Did you watch Thursday’s galactic clusterfuck of a congressional impeachment hearing when the dimmest bulbs in the lighting store known as The Dim Bulb Emporium embarrassed themselves, America, the entire animal kingdom, and really anyone with a functional brain stem or an IQ above single digits? We didn’t. We were too busy inserting slivers of bamboo under our fingernails, which was a more useful and notably less painful way to spend our day.
So we missed it when Rep. Byron Donalds, Republican congressman from Florida best known for dragging out Kevin McCarthy’s agonizing journey to House speaker and Legislative Shitmuffin of the Year nominee from now until the merciful end of his political career, showed off some Hunter Biden text messages that were supposed to leave the impression that Hunter and his uncle, James Biden, had been scheming to Do Crime:
“This can work, you need a safe harbor. I can work with your father alone!! We as usual just need several months of his help for this to work! Let’s talk about it. It makes perfect sense to me…”
Vague! And vagueness equals shadiness! What was this shady deal that the greatest white collar crime family in the history of capitalism was working on? Well duh, it’s obviously something shady! Do the hosts of the Fox News primetime lineup have to spell it out for you libtards?
Donalds left out the important part, which was Hunter’s text that his uncle was replying to:
“But I can’t pay alimony w/o Dad or tuitions or for food and gas. Really it’s all gone. I can go make it up in 15/20 days I’m sure, but he’s basically made it clear that he’s not paying alimony b/c Mom made clear that she won’t do it.”
Yep, the big crime was that Hunter, a divorced man with a drug problem, a struggling lobbying career, and three kids in private school, was dead broke and hoping his parents would help him out. That’s it. Sad? A bit. Corruption that should see all the Bidens charged with influence peddling or wire fraud or murder by booga booga or whatever crimes they committed in the fevered and paranoid-fueled imaginations of the Republican base to which Byron Donalds was spoon-feeding flat-out bullshit? Not even remotely.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez later pointed out that Donalds had taken those texts way, way out of context. But by that time the Bullshit (Byron’s Version) had served its purpose. It had gotten chopped into little soundbites and spread around social media to give the screeching howler monkeys of the Right something to screech and howl about.
Sometimes we think about how much of our political writing career has followed Brandolini’s Law, and this is followed by much deep sighing. Followed by much deep drinking. And then more sighing, though it is now somewhat slurred.
Donalds was not done being an embarrassment to anyone with an ounce of shame, a demographic that admittedly excludes the entire Republican Party. Later on that day, he tweeted out this:
There is a lot going on here! Let’s break it down:
Jared Kushner has a legitimate business where he raised investment capital.
Jared Kushner founded an investment firm after leaving the White House and famously got $2 billion in funding for it from a Saudi wealth fund on orders from Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, despite the fund’s own financial analysts saying it was a bad investment. This was likely payback to Kushner for the myriad ways he put his thumb on the scales for the Saudis during his father-in-law’s presidency. Little favors like sharing American intelligence on Saudi dissidents that MBS used in violent crackdowns, looking the other way when Saudi Arabia blockaded Qatar, looking the other way when they bonesawed Jamal Khasshogi. Trifles like that.
Before that, Kushner almost ran his family’s real estate empire into the ground by overleveraging the company to buy a Manhattan skyscraper right before the Great Recession of 2008 cratered the real estate market. Real business genius, that one.
Hunter Biden has no legitimate business, and the money he collected was spent on him and his family.
Hunter actually was a foreign lobbyist trying to get his own company off the ground. Whatever else you think of lobbying, and you can probably guess what yr Wonkette thinks of it, it’s still a legitimate business, if often a grossly unethical one.
But it’s the second part of that sentence that gets us. Donalds’s big accusation against Hunter Biden is that he used the money he made from lobbying to support his ex-wife and children? That’s probably the most responsible thing Hunter has done in his entire adult life!
So yes, those are the two big scandals Byron Donalds is pushing: That Hunter Biden needed some financial help from his parents during a difficult time, and that he used whatever money he made as a working adult to support his family.
In short, Byron Donalds can fuck off into the sun, and he can take his little “Freedom Force” with him.
[Xitter]
We’re not lobbyists, so our families are supported by your generous donations.
I am super late to this party, but Byron Donalds is, straight up, a dick.
Still kills me that this is the best they got—a vague reference to helping the poor guy out. And giving Kushner a pass is just icing on the fetid cake.