The Evidence That Joe Biden Committed Bribery

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  • Over here at Manhattan Contrarian, I have now had five posts detailing the lay-down case that Joe Biden committed the federal crime of bribery (18 U.S.C Section 201(b)) with respect to the conduct of himself and his son in Ukraine.

  • Meanwhile, over in what we continue to call the mainstream media, there has developed a mantra that there is “no evidence” that Joe Biden acted to help his son collect a bribe in Ukraine. Just yesterday, Eric Felten over at RealClearInvestigations put together a nice roundup of these ridiculous statements.

  • What are we missing here? Actually, it’s what are they missing? What they are missing is a fundamental understanding of how motive or causation are proved in this world.

  • Here is the basic principle: A hypothesis as to motive or causation cannot be proved by evidence consistent with the hypothesis. Instead, motive or causation are proved by evidence inconsistent with the alternative hypothesis.

  • Unfortunately for Joe, there is indeed evidence that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that he acted for pure motives, and not to help his son. I have identified two pieces of such evidence in prior posts. . . .

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Biden v. Trump: Which One Is The "Bribe"?

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  • It was right around the time that I was writing my last post (“The Trump Impeachment: What Is The Crime?”) that House Democrats started using the word “bribery” to describe what they are looking into. OK, that’s a start. Shall we consider it further?

  • Bribery is a real crime, and it’s even mentioned in the Constitution as a basis for impeachment. But there are two major problems with trying to fit the square peg of the Trump/Ukraine fact pattern into the round hole of the impeachable crime of “bribery.” The first is that if providing to a politician some intangible political advantage can be characterized as a “bribe,” then most of what politicians do all day would become “bribery.” The second is that calling President Trump’s conduct as to Ukraine “bribery” invites comparison with the conduct of Joe and Hunter Biden in the same country, and calls for testing the conduct of each against the words of the applicable statute to see which is the better fit.

  • As discussed in the previous post, it’s only a “crime” if you can fit within the exact words of some criminal statute passed by Congress. In the case of the crime of bribery of a federal official, the main statute is 18 U.S.C. Section 201(b).

  • If you have read that, perhaps your reaction was, “then why isn’t every politician already in jail?” The problem is that politics is inherently corrupt. Even if a politician is not “on the take” for personal money, it goes without saying that every incumbent politician regularly uses the powers of his office to obtain intangible political benefits to himself from third parties, for use against rivals.

  • With that background, let’s try applying the words of the bribery statute to the conduct of President Trump and of Joe and Hunter Biden relating to Ukraine. . . .

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The Trump Impeachment: What Is The Crime?

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  • With the big impeachment circus now going on in the House of Representatives, perhaps you have begun to wonder, what is the alleged crime? I know that I have. Should anybody care about that?

  • There is a very good reason to care. The Constitution specifies the potential grounds for impeachment: “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” (Article II, Section 4). All the possible categories of impeachable offenses specified by the Constitution are crimes. To meet the Constitutional test, you have to have a crime.

  • In both the Nixon and Clinton impeachments, they seemed to take seriously this requirement of a crime as the necessary predicate. The large majority of the allegations of wrongdoing closely track the contours of well-known crimes defined in the Code.

  • Here we are in the midst of impeachment mania, and we have completely lost track of the whole idea that there might be a need for an actual crime. I’ve spent some quality time here this afternoon trying to find some intelligent promoter of impeachment who has even ventured a plausible attempt to specify what criminal statute is alleged to have been violated. No success. What I have found instead are various people arguing that no crime is necessary for impeachment.

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Bolivia: That Was Quick!

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  • It was barely more than a month ago — October 3 to be exact — that I made fun of a big spread the previous day in The Nation, declaring the country of Bolivia to be the latest, greatest “Remarkable Socialist Success Story”!

  • And then yesterday, [Bolivian President Evo] Morales may or may not have resigned. That was quick! How could this all have gone so wrong so fast?

  • To start with, there was the small problem of allowing the electoral machinery to be fully controlled by people loyal to the incumbent bent on re-election. Surely then, wouldn’t Morales’s people have no problem turning any remotely close result into a clear victory? Sometimes what seems like an advantage may not turn out that way.

  • From the OAS Report on the election: In some cases, it was confirmed that all the tally sheets in a center had been completed by the same person. Sometimes, that person turned out to be the MAS representative accredited as the party's delegate in the voting center concerned. Likewise, several tally sheets were found in which the government party obtained 100% of the votes. In some of those documents, the fields for opposition parties had not even been filled in with a "0". In some of those voting tables, moreover, attendance was 100%, which is practically impossible. . . .

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Nobody Will Stop Africa From Developing Its Fossil Fuel Resources

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Nobody Will Stop Africa From Developing Its Fossil Fuel Resources

  • In prior posts where I have addressed the futility of jurisdictions in the U.S. trying to “save the planet” by reducing their use of fossil fuels, my focus has generally been on China and India. Those countries have huge populations (about 1.4 billion each) and still-poorly-developed energy infrastructure. Of course they are going to continue to build power plants until everybody has access to reliable electricity.

  • But let us also not overlook Africa. Africa’s population is currently about 1.3 billion, but growing much faster than that of China or India.

  • You may have seen predictions in certain quarters that Africa is going to “go green” as it gains access to energy. But what is the reality on the ground? We can get a good indication by looking at what happened last week at the Africa Oil Week convention, held this year in Cape Town, South Africa.

  • It seems that the Africa Oil Week convention was attended by representatives of some 75 countries, including 23 energy ministers. According to Reuters, unlike the scene at similar confabs held in Europe, at this one pretty much no one gave a hoot about the issue of “climate change” . . .

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Running Out Of Other People's Money, New York And Federal Versions

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  • I’m old enough to remember a time when government officeholders thought that a significant part of their job was prioritizing various options for public spending, in recognition that overspending on lower priorities would mean that nothing would be left for higher priorities.

  • The new fad is an unending tidal wave of proposals for new government programs and spending initiatives which will, any day now, bring perfect justice and fairness to the world. Which ones will we implement? All of them!

  • The budgeting process in New York City under the reign of uber-progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio and a like-minded City Council has been one where any idea that sounds like it might be “doing good” promptly gets funded. I’ll give you a few examples of my favorite wildly skewed spending priorities. . . .

  • But, with the economy booming, what do we care? Don’t we have plenty of money for whatever spending initiative sounds good at the moment? Actually, we are reaching limits all over the place.

  • Over in the Democratic Party race for the presidential nomination, the key qualification for running is an unshakable belief that it is impossible to run out of other people’s money.

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