Roman Gastesi and Hunter Biden

By Rick Boettger

Roman Gastesi is accused of “knowingly and intentionally obstructing, delaying, or preventing the communication of information relating to the commission of a felony,” and faces arrest and prosecution in Monroe County by our State Attorney.

Hunter Biden has been protected for 18 months by a State Department that has stonewalled New York Times’ FOIA requests for records of his felonious influence-pedaling.  One of his letters to our State Department on behalf of Biden’s $3 million Romanian client, even when finally “released,” was entirely redacted.  That is, in the light of clear public knowledge, the State Department proudly breaks the law far worse than our Monroe County Manager did, and is not sanctioned in the slightest.

Worse, the State Department is covering up on behalf of their own bosses, the Administration, who writes their exorbitant paychecks.  Roman may not have exactly been even covering up, but just failing to investigate people who worked for him, who had zero influence on his own paycheck.

On a positive note, I am proud of living in a county that actually has respect for its own laws, holding even its most powerful leaders to account.  However, I am far more saddened by living in a nation that lets its big shots get away with almost anything.  At the national level, it takes the spectacular, in-your-face of House Representatives’ Martinez and Santos flaunting their Egyptian gold bars and blatant electoral crimes to get any sanctions at all. Everyone knows that Trump has been immune from sanctions for his entire life, and may even escape any penalties for his already-convicted 34 New York felonies. And the Supreme court just gave our nation’s president blanket immunity for virtually everything.

What has been covered up not only by our State and Justice Departments but by the national legacy media are Hunter’s crimes and the Biden administration’s years’-long vigilant cover-ups.  They have been so well censored that most of you reading this will not know the solid facts.  In a nutshell, for five years while Joe was veep, Hunter got tens of millions of dollars from foreign countries (China, Romania, Ukraine) for doing nothing but being the veep’s son.  He laundered this  money by running it through a clever web of 20 Delaware shell corporations.  Millions  ended up being eventually wired by name to members of the Biden family: Hunter, uncle James, and then-lover Hallie. The law states that bribes paid to family members count as bribes paid to the official.

The New York Times led the 2020 cover-up of Hunter’s famous laptop, calling it Russian disinformation, thus saving Biden’s election.  They only accurately began reporting the above facts this June.  Their readership hated the news.  I went through the 685 reader comments on the online version (since deleted) and only 8 accepted the facts as a problem.  All the rest castigated the NYT for reporting it at all.  The most recent proof of Hunter’s lobbying our State Department on behalf of the Romanian who paid him $3,000,000 for “real estate advisement” got 1340 comments, still online.  About 98%, again, are mad at NYT for printing it, saying it is a “nothing burger,” and the NYT should only report on Trump family crimes.

Give the NYT belated credit for finally covering this at all.  MSNBC last reported honestly about Hunter in April 2022, and only online, not on the air.  Since then every story leads with its being the nothing burger, and nowhere near as bad as Trump’s family.  They know what their readership demands.

So I guess my main enemy here is not the government for covering it up, nor the media for abdicating their 4th Estate duty to hold our government to account—but rather my enemy is cognitive dissonance.  That is, We The People in our normal humanity love consistency.  Our good friends must be good people.  A President whom we voted for and who did many good things we like, he cannot be guilty of doing bad things.  That would be whiplash for our tender sensibilities, a dissonance in our cognition, hence the social psych term.

Of course, both sides are the same.  For correctly calling Arizona for Biden in 2020, Fox News fired two top executives and laid off 18 other staffers.  Owner Murdoch and their viewership were outraged by the bad news, and hated hearing it.

Thus my quiet amaze at our humble little end-of-the-road Monroe County and local media for ethically  going where our national leaders fear to tread, saying bad news about the people we love.  Gastesi faces sanctions for a cover-up not 5% as bad as the Biden family’s and the Justice Department’s, who will get off Scot-free for influence peddling and obstructing justice—only Hunter is charged, and only for tax fraud.  I am no fan of Roman—his role in the SUFA case was worth a misdemeanor charge had I not been two months late bringing it the then-SA Vogel’s attention, and his involvement in the iPhone sale was far worse than this, with one of his usually-protected subordinates taking the rap.  I never thought I’d feel sorry for him.  That is what Hunter has obliquely done to my sense of justice.

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