The Senate is now a full-fledged arm of the Trump re-election campaign:
The Treasury Department has complied with Republican senators’ requests for highly sensitive and closely held financial records about Hunter Biden and his associates and has turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them, according to a leading Democrat on one of the committees conducting the investigation.
For months, while the impeachment controversy raged, powerful committee chairmen in the Republican-controlled Senate have been quietly but openly pursuing an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and Ukrainian officials’ alleged interventions in the 2016 election, the same matters that President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani unsuccessfully tried to coerce Ukraine’s government to investigate.
Unlike Trump and Giuliani, however, Sens. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee; Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; and Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have focused their efforts in Washington, seeking to extract politically useful information from agencies of the U.S. government. They’ve issued letters requesting records from Cabinet departments and agencies, including the State Department, the Treasury, the Justice Department, the FBI, the National Archives and the Secret Service.
And guess what? These agencies all jumped right on it.
Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement — highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering.
The senators’ requests to the Treasury have borne fruit, according to the ranking Democratic senator on the Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, who contrasted the cooperation given to the Republican senators with the pervasive White House-directed stonewall that House Democrats encountered when they subpoenaed documents and witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.
“Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests — no subpoenas necessary — and producing ‘evidence’ of questionable origin,” Wyden spokesperson Ashley Schapitl said in a statement. “The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans’ sideshow at lightning speed.”
Keep in mind that Hunter Biden’s alleged unethical behavior happened years ago.
Biden looks very weak right now and it is looking more and more likely that he will not be the nominee. But it also appears more and more that the GOP vendetta against him wasn’t really about the election. I think it was their way of paying back Obama and attempting to destroy his legacy as a clean administration.
Nothing is too petty for Trump and his henchmen. It is a dominance play to show the American people that anyone who resists will be pursued. It’s worked very well to tame the GOP. We’ll have to see if they can use their combined strength to force the rest of us to submit.
There’s more …
Two Republican senators have said they are continuing to look into “potential conflicts of interest” with Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China, shortly after President Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate on articles of impeachment for his own conduct in Ukraine.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., sent a letter to Secret Service Director James Murray on Wednesday asking for clarification on “whether Hunter Biden used government-sponsored travel to help conduct private business” and details of his travel records.