And you complain about my reading comprehension? I listed five points that Tom was apparently expecting me to believe implicitly but which go against publicly available information, so I stated I'd need a lot of evidence to believe any of them, never mind all. But none of those five points involved the actual payment made to Biden that Tom says he has privileged information about. Moreover, Tom says in his same post 'there aren't any conspiracy theories here, it's all pretty open and brazen' - if it's so open and brazen it shouldn't be that hard to provide credible, non-privileged evidence for all or most of my five points, right?

I never suggested that he should violate his attorney client privilege about that payment to Biden here to me - in fact I wondered why he was bothering to write about this on a message board like this, instead of taking it up with someone who could actually do something about it.

But in this whole case, the position of Tom and of Republicans generally with regards to Shokin seems to be a backwards reasoning: that, because they start out from the assumption that Burisma bribed Biden (and unidentified people in the EU and IMF, but who cares about those, right?) but the only thing they see that Biden actually did was getting rid of Shokin, it must mean that Shokin was doing something that really scared Burisma. They never do bother to show what he actually was doing that was so bad for Burisma, which is a big problem because, apart from Shokin's own words, all the evidence points the other way, that he was in fact dragging his feet on fighting corruption and that was why there was both domestic and international pressure to have him fired.

So, even supposing I accept Tom's assertion about the payment as a fact without requiring anything more, I'd still have to say 'now tell me what Joe Biden actually did that was worth so much money to Burisma'.

I don't say that he's lying or bullshitting, but it's a sufficiently spectacular claim that I also can't just accept it at face value as I would with more mundane statements like your aerospace technology example above. Hence, I don't know if it's true or not, but if it is, I would certainly want law enforcement to have such information and act accordingly. And as discussed in more detail above, I'd be more inclined to believe Biden had received a bribe if I had seen any convincing case about what he actually did for it.

No doubt, but all the same, in such a situation, it seems to me he'd both want and in fact have a patriotic duty to find some way to get the information where it needs to go in order for justice to be served. This whole thread started about presidential pardons before we got this far off topic - some of the most famous pardons went to people who were obliged to violate the law in order to expose something much bigger.