In three days, a preview of 2024’s battles
Byron York
IN THREE DAYS, A PREVIEW OF 2024’S BATTLES. There were a number of really significant events in Washington Wednesday that, combined with some equally significant developments on Monday and Tuesday, offer a preview of much of the political warfare that will dominate the news next year.
The things that happened Wednesday were: 1) Hunter Biden’s stunt appearance on Capitol Hill to announce that he was defying a House subpoena, 2) a House vote to authorize an impeachment investigation of President Joe Biden, 3) a Supreme Court decision to review a law that has been used to prosecute more than 300 Jan. 6 rioters and makes up two of the felony charges against former President Donald Trump, and 4) an announcement from the judge in the Trump Jan. 6 and 2020 election case that it is on hold until some critical constitutional questions it raises are resolved.
That’s on top of what happened earlier this week, including: 1) polls showing Trump with a widening lead over both his Republican primary competition and Biden, nationally, in key swing states, and in the first-voting state of Iowa, and 2) special counsel Jack Smith’s rushed request to the Supreme Court that it rule on those constitutional questions in time for Trump to be tried and convicted before next November’s election.
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This newsletter examined the latter two developments earlier this week. So on to what happened Wednesday:
1) The House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena for Hunter Biden to appear for questioning. Lawmakers planned to interview Hunter Biden in what is called a transcribed deposition. This is why they did it: There are two main ways of gathering testimony — a public hearing or a private deposition. In the public hearings that we have all seen, each committee member gets five minutes to question a witness, alternating between Republican and Democratic members. Such hearings are filled with grandstanding, speechifying, and gaslighting, which means they are often partisan shows that don’t elicit much new information.
In a private deposition, on the other hand, each side agrees to question the witness for, say, an hour. The questioning is usually handled by Republican and Democratic lawyers who can develop lines of inquiry. The transcript is later made public, but the point is to gather information. Later, the committee holds a public show hearing where everybody chews over the stuff that was revealed in the deposition.
It is standard procedure that a committee first hold a deposition and then hold a hearing. That’s what committee Republicans chose to do with Hunter Biden. Except that Hunter Biden refused to comply. He announced that he would appear only in a public hearing, one that has gathered no new information and one in which his Democratic allies could fight it out with Republicans and nothing much would be accomplished. The committee said no — deposition first, then hearing. Hunter Biden was ordered to appear in a room in the Rayburn House Office Building on Wednesday morning.
He didn’t show up. Instead, Hunter Biden drove to the Capitol, where Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) had arranged a space for him near the steps. Hunter Biden stepped to a bunch of press microphones — remember, this was all for show — and said, “I am here.” Well, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t where he had been summoned, and he wasn’t going to take part in a deposition, as the subpoena demanded. Instead, he denounced Republicans, got back in a car, and left. The headline was: Hunter Biden defied a congressional subpoena.
How big a deal was that? When some Trump figures, such as Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, defied subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee, the Democratic-led House thought it was a very, very big deal. They found Bannon and Navarro in contempt of Congress and referred their cases to the Justice Department. The Justice Department also thought it was a very, very big deal and brought criminal charges against both Bannon and Navarro. Now, the Republican-led House will probably find Hunter Biden in contempt. But it is highly unlikely that the Biden Justice Department will charge him criminally.
In any event, what Hunter Biden did on Wednesday was a stunt, and stunts sometimes backfire. Hunter Biden just made Republicans more determined to pursue him. He also implicated his father, the president, in his contempt of Congress when White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that Joe Biden knew what Hunter was going to do ahead of time. “The president was certainly familiar with what his son was going to say,” Jean-Pierre said Wednesday.
2) Another big event was the House vote to begin an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden’s business dealings. There’s not a lot more to say about that — beyond the question of whether House Republicans should have done it at this moment. They have proven beyond any doubt that Joe Biden did not tell the truth about his knowledge of Hunter Biden’s shady overseas business dealings. They have also proven beyond any doubt that access to Joe Biden was the only product Hunter Biden sold to foreign customers and that Joe Biden knew it at the time. But they have not proven beyond any doubt that Hunter Biden passed on part of the gains from his foreign influence peddling to his father. Yes, they have some checks, but they are not definitive.
Given all that progress, Republicans have every reason in the world to continue investigating Joe Biden’s dealings. They also have reason to wait a while to transform that investigation into an impeachment inquiry. But they decided to move ahead on Wednesday, so we’ll see what happens.
3) On the Supreme Court, the biggest news Wednesday was the court’s decision to review a law that the Biden Justice Department has used to prosecute more than 300 Jan. 6 defendants and that special counsel Jack Smith is using to prosecute Trump. It is pretty complicated, but the short version is that the law was passed in 2002 as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, designed to crack down on white-collar crime. The law says that “whoever corruptly alters, destroys, mutilates or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”
The law, passed in response to the Enron scandal, seems clearly intended for crooked executives trying to burn documents or delete emails to obstruct a criminal investigation. “The obstruction charge was never an easy fit in the cases stemming from the storming of the Capitol,” the New York Times reported. “When it was passed in the early 2000s, the law was aimed at curbing corporate malfeasance by outlawing things like destroying documents or tampering with witnesses or evidence.”
Nevertheless, the Justice Department seized on the “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding” part and used it to charge people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, even those who did so peacefully. Several defendants have tried to argue that this law does not apply to them, but they have all lost — except one. Fifteen out of 16 federal judges in Washington have ruled against that argument, but one accepted it, and because he did, the Supreme Court has now decided to step in and settle the matter.
Obviously, if the court rules that the Justice Department misapplied the law, it would blow up the cases against those 300-plus defendants, plus the case against Trump. Two of the four counts against Trump in the Jan. 6 and 2020 election case rely on that part of the law. So the Supreme Court’s decision to review the law is a big, big deal.
4) Finally, one last development. In light of Smith’s, and then the Supreme Court’s, moves on the question of presidential immunity, the judge in Trump’s case, Tanya Chutkan, temporarily put the case on hold while the court settles it. Chutkan is the one who set the date, March 4, 2024, for Trump’s trial to begin. She has appeared determined to make it happen. But now, she seems to have conceded that some key aspects of the case are out of her hands.
Special counsel Smith is racing to put Trump on trial as quickly as possible, with the obvious goal of trying, convicting, and imprisoning Trump before the 2024 presidential election. Now, some moves in the courts have made that job harder, although not impossible.
So it has been a remarkably newsy few days. That sometimes happens in December as Washington races to take care of business before the Christmas break. But all of this will come back after New Year’s. It will, in fact, shape a lot of the nation’s politics in 2024.
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