No. of Recommendations: 8
Ukrainian gas firm Burisma worked with Hunter Biden to set up an account in Malta at Satabank, emails from the First Son's laptop reveal
Satabank was shut down in 2018 after an investigation found 'gross deficiencies' in its adherence to the country's anti-laundering and terror financing laws
Emails show Hunter gave income statements, passport details and utility bills to a Burisma executive to set up an account at the now-defunct bank in 2016
Having read the article, is there anything that shows that Hunter Biden committed any crimes?
Clearly the bank was violating Maltese anti-laundering laws - but that doesn't establish that any particular depositor at the bank was doing anything that was illegal.
No one is saying that there's no "there there" for Hunter Biden. What he was doing was despicable but legal - trading on his famous name in order to secure wealth for himself degrades our institutions, but it's neither a crime nor anything that his father could prevent him from doing.
The reason this stuff is "is hardening the notion among the public that Biden's DOJ is thoroughly partisan and in the tank for the democrat party" isn't because DOJ is doing anything wrong - it's because DJT and certain members of the GOP are out there telling their voters that the DOJ is thoroughly partisan and in the tank for the Democratic party.
The reason that some of the public believes that the DOJ is in the tank is because they're constantly being told that there's tons of solid evidence that Hunter Biden committed a lot of crimes. If that were true, then the only explanation would be that the DOJ is deliberately refraining from bringing prosecutions that it should bring. But it's not true. They had the tax and gun violations, and they were obviously ready to bring charges on that. But all of the other stuff that Hunter Biden was doing that can be proven was awful but lawful. It's the GOP's false insistence that the absence of charges isn't based on the absence of provable violations of a crime, but instead on politics, that creates the "hardening" of opinion you discuss.
[Note - this happens all the time when people do awful but lawful things. I remember having lots of conversations about this on The Olde Boards during the Great Recession, when people were lamenting the fact that none of the Banksters were getting criminally charged. They kept saying it was because the DOJ was in the tank for Wall Street, rather than because most of them were smart enough to make sure their awful behavior didn't cross over into something prohibited by statute. But trust in the government's response went down sharply, because progressives were out there saying that not bringing charges must have meant the DOJ had their thumb on the scale. Matt Taibbi was a pretty gross offender, IIRC.]
