Gotta make hay while the sun shines.
The post Hunter Biden Parasite Tries To Suck Out One More News Cycle appeared first on Above the Law.
President Biden’s exit from the race has hit so many of us hard.
But it’s not just his erstwhile opponent who is losing his shit. The entire Hunter Biden Industrial Complex has now been rendered redundant, and boy are they mad about it. This is particularly hard for a weirdo named Tony Bobulinski, who spent the past four years trying to parlay a brief association with the president’s son into a career as a rightwing media figure.
In October of 2020, after the Wall Street Journal refused to print Bobulinski’s allegations about Joe Biden getting cut in on his son’s business deals in China, Bobulinski told his story to the rightwing news outlet Breitbart. He was then invited to the presidential debate as a guest of Donald Trump, and graduated to being a favorite of House Oversight Chair James Comer, in his four year quest to GIT THEM BIDEN BOYS without shooting off his own, umm, member. (He failed on both counts.)
In April, Bobulinski sued Reps. Dan Goldman and Jamie Raskin, demanding $20 million from each for the grievous harm to his reputation thanks to mockery of him and his testimony. In the Raskin complaint, he alleged that the congressman defamed him by retweeting his own speeches after they were posted by the House Judiciary Committee. Perhaps it’s a commentary on the plaintiff’s estimate of the strength of the suit that he hasn’t yet managed to effect service. Or it could be incompetence.
But the Goldman suit is proceeding in hilariously shambolic fashion before Judge Amy Berman Jackson at the District Court in DC.
Bobulinski complained about tweets from the congressman’s personal and official account in which he claimed Bobulinski’s testimony was bogus.
“Tony Bobulinski has used a Trump campaign-paid lawyer to make false allegations since October 2020,” he tweeted, along with footage of Bobulinski admitting that he’d been in discussions with Mark Meadows during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Bobulinski is represented by Jesse Binnall, a “Kraken” alum who does, indeed, represent Donald Trump. It’s not clear whether the congressman was suggesting that Binnall is being paid by Trump to represent Bobulinski, which Bobulinski denies. Nor is it obvious that saying “he has a lawyer paid for by Trump’s PAC” would be defamatory, even if false — half the Republicans in DC are getting legal assistance from Trump’s PACs!
Nonetheless, Bobulinski insists that his reputation has been grievously damaged by the insinuation that he is a shill for the Trump campaign:
Defendant’s omission of this context left a reasonable viewer with the impression that President Trump or his campaign is paying for Mr. Bobulinski’s legal fees, and ultimately, his testimony. It also left viewers to falsely believe that Mr. Bobulinski was testifying for political purposes, as opposed to his true motivation, which has been to tell the truth about the Biden Family’s enterprise of selling influence to foreign actors. Mr. Bobulinski felt compelled to do so, as was his civic duty, for the sake of disclosure to, and preservation of, the Republic.
Citing the Speech or Debate Clause, Rep. Goldman immediately moved to substitute the government as defendant under the Federal Tort Claims Act, and then to dismiss the case because the plaintiff had failed to serve the Justice Department within ninety days. (Do these guys not know any process servers in the DMV?)
Goldman also moved to dismiss on the basis of sovereign immunity, noting that the allegedly defamatory comments pertained to Bobulinski’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee, on which Goldman and Raskin both sit.
Bobulinski responded with an amended complaint in which he made zero new arguments, but amped up the rhetoric to 11.
“In his ~ 18 months as a freshman member of Congress, Defendant has conducted himself shamefully under the misguided belief that he is unaccountable for the real impact of his inflammatory and maliciously defamatory statements that are not only well outside the scope of his employment, but also are prone to incite violence and recklessly endanger the targets of his statements,” Bobulinski froths, before suggesting that Goldman “may well have precipitated the assassination attempt on President Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania a few weeks ago.”
Bobulinski professes to be in fear for his life: “Protected by a SEAL Team at great expense, which is required due to the lies published by Defendant, Mr. Bobulinski and his family have also received death threats.”
If we didn’t know better, we’d suspect that Bobulinski is making one more desperate attempt to hack his way back into the news cycle one more time before everyone forgets who Hunter Biden is and Judge Jackson yeets this turkey of a case into the sun.
Bobulinkski v. Goldman [Docket via Court Listener]Bobulinski v. Raskin [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
