Ep 22 — Hunter Biden And The Lies They Wish Were True (Feat. Marcy Wheeler‪)‬ Law and Chaos

Hey guys, it’s Liz Dye, and we’ve got some big, exciting changes coming your way next week. It’s all still in process, but I can tell you now that we’ll be shifting our podcast drops from Monday/Friday to Tuesday/Friday and ramping up the written content, as well. So, heads up, the next show will be in your feed Tuesday, not Monday. 
 
But today, I’m so excited to talk to a personal hero of mine, Marcy Wheeler. This woman is relentless! If you want to understand what’s going on with the Biden prosecution, you have got to read her site emptywheel.net. But before we get into the show I think we need to spend a bit of time discussing the cast of characters and timeline here, because if you’re not up to your eyeballs in it all the time, the details can get a little fuzzy. And I’m going to put the text of this intro in the show notes with a million links, for you to follow along if you like. So, here goes.
 
President Biden’s son Hunter has battled addiction for much of his adult life. He’s also done some questionable things to earn money to support his family. Those things generally fall under the category of distasteful but legal, not to say quotidian. It’s a dirty, little NOT AT ALL secret that DC runs on access, and family members routinely market themselves as conduits to their powerful relatives. E.g., Ginni Thomas, who is nutty as a fruitcake, and collects hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from people with a stake in shaping the Supreme Court.
 
In 2019, as Biden was emerging as a candidate to take on Trump, the Republican smear machine was looking for dirt. And so they turned to the same dirt merchants that managed to muddy up Hillary Clinton. Clinton was dogged for years with allegations that she’d “sold America’s uranium stockpiles to Russia” to benefit a donor to the Clinton Global Initiative. That story was ridiculous — she was Secretary of State at a time when the State Dept was one of eight agencies that had to approve the sale of a mining company called Uranium One to a Russian conglomerate. And the supposed CGI donor who would have benefited, had sold his shares before the deal was approved. But that didn’t matter to Peter Schweizer, a Breitbart editor and Steve Bannon ally who wrote a book called “Clinton Cash” and laundered this nonsense into the collective consciousness. And in 2018, he did the same thing with Joe Biden. 
 
As VP, Biden had made a speech in 2015 pressing the Ukrainian government to fire a corrupt prosecutor named Viktor Shokin. It was the consensus of the entire US government, as well as the entire international establishment, that Shokin had to go if Ukraine was ever going to get its house in order. Nevertheless, Schweizer wrote a book called “Secret Empires” in which he alleged that Biden was unilaterally forcing out this prosecutor to protect a Ukrainian oil company called Burisma which employed his son as a board member. I wrote about it at the time as Ukranium One. And if you hear me shittalking NYT reporter Ken Vogel, that’s why. Because when Rudy Giuliani started flogging this nonsense about Burisma, Vogel treated it as if it might be true. And it was very clearly NEVER true. It was Uranium One all over again, and it’s been the same shit for five years now. And when Trump pressured Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to “do us a favor though,” this is what he wanted. He wanted the Ukrainian government to say it was investigating this bullshit as if it were real.
 
So in 2019 Rudy Giuliani waddled off to Ukraine in search of proof of this concocted story, where he got fed Russian propaganda by a Russian spy named Andrey Derkach, who was later sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department for using that Russian propaganda to influence the 2020 election. But Trump didn’t give a shit about that, and neither did Bill Barr, they set up Scott Brady, the US Attorney in Pittsburgh, as Rudy’s personal dis