The Mass-Debaters: Part One - The Winners and Losers Of The First Trump/Biden Brawl.

If we are an affiliate of FOX News... we are a pretty lousy one!

Eric Renderking Fisk | October 6th, 2020

Jason Cousineau and Eric Fisk discuss the first Presidential Debate between Incumbent Donald Trump versus former VP and challenger Joe Biden, versus moderator Chris Wallace of FOX News! Besides the people who didn’t watch this undisputed disaster, who actually won the debate? Did either of these two convince views that they are the best septuagenarian for the job, or did they alienate their base and undecided at the same time?

Or did this event actually do more harm than good, and made a case for voters to choose a third-party candidate like former Fedora Chronicles guest and Libertarian candidate Dr. Jo Jorgensen, or Howie Hawkins? Or would we be better off if the great Yellowstone Caldera erupted and ended 2020 early for all of us?

And what does “Rosemont Seneca Thornton” have to do with this election, anyway?

But first, Jay and Eric discuss the outrageous claims by a congresswoman’s sycophant about The Fedora Chronicles. Rumors, Gossip, and laughs!

I wish I could take credit for this image - all I did was put the logo on their private parts!

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Show Notes and Links

Washington Post - "Treasury reports rebut Biden's 'totally false' claims about Hunter's cash haul," By Rowan Scarborough  - The Washington Times - Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden flatly denied at Tuesday night’s debate that his lawyer son took huge sums of money from corrupt oligarchs and Chinese communists during his vice presidency, but Treasury Department reports show that Hunter Biden did receive the money.

President Trump chose to make an issue of Hunter Biden’s cash haul from Russia, Ukraine and China with the implication that unsavory figures were trying to buy Vice President Biden and the Obama administration.

“When somebody gets 3½ million dollars from the mayor of Moscow,” Mr. Trump said.

“That’s is not true. That report is totally false,” Mr. Biden said.

A Senate Republican report by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee says Mr. Trump is right, though it was not Moscow’s mayor, but his wife, whom the U.S. suspects of corruption in attaining billionaire status.

In April 2014, President Obama made Mr. Biden the point man in Ukraine, after the Russian invasion, to persuade leaders to rid the country of rampant corruption.

The next month, Hunter Biden showed up on the board of directors of the energy company Burisma Holdings, which the State Department considers corrupt, as it does its oligarch owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, already had secured a spot.

Over the years, Burisma paid the two more than $4 million. Treasury records show that 48 wire transfers from May 2014 to February 2016 totaled $3.4 million. The money went to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, a shell company run by Mr. Archer in partnership with a Chinese investment fund.

In 2014 and 2015, Burisma sent $700,000 directly to Hunter Biden. After Mr. Archer was arrested on fraud charges, Burisma sent Hunter Biden another $752,000.

On China, Vice President Biden promoted closer ties to the communist regime on many fronts. He traveled to China in 2013 on Air Force Two and took along Hunter, who met with Chinese businessmen.

New York Post: "Inside the shady private equity firm run by Kerry and Biden’s kids," By Peter Schweizer | March 15, 2018

Impeachment of Donald Trump From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The impeachment of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, was initiated on December 18, 2019, when the House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Senate acquitted Trump of these charges on February 5, 2020.

Trump's impeachment came after a formal House inquiry alleged that he had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election to help his re-election bid, and then obstructed the inquiry itself by telling his administration officials to ignore subpoenas for documents and testimony. The inquiry reported that Trump withheld military aid[a] and an invitation to the White House to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in order to influence Ukraine to announce an investigation into Trump's political opponent Joe Biden and to promote a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The inquiry stage of Trump's impeachment lasted from September to November 2019 in the wake of an August whistleblower complaint alleging Trump's abuse of power. In October, three congressional committees (Intelligence, Oversight, and Foreign Affairs) deposed witnesses. In November, the House Intelligence Committee held a number of public hearings in which witnesses testified publicly; on December 3, the committee voted 13–9 along party lines to adopt a final report. A set of impeachment hearings before the House Judiciary Committee began on December 4; on December 13, it voted 23–17 along party lines to recommend two articles of impeachment, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The committee released a lengthy report on the impeachment articles on December 16. Two days later, the full House approved both articles in a mostly party-line vote, with all Republicans opposing along with three Democrats. This made Trump the third U.S. president in history to be impeached and marked the first fully partisan impeachment where a U.S. president was impeached without support from the President's own party (though independent representative Justin Amash, who voted in favor of impeachment on both articles, had previously been a Republican until July 2019).

The articles were submitted to the Senate on January 16, 2020, initiating the trial. The trial saw no witnesses or documents being subpoenaed, as Republican senators rejected attempts to introduce subpoenas on January 21 while arranging for trial procedures, and then on January 31 after a debate. On February 5, Trump was acquitted on both counts by the Senate as neither count received 67 votes to convict. On Article I, abuse of power, 48 senators voted for conviction, while 52 senators voted for acquittal. On Article II, obstruction of Congress, 47 senators voted for conviction, while 53 senators voted to acquit. Republican Mitt Romney, the only senator to break party lines, became the first U.S. senator to vote to convict a president of his own party in an impeachment trial, as he voted for conviction on abuse of power. Two days after the acquittal, Trump fired witnesses Gordon Sondland and Alexander Vindman, who had in the impeachment inquiry testified about his conduct; Vindman's twin brother Yevgeny was also fired.

Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory...

Trump and his allies have also promoted a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were engaged in corrupt activities in Ukraine. Trump's defense team promoted this conspiracy theory during his impeachment trial, and Trump has said he planned to make it a major issue during the 2020 campaign, while a Republican-controlled Senate committee ramped up an investigation in spring 2020. Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, spearheaded an effort to gather information in Ukraine to advance the conspiracy theory, and attorney general Barr confirmed that the Justice Department created an "intake process" to review Giuliani's findings.[38][39][40][41] The conspiracy theory asserts that Hunter Biden was paid a large sum of money by a Ukrainian firm, Burisma Holdings, to take a job for which he was unqualified, as a means for Burisma to influence then-vice president Joe Biden, who then extorted Ukraine for $1 billion to fire a prosecutor so as to prevent Hunter Biden from being investigated for corruption. This narrative has been found to be false.[49] Hunter Biden did take a high-paying job with Burisma, but involving matters for which he was qualified, and there is no evidence he was peddling influence with his father. Vice president Biden did withhold $1 billion in government aid to Ukraine, but for the opposite reason the conspiracy theory asserts: as a matter of American and international policy to induce Ukraine to remove a corrupt and ineffective prosecutor who was not assertively investigating Burisma. Trump defended the fired prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, “who a lot of people said was a great prosecutor and they took him off.”[50] In a widely-circulated 2018 video, a portion of which was included in a Trump campaign ad, Joe Biden is seen taking credit for Shokin's firing, but not for the reason the conspiracy theory and Trump ad contend.[51][52]

In September 2019, Shokin signed an affidavit asserting his beliefs — rather than assertions of facts — that Joe Biden engineered his removal from office to prevent an investigation into Burisma and Hunter Biden. Giuliani promoted the affidavit in television appearances, asserting that Shokin "says under oath" that he was investigating Hunter Biden when he was fired.[53] The affidavit notes that it was provided "at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash...for use in legal proceedings in Austria."[51] Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch, had for five years been living in Austria, figthing extradition to the United States where he was under indictment for a bribery scheme.[54] Since July 2019, Fitrash's lawyers included Joseph diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, close Trump and Giuliani associates who are regular guests on Sean Hannity's Fox News program.[55] The New York Times reported that Giuliani had directed Lev Parnas to recommend to Firtash that he hire diGenova and Toensing, with the proposition that Firtash could help to provide compromising information on Biden, which Parnas's attorney described was "part of any potential resolution to [Firtash's] extradition matter".[56] The Washington Post reported that in mid-August 2019, Toensing and diGenova secured a rare face-to-face meeting with attorney general Bill Barr to argue the Firtash charges should be dropped.[57] Prior to that meeting, Barr had been briefed in detail on the initial whistleblower complaint within the CIA that had been forwarded to the Justice Department, as well as on Giuliani's activities in Ukraine. Barr declined to intervene in the Firtash case.[56] Bloomberg News reported that its sources told them that Giuliani's high-profile publicity of the Shokin affidavit had greatly reduced the chances of the Justice Department dropping the charges against Firtash, as it would appear to be a political quid pro quo.[58] diGenova has said he has known Barr for decades, as they both worked in the Reagan/Bush Justice Department.[59]

Firtash made his fortune brokering Ukrainian imports of natural gas from the Russian firm Gazprom.[60] As vice president, Joe Biden had urged the Ukrainian government to eliminate middlemen such as Firtash from the country's natural gas industry, and to reduce the country's reliance on imports of Russian natural gas. Firtash denied involvement in collecting or financing damaging information on the Bidens.[56] In 2017, the Justice Department characterized him as an "upper echelon (associate) of Russian organized crime".[61]

In May 2020, Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, an associate of Rudy Giuliani with links to Russian intelligence, released snippets of recordings of Joe Biden speaking with Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president during the years Hunter Biden worked for Burisma.[62] The recordings, which were not verified as authentic and appeared heavily edited, showed Biden linking loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general. The recordings did not provide evidence to support the ongoing conspiracy theory that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired to protect his son.[63] Poroshenko denied In June 2020 that Joe Biden ever approached him about Burisma and characterized the recordings as fake.[64][65] One America News, a favorite news outlet of Trump's that features conspiracy theories, heavily promoted the recordings.[66] In September 2020, the US Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, stating he "has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services." The Treasury Department added Derkach "waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election," including by the release of "edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials."[67][68]

In some cases, Giuliani and his associates worked with individuals linked to Russian organized crime and intelligence, including Firtash and Derkach.[69][70] In late 2019, multiple sources reported that the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which Giuliani had once led, was investigating him for multiple felonies relating to his activities in Ukraine.[71][72][73] The chairman of the Senate committee investigating the matter, Ron Johnson, was warned by American intelligence officials of a risk he could be playing into the hands of Russian intelligence to spread disinformation.[74]