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Remember when Jonathan Turley argued that Martin Luther King Jr. was never arrested for his civil rights protests? We all had a good laugh at the time, but perhaps it’s prudent to consider the possibility that the Turley we see on TV these days is actually an evil Turley from the Mirror Universe dropped into our timeline. It would explain the MLK gaffe. It would explain why his impeachment testimony directly contradicts the testimony he gave in 1998. And it would explain why he thinks Joe Biden served as vice president in 2018.
Yesterday, the pride of George Washington University Law School committed over 1,000 words to paper explicating his latest legal theory to nail Hunter Biden. It’s a very serious piece and not at all surgically designed to hit buzzwords that might pique the interest of milk toast Fox News hosts looking to give five minutes to the attention-starved law professor.
His airtight legal case begins…
In 2018, Hunter Biden’s world was collapsing.
The New York Times had run a story on one of his shady deals with the Chinese and his father, then vice president, was pulled into the vortex.
“Then vice president.” This is an article that the New York Post published on Monday at 10:47 p.m. The paper would not correct this historical error to “the former” until Tuesday at 10:15 p.m. It took almost 24 hours for a major news publication to fact-check that Joe Biden was not Donald Trump’s vice president. Do they have any editors at all over there? This is the same paper that metastasized the claim that homeless vets were being kicked out of housing to make way for illegal immigrants in what ultimately turned out to be an easily verifiable lie. Get it together over there.
Turley’s website has not yet corrected the claim.
That might be because Turley realizes correcting the blatant error doesn’t resolve the underlying rot in the article. Turley’s central thesis is that uncovered messages among the Biden family suggest that Hunter Biden engaged in illegal influence peddling in 2018. Changing the second sentence of the article to acknowledge that Joe Biden was a private citizen in 2018 might avoid botching a historical fact, but it also dooms the remaining 1,000-some-odd words.
If Biden’s son leaned on his dad’s reputation to close business deals in 2018, it’s a reminder that the revolving door of D.C. political power reeks, but it’s not illegal. That’s why most Hunter Biden truthers fixate on allegations firmly anchored before January 2017.
Turley must have thought he was a very special boy for being the first one to craft a legal theory based on these new 2018 messages! In his haste, he breezed over the inconvenient reality of linear time that apparently held back the rest of his fellow travelers.
To be entirely clear, someone who fancies themself a legal scholar sat down at a keyboard and banged out a theory of criminal liability predicated on a false assumption of fact and then broadcast that to the world. At least the ChatGPT hallucination lawyer thought he’d conducted cursory research.
Or Turley is, in fact, from that universe where Stouffer’s actually makes stuffing. Has anyone checked to see if he’s ever sported a goatee?
Bidens offer ‘safe harbor’ to Hunter as he flails over scandalous reports, new messages show [NY Post]
Earlier: Remember When Martin Luther King Was Arrested? Because Jonathan Turley Sure Doesn’t!
For The Love Of All That Is Holy, Stop Blaming ChatGPT For This Bad Brief
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
