Getting on the wrong side of a federal law enforcement agency can have devastating consequences, even for someone who has not violated the law.
Take the case of Nancy Black, reported by George Will a few years ago. She had captained a whale-watching vessel in Monterey Bay. One of her employees had whistled at a whale to induce the animal to remain near the boat. NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, asked Ms. Black to send a video of the incident. They wanted to investigate whether the whistling constituted harassment of a marine mammal, a federal crime.
She sent the video after editing it to highlight the incident in question. Investigators found that Ms. Black had not harassed the whale. Although her interaction with the whale was innocent, the feds wanted her stopped. She was indicted for making a materially false statement to a government agency. Her crime was editing the video to highlight the information that demonstrated her innocence. At one point a dozen federal agents raided her home to remove computers containing years’ worth of data that she had collected.
https://www.silive.com/opinion/columns/2012/07/the_government_leviathan_goes.html
Or consider the case of Jim Brown, a Merrill Lynch executive who testified before a grand jury during the Enron investigation back in 2002. A prosecutor asked him about a phone call which, it was alleged, was part of a financial conspiracy. Mr. Brown had not been part of that telephone call. He didn’t have any first-hand knowledge. The prosecutor told Brown that it didn’t matter whether he had participated. What was wanted was Brown’s understanding of what was discussed “whether it was accurate or not”.
Unfortunately, Mr. Brown’s understanding of what was said on that call was not correct. It was later shown that the content of the call differed from the information Brown had been given and had repeated at the prosecutor’s direction. That will happen when you report on an event in which you did not take part. Brown was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.
The prosecutor was Andrew Weissman, later the leader of the Russian collusion investigation for which Robert Mueller acted as the titular head. The Enron task force reported to Christopher Wray, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, now the director of the FBI.
These are not isolated incidents. For more detail, see Sidney Powell’s “Licensed to Lie”; Conrad Black’s “A Matter of Principle”; Dinesh D’Souza’s “Stealing America”; or Harvey Silverglate’s “Three Felonies a Day”. There are plenty of other sources.
Which brings me to Tony Bobulinski. He is a former business partner of Hunter Biden. He says that he can confirm the authenticity of some of the materials found on the Hunter Biden laptop that you have been reading about on your favorite news sites and hearing reported on TV. (Irony.)
He claims to be able to demonstrate that Mr. Biden’s protestations of innocence in connection with the flow of foreign money from China and Ukraine toward members of the Biden family are false.
We now learn that the FBI took possession of the Hunter Biden laptop in December 2019. At a time when the federal establishment was honeycombed with whistleblowers on matters dealing with Ukraine, was there an FBI whistleblower who breathed a word about the laptop to the House Intelligence Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the White House, or anyone in the media?
The FBI got the laptop from a computer repair person. The repair guy found the potentially damaging materials in the course of trying to fix the computer. He contacted the FBI through an intermediary. The FBI initially took a forensic copy of the hard drive. Later they came back and took the laptop. Evidently, the repair guy kept a copy of his own.
I should emphasize that Mr. Biden denies any wrongdoing. He has said in the clearest terms that he has never received money from a foreign country.
The FBI sat on this information during the impeachment hearings in the House, through the delay that ensued when the Speaker of the House refused to transmit the articles of impeachment until she was satisfied that the Senate process would be satisfactory, and again through the parade of witnesses who presented the case in the Senate for the removal of the president from office.
How happy do you think the FBI are with that computer repair guy? Or with Tony Bobulinski?
I’ll go out on a limb and say, not happy at all. In fact, very unhappy.
And now we read that Mr. Bobulinski is going to meet with the FBI. Think well, Mr. Bobulinski. Think of George Papadopoulos, who in an interview with the Mueller team misstated the date when he met a certain obscure Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud. Mr. P is now a convicted felon. Think of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Read a chapter or two of any of the books I mentioned above. And consider hiring the best lawyer you can afford, maybe the best lawyer you can’t afford.
On a frivolous note, the instant I heard Mr. Bobulinski’s delightful name, I thought of “Babalu’s Wedding Day”, a song briefly popular in my youth. It was recorded in 1959 by a group named The Eternals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEqSRGHt1HY
Here is the same group (with some personnel changes) on video, 40 years older and a bit thicker in the waist, but still in fine voice, performing before a “live” audience. (What other kind of audience is there?) Before performing, they mention that Babalu was not their biggest hit. Their true hit song, “Rockin’ in the Jungle” made it to number 11 on the charts in 1959, number 5 in the New York area. For this reprise of “Babalu”, the song for which they are best known even if it wasn’t their biggest hit, they incorporated some tricky dance moves.
The Passing Scene 