On Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerry Nadler did his best to spin the transcript of FBI Thomas Sobocinski. He claimed that the impeachment case against Joe Biden was “falling apart” as the story of the two whistleblowers in the Hunter Biden case started to “unravel.”
Sobocinski “pushed back” against the claim by the whistleblowers that Special Counsel David Weiss said he didn’t have charging authority. Sobocinski said he didn’t remember that being said that but he also added fuel to the fire that the case was slow-walked by saying Weiss plodded on his decision to charge Hunter Biden.
Nadler and the Democrats didn’t want to play up that second part but they wanted to play up that point about the charging decision to suggest that impugned what the whistleblowers had said. It’s not unusual that witnesses to the same event might have different recollections of the same event.
The problem with the spin, as I pointed out at the time, was that IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley had contemporaneous notes of the meeting, and Sobocinski didn’t. Also according to Empower Oversight, a non-profit group assisting the whistleblower Shapley sent out a summary of those notes to other people in real-time, including his supervisor who “contemporaneously corroborated his account.”
As the Judiciary Committee noted, it’s been the whistleblowers who have been consistent, unlike Attorney General Merrick Garland or Special Counsel David Weiss.