank now out of options when it comes to curbing inflation, the Kremlin is going to have to cut costs somewhere in order to avoid a crisis.
This is undoubtedly good news for Ukraine. Russia’s economic realities will change the calculus in the Kremlin, and hard decisions will have to be made about how long the fighting can continue.
Back in February of 2022, the invasion of Ukraine was supposed to last just a few days and be a huge economic boon for Russia. Almost three years later, Putin’s “special operation” has proved to be a strategic and economic disaster. While Russia still has the upper hand, it is isolated from the rest of the world, almost entirely dependent on exporting oil, spending like a drunken sailor, and losing thousands of troops a month.
It turns out wars have consequences, especially when they don’t go to plan.
Kash Patel to head the FBI?
At this point we can only assume Trump is trolling the establishment with his latest administration pick. The Washington Post reports:
President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he wants to replace FBI Director Christopher A. Wray with Kash Patel, a staunch loyalist who has vowed to fire the agency’s leadership and dramatically reshape its mission, was met with bipartisan concern that his appointment could undermine the agency’s independence.
Patel is a hardcore MAGA acolyte, a Deep State conspiracy theorist, and a 2020 election denier. In 2023, Patel told Steve Bannon that he believes a future Trump administration should “put in all-American patriots top to bottom,” and then “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media.”
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he continued.
Patel also appears to despise the FBI, telling a podcast interviewer in September that FBI headquarters in DC should be “shut down” turned into a “museum of the deep state”.
So who better to run America’s largest and most important law enforcement agency?
Have great week!
The worst part of the Hunter scandal was the clear sign all of the mainstream media I counted on have bended the knee to Trump. ABC, CNN, NYT, and WaPo all ran damning headlines, drawing equivalency between the crimes of Hunter Biden (not an elected official, crimes which rarely result in criminal charges) and Trump (an elected official -- too many crimes to list, all of which jeopardized national security). Look at today's scrolls -- all four sites position Trump as a strong and bold man (and if they criticize a cabinet pick, it's all about the pick and not about Trump). This leaves me with The Banter, Salty Politics, Heather Cox Richardson, and with any hope, what becomes of MSNBC, in terms of reliable news sources. With the media gone, we'll likely rarely appreciate the full scope of Trump's dismantling of law enforcement, air/water/food/drug protection, the mortgage industry, and more. He's threatening to replace the gold standard with bitcoin, perhaps even doing away with the US Dollar. I have no idea how any of us are going to survive 2025.
"President Biden did what any father would have done under those circumstances, and given it was entirely legal, no one should be complaining about it."
More, he did what any President should have done in those circumstances: stood of for justice against a gross miscarriage of it.
It was blatantly obvious that the charges against Hunter Biden were driven by purely political motives. Stepping in to pardon him and right that kind of wrong is exactly what someone sworn to uphold the laws of the US should do.