Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘BIDEN FAMILY CORRUPTION’

Business Partners Confirm Joe Biden Was Part of Family’s Influence-Selling


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE AND JORDAN BOYD | MARCH 20, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/20/business-partners-confirm-joe-biden-was-part-of-familys-influence-selling/

Tony Bobulinski oversight hearing

Author Tristan Justice and Jordan Boyd profile

TRISTAN JUSTICE AND JORDAN BOYD

MORE ARTICLES

House Republicans heard explosive testimony from President Joe Biden’s family business partners Wednesday in a public hearing that confirmed the president’s personal involvement in global schemes to sell influence over American government.

Tony Bobulinski, a former family business partner turned whistleblower who told lawmakers President Biden was the “brand” sold to foreign governments, doubled down on accusations of corruption with sworn testimony in public.

“I want to be crystal clear: from my direct personal experience and what I have subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the brand’ being sold by the Biden family,” Bobulinski told lawmakers. “His family’s foreign influence peddling operation — from China to Ukraine and elsewhere — sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government.”

Lawmakers featured Bobulinski alongside Jason Galanis after closed-door depositions with the two witnesses. Devon Archer, another former business partner, and Hunter Biden also sat for closed-door depositions with House committees, but turned down congressional invites to testify in public.

His attorneys previously demanded a public hearing in exchange for Hunter Biden’s cooperation with congressional subpoenas. Then Biden attorney Abbe Lowell suddenly demanded lawmakers hold a public hearing to probe the business practices of his former client, Jared Kushner, potentially violating legal ethics rules. If House Republicans held a public hearing with Kushner, Lowell wrote in a letter last week, “Mr. Biden would consider an invitation for that event.”

House Republicans are probing whether to draw up articles of impeachment against President Biden for selling the use of his political positions to foreign oligarchs. House investigators have discovered more than 20 shell companies established by the Biden family to funnel tens of millions of dollars from corporate leaders from adversarial nations. Witnesses testified Wednesday that President Biden was at the center of the family’s efforts to rake in foreign profits.

“The Bidens sell Joe Biden. That is their business,” said James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee at the beginning of the hearing on “Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office.”

Testifying from prison, Galanis said the Bidens aimed to make “billions, not millions” from selling political favors to oligarchs in China and Russia. Galanis is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence for securities fraud, which Galanis told lawmakers last month also involved Archer and Hunter Biden.

Democrat Obstruction

Democrats spent Wednesday’s hearing attempting to obstruct the impeachment proceedings with repeated interruptions to insist Republicans have no proof of influence peddling claims they have “exonerated” the president. Their handpicked witness Lev Parnas, also a convicted criminal, even went so far as to claim he “found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine.”

On the contrary, House and Senate investigators have uncovered bank receipts, White House visitor logs, testimonies from Biden business partners, text messages, and other documents indicating the Biden family sold their patriarch’s name and position to foreign oligarchs including several in Ukraine. Yet Democrats pressed forward with a stunt campaign to delay, disrupt, and dismiss the hearing. When members heard about text messages about the Biden family business on Bobulinski’s cracked Blackberry phone, Democrats, led by Raskin, introduced a motion to subpoena the device.

Bobulinski previously offered to show the text messages to members who wanted to see them, so Jordan quickly countered with a motion to table. Comer agreed but was forced to wait for a clerk to record a formal vote before proceeding.

To Democrats’ dismay, members’ recorded votes tallied up in favor of tabling.

After the minutes-long delay, Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia asked Bobulinski whether he would turn over his phone to the committee.

“I’m willing to sit in a room with the chairman and the ranking member with my phone and their staff and we can go through each and every text message,” Bobulinski said.

New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez later asked Bobulinski whether he witnessed the president commit a crime, to which Bobulinski answered with an emphatic “Yes.”

“What crime?” Cortez pressed.

“Well, how much time do I have to go through?” Bobulinski answered.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour.

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

8 Unbelievable Claims From Hunter Biden’s Congressional Deposition


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 01, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/01/8-unbelievable-claims-from-hunter-bidens-congressional-deposition/

Hunter Biden in Congressional hearing

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

“You have my answer under oath and under the penalty of perjury,” Hunter Biden declared a half-dozen times during closed-door questioning by the joint House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on Wednesday, a transcript of which was released Thursday. His protestations of truth-telling lacked conviction, though, because the facts and logic proclaimed a different reality. 

Here are the highlights of Hunter Biden’s most unbelievable testimony.

1. It’s All a MAGA-Orchestrated Conspiracy Theory

Hunter Biden opened by claiming the committees had “hunted” him as part of a “partisan political pursuit” of his father. 

“You do not have evidence to support the baseless and MAGA-motivated conspiracies,” he continued before claiming the only basis for the claims of Biden family corruption came from criminals, fugitives, or other liars.

But no matter how many times Hunter evoked the name of Alexander Smirnov — the recently indicted FBI confidential human source who allegedly lied about Burisma paying the Bidens bribes, as memorialized in the FD-1023 — bank records and the testimony of Biden-friendly witnesses negate Hunter’s claims of a conspiracy theory. 

There are only so many coincidences the American public will buy before realizing they’re being sold a bag of malarkey. Evidence of large deposits to Hunter Biden-connected businesses from foreigners in Joe Biden’s wake leaves Hunter’s claim of a conspiracy unbelievable.

2. I Called Upon the Wrong Guy

Probably the most incredible area of Hunter’s testimony was his explanation for a text he sent to Raymond Zhao, asking him to have the director of CEFC call him. “I’m sitting here with my father,” Hunter texted Zhao, “and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. I’m very concerned that the chairman has either changed his mind or broken our deal without telling me or that he’s unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept.”

“Tell the director I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” Hunter continued, adding that “if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following direction. All too often people mistake kindness for weakness, and all too often I’m standing over the top of them saying, I warned you.” 

“I will call you on WhatsApp,” Zhao replied.

This text exchange was incredibly damning because the players involved were connected to the communist Chinese energy company CEFC, which later transferred $5 million in capital to a company Hunter Biden created only a few days after the above text exchange.

But don’t worry, Hunter assured the committee. His text went to the wrong guy because he was “so out of his mind” from his addiction, he had accidentally sent the threat to “Henry Zhao,” who was not connected to CEFC.

“And I, like an idiot, directed it towards Henry Zhao who had no involvement, who had no understanding or even remotely knew what the hell I was even Godd-mn talking about. Excuse my language,” Hunter told the committee.

First, given the quick response to Hunter’s text from CEFC, it is unbelievable that the text didn’t go to the CEFC-connected Zhao. Second, even if Hunter basically drunk-dialed the wrong mark, that doesn’t exonerate him or his father — the latter of whom, the evidence establishes, helped Hunter by showcasing his accessibility to his son’s business partners. 

In short, the text shows Hunter intended to shakedown CEFC, and the $5 million suggests he succeeded.

3. Burisma Wanted Me to Call My… Teen Daughters?

A close second for the most outrageous storyline concerned the call to D.C. that Hunter Biden’s business partner and friend Devon Archer claims Hunter made at the request of Burisma executives. 

Archer, a Biden-friendly witness, had previously testified to the House Judiciary Committee that in early December 2015, after a Burisma board meeting, the founder of the Ukrainian energy company had asked Hunter to call D.C. because of pressure being placed on the company. In a follow-up question, Archer confirmed the Burisma request was for “help from the United States Government to deal with the pressure they were under from their prosecutor, and that entailed the freezing of assets at the London bank and other things that were going on in Ukraine.”

According to Hunter’s friend and former business partner, Hunter stepped away with the Burisma executives to make the call to D.C. But when asked about the call on Wednesday, Hunter testified, “I never would have called, and never did my father on behalf of Burisma.” 

So, whom did he call? 

Hunter didn’t remember but suggested it was his wife or his high school-aged daughters.

Sure, Jan.

4. The Big Guy = The Big Lie?

Revisiting Archer’s testimony from last year added another improbability to Hunter Biden’s testimony — this one concerning “the big guy” moniker. 

When questioned about the reference to 10 percent being “held by H for the big guy,” Hunter claimed not to know what that meant. And when questioned by Democrats on the committee about Joe Biden’s nicknames, Hunter denied his family referred to Joe as “the big guy.” 

Tony Bobulinski, however, testified previously that “the big guy” was Joe Biden’s nickname. And while Hunter Biden claimed Bobulinski was a liar and not to be believed, Archer also used that nickname in an apparent reference to Joe Biden in his testimony, saying Burisma wasn’t “specific, you know, can the big guy help? It was — it’s always this amorphous, can we get help in D.C.?”

5. ‘My Chairman’ is Absolutely, Positively Not Daddy

Also ringing hollow was Hunter Biden’s assertion that “my chairman” was not his father. House investigators asked Hunter about a text he had sent to Bobulinski, in which he said, “In light of the fact that we are at an impasse of sorts, and both James’ lawyers and my chairman gave an emphatic no — I think we should all meet in Romania on Tuesday next week.” 

Hunter went on to say that “my chairman” was Chairman Ye of the Chinese company CEFC. Hunter then testified that he didn’t ever refer to his father as “my chairman,” calling the suggestion “laughable.” 

The Republican committee members confronted Hunter with a text his business partner Rob Walker had sent to Bobulinski that said, “When he said his chairman, he was talking about his dad.” 

Hunter sought to negate Walker’s testimony by claiming it was merely one “third party that was talking with another third party” who was “making a judgment about what I was talking about.” 

Hunter then reverted to, “[Y]ou have my answer under oath that I did not refer and never have referred to my father as chairman.”

His “under oath” guarantee isn’t very assuring, however, given that Hunter had earlier stressed his long-standing relationship with Rob Walker — the third party who identified “my chairman” as Joe Biden.” “Rob Walker has known me since 1998,” Hunter testified. In fact, Hunter claimed Walker would have told their other business partners they were “way out of bounds” if Walker knew they were suggesting getting Joe Biden involved in their business deals.

So it sure seems like Walker would know whether Hunter would refer to his father as “my chairman.” 

6. The Laptop Was a Plant

While many of Hunter’s explanations were unbelievable, his claims about the laptop the FBI seized from a Delaware repair shop were surreal.

When asked about his laptop from hell, Hunter claimed first not to remember dropping one off at a repair store in 2019. Then, when asked if he ever dropped off a laptop at a repair shop, Hunter spoke of dropping one off at a place three blocks from his D.C. office and at an Apple store in Georgetown. When pushed on whether he had ever left a laptop for repair in Delaware, Hunter replied that “the largest Apple store in America is at the Christiana Mall,” and that if he were “to drop off a laptop” — not that he “ever remember[ed] doing that, but if [he] was going to drop off a laptop” — he “would have gone to the Apple store, which was 7 minutes from [his] parents’ home there.” 

In other words, Hunter is claiming he wouldn’t have dropped his laptop off at Mac Isaac’s store to suggest he didn’t. This outrageous assertion is part of a conspiracy theory that suggests the laptop abandoned at the Delaware repair shop was a plant. 

Hunter also pushed another false narrative by suggesting much of the evidence recovered from the laptop was fake. 

“Many different things” on the laptop were “either fabricated, hacked, stolen, or manipulated.” “100 percent,” Hunter testified on Wednesday. 

Of course, when it came to identifying which ones, Hunter insisted, “I can’t go through them all right now.” 

7. My Resume Is Real — And It’s Spectacular

Throughout the transcribed interview, Hunter also attempted to deflect questions about his lucrative service on Burisma’s board of directors by touting his resume. But when pushed on what he actually did for Burisma for a million-dollar paycheck, Hunter’s explanation of attending board meetings and “providing the best advice that I could give” convinced no one. 

That was especially true given that the one thing Hunter should have been giving advice about — Burisma’s various legal problems — the president’s son claimed to know nothing about. Specifically, according to his Wednesday testimony, he did not know Burisma was under investigation in the U.K. for money laundering and had $23 million of assets frozen until “it became public.” 

One would think a board member bearing the impressive resume of Hunter Biden and charged with overseeing corporate governance would know about an investigation and frozen assets before “it became public.” 

8. That’s Not My Money… Until It Is My Money 

Another eyebrow-raising refrain from Hunter Biden concerned payments into accounts held in the name of Rosemont Seneca Bohai and Rosemont Seneca Thornton. Those entities were Devon Archer’s, and as such, the money deposited into those accounts from foreigners wasn’t Hunter’s, the president’s son suggested. 

“I have no authority over those accounts, and I have no view inside of it,” he testified.

Never mind that Archer transferred large sums from those accounts to Hunter Biden-connected accounts or, in one case, used the $142,300 a Kazakhstani oligarch deposited into the Rosemont Seneca Bohai account to pay for a car for Hunter Biden. While Hunter tried to downplay the shifting of funds from one business to another, at the end of the day, it was all unbelievable.

The totality of Hunter Biden’s testimony also rendered his opening line unbelievable. That line—“I did not involve my father in my business” — seems false at every angle. 

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

Law, Political

Tagged with:

Special Counsel Indictment Looks Just As Bad For David Weiss As The Charged FBI Informant


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 16, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/16/special-counsel-indictment-looks-just-as-bad-for-david-weiss-as-the-charged-fbi-informant/

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

On Thursday, Special Counsel David Weiss unsealed an indictment charging a longtime confidential human source (CHS) with making false statements. But it wasn’t Christopher Steele, the CHS who threw the country into turmoil for four years by peddling the fraudulent Steele dossier. Former CHS Stefan Halper, who helped further the Russia-collusion hoax, also wasn’t the subject of the indictment. Nor was CHS Rodney Joffe, who sought to destroy the Trump presidency with the Alfa Bank hoax.

No, it was the CHS who, on June 26, 2020, told his handler that the owner of Burisma claimed he had paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes in exchange for protection from being investigated by the Ukrainian prosecutor.

Thursday’s indictment revealed the name of that CHS for the first time — Alexander Smirnov — and alleged that Smirnov’s aforementioned statements, which were memorialized in an FD-1023 report, were false. 

False Statements Allegations

Since news first broke of the existence of that FD-1023 last summer, House Republicans championed the CHS’s reporting as further evidence of Biden family corruption, while Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley focused on the Department of Justice’s apparent failure to investigate the veracity of the FD-1023 as part of their probe into Hunter Biden’s business affairs.

Weiss’s indictment presents a powerful case that Smirnov lied on June 26, 2020, when the CHS told his handler he’d had conversations with Burisma executives in 2015 and 2016: An investigation by Weiss’s team concluded Smirnov did not meet the Burisma executives until March 1, 2017, meaning the earlier conversations could not have occurred. The indictment references introductory emails that established the alleged accurate timing of events, as well as travel records of other individuals, which contradict Smirnov’s claims. That evidence, the special counsel’s office concluded, was sufficient to charge Smirnov with making false statements and creating a false record.

If Smirnov lied to his handler in June 2020 about his conversations with Burisma executives, the indictment is well deserved. Not only did Smirnov’s alleged lies violate the federal criminal statute that prohibits false statements, but they also proved especially damaging to society as a whole by interfering in the House’s impeachment inquiry. 

The harm here is not merely that investigators wasted time chasing apparently false leads, or that Hunter and Joe Biden suffered from Smirnov’s allegedly false accusations, but also that Smirnov’s lies may overshadow the other unrelated — and substantial — evidence implicating the Bidens in a pay-to-play scandal, rendering it more difficult to obtain justice.

What About Other CHS Lies?

Smirnov, however, is but one CHS whose alleged lies have created havoc for our country. 

Consider the lies peddled in the Steele dossier to our FBI. CHS Christopher Steele represented his sourcing as trusted, reliable, and well-placed when it was none of those things. That dossier led to the DOJ obtaining four unconstitutional surveillance warrants against an innocent American, resulted in our government spending millions investigating a hoax, and impaired the functioning of the Trump administration. Yet even after Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham referred the matter to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation, Steele reaped no consequences for the lies he sowed. 

Then there was CHS Stefan Halper who, according to an electronic communication, told the FBI the Russian-born Svetlana Lokhova had “latched” onto Michael Flynn at a Cambridge academic gathering and then, after the dinner, “surprised everyone and got into [Flynn’s] cab and joined [Flynn] on the train ride to London.” Halper, however, never attended the dinner, so he could not have witnessed any of the happenings, and the supposed cab ride was completely fictional. 

The FBI’s summary of his debriefing also memorialized Halper claiming Trump volunteer Carter Page asked Halper during a July 18, 2016, meeting whether he “would want to join the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser.” In an exclusive interview with The Federalist in 2020, however, Page, “unequivocally denied asking Halper ‘to be a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign.’” 

Add to those two sources Rodney Joffe, the CHS who helped concoct the Alfa Bank hoax. That fairytale went that the Trump organization had a secret communication channel with Putin operating through the Russian-based Alfa Bank. Joffe peddled that tale to the FBI and, with the help of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, pushed the CIA to investigate this second Russia hoax just as the Trump presidency was beginning. 

As I wrote in 2022: “Justice Won’t Be Served In SpyGate Without John Durham Investigating More Confidential Human Sources.” But alas, Durham’s investigation ended without any reckoning for Steele, Halper, or Joffe. 

Weiss Must Go

While the double standard is infuriating, assuming the allegations against Smirnov are true, charges are eminently justified. Also justified? Impeaching David Weiss.

Thursday’s indictment established that no one in U.S. Attorney Weiss’s office investigated Smirnov’s serious claims against Hunter and Joe Biden until after Grassley released a copy of the FD-1023 on July 20, 2023. It would be over a month later before FBI investigators would speak with Smirnov’s handler about the FD-1023. And, according to the indictment, it was not until Sept. 27, 2023, that the FBI interviewed Smirnov. That timeline confirms the incompetence of Weiss in handling the investigation into Hunter Biden because in October 2020, Weiss’s Delaware office received “a substantive briefing” concerning the FD-1023 from the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office. 

In the run-up to the 2020 election, then-Attorney General William Barr tasked then-Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney Scott Brady with screening evidence related to Ukraine. Last year, Brady testified before the House Judiciary Committee about that screening process, including how his team handled the FD-1023.

Brady explained the Pittsburgh FBI office sought to corroborate anything they could from the FD-1023, but he noted that his office lacked the authority to use a grand jury for the screening process. Brady’s team nonetheless succeeded in obtaining travel records of the CHS and “interfaced with the CHS’s handler about certain statements relating to travel and meetings to see if they were consistent with his or her understanding.” 

What they were able to identify, Brady testified, was consistent with the CHS’s representations in the FD-1023. Additionally, the CHS was a longtime source for the FBI and considered “highly reliable” — something the indictment confirms given his length of service and the government authorizing Smirnov to commit crimes while operating as a CHS. 

Brady further testified that his office had vetted the FD-1023 and the CHS “against known sources of Russian disinformation.” To conduct that analysis, his team worked with the Eastern District of New York. “It was found that it was not sourced from Russian disinformation,” Brady told the House Judiciary Committee.

Then when his team finished screening the FD-1023 and other evidence related to Ukraine, a Pittsburgh assistant U.S. attorney briefed Weiss’s office on the evidence, explaining how they had screened it, and noting they concluded it had “some indicia of credibility” and should be investigated further.

Thursday’s indictment of Smirnov suggests the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office sat on the FD-1023 for nearly three years, until after Grassley released a copy to the public. Instead, Weiss’s office offered Hunter Biden a sweetheart plea agreement, which fell apart only because the federal judge assigned to the case inquired into the strange arrangement that appeared to give Hunter Biden blanket immunity in a pretrial diversion agreement — something she had never seen before.

Special Counsel Weiss clearly knows how bad this looks because, in the indictment, he tried to spin the assessment into the FD-1023 as being closed out by the Pittsburgh FBI office, implying that is why his office did not conduct any further investigative steps. 

“By August 2020, FBI Pittsburgh concluded that all reasonable steps had been completed regarding the Defendant’s allegations and that their assessment, 58A-PG-3250958, should be closed,” Weiss wrote. “On August 12, 2020, FBI Pittsburgh was informed that the then-FBI Deputy Director and then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States concurred that it should be closed.”

However, as former Attorney General Barr has made clear numerous times, the Pittsburgh office was merely charged with screening the evidence, and the investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.”

“On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”

No further investigation occurred, however. That alone should justify Weiss’s removal — and not merely for what he failed to do, but also because the country can’t trust that his special counsel team will follow all the leads, including the ones we don’t know about. 

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

Crime, Law, Political

Tagged with:

Hunter’s Painting Foray Had All the Classic Earmarks of a Biden Family Influence-Peddling Operation


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JANUARY 19, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/19/hunters-painting-foray-had-all-the-classic-earmarks-of-a-biden-family-influence-peddling-operation/

Hunter Biden

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

Hunter Biden’s “Sugar Bro,” Kevin Morris, testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on Wednesday. A readout of Morris’ testimony, when considered in tandem with the testimony provided last week by Hunter Biden’s gallerist, suggests Hunter was setting up another front for the family influence-peddling racket when the plan collapsed due to public scrutiny.

On Thursday, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer issued a statement following the committee’s transcribed interview of Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris. In his press release, Comer revealed that Hollywood producer Lanette Phillips introduced Morris to Hunter Biden during a campaign event at her Los Angeles home for Joe Biden in the winter of 2019. One week later, Phillips called Morris to discuss what Morris apparently framed as an “entertainment” issue. Morris later visited Hunter at his home in L.A., according to the press release. 

According to Comer, Morris testified he began providing money to Hunter Biden in January 2020. Then on Feb. 7, 2020, Morris emailed Hunter’s advisers and tax accountants, writing, “We are under considerable risk personally and politically to get the returns in.” Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden filed his long-overdue 2017 and 2018 tax returns, although he didn’t pay his hefty tax bill at the time. Around Oct. 18, 2021, Morris paid some $2 million in overdue taxes for the president’s son.

In addition to paying Hunter’s taxes, Morris also paid for many of his living expenses and bought 13 of Hunter Biden’s paintings — two from before Hunter retained a gallerist and 11 after, with Morris paying $875,000 for the set purchased from the gallerist. 

The Gallerist

That gallerist, George Berges, testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last Tuesday concerning his knowledge of Hunter Biden’s profiteering from his newfound career as a painter. Berges, the owner of the Soho-based George Berges Gallery, told the committee that he served as the “gallerist” for Hunter Biden beginning in December 2020. As Hunter’s gallerist, Berges acted as the exclusive agent, selling Hunter’s paintings. In that role, Berges had firsthand knowledge of the money flowing into Hunter’s bank account from his newest business venture.

Berges’ testimony pales in comparison to some earlier witnesses who revealed details of Hunter Biden’s dealing with Burisma and Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business dealings. Yet, when studied in its entirety, the gallery owner’s testimony paints a picture of an attempt to launch a new enterprise to provide cover for a continuation of the Biden family’s pay-to-play scheme. Morris’ testimony this week adds further definition.

First, we have the gallerist’s testimony that Lanette Phillips also introduced him to Hunter in 2019, telling Berges that Hunter was an artist. Next, there is the fact that in December 2020, Hunter and Berges executed a contract appointing the gallery owner as his exclusive representative, with Berges receiving a commission of 40 percent on sales. That contract, Berges testified, included a provision that required the gallerist to disclose to Hunter the identity of the purchasers of his paintings. 

As Berges explained, that was not a typical contract term; he had never included a similar clause in any of his other contracts. “Normally, the gallerist does not let the artist know who the collectors are,” Berges confirmed, adding that of the 15 or so artists he currently works with, none ask to know who purchased their artwork. Berges elaborated, stating, “It’s my collector base,” and you don’t want “your artists to circumvent you if they know your collectors.”

While the contract required Berges to tell Hunter the names of the purchasers, Berges explained during the interview that he never did, and because Hunter didn’t push for their identities, his instinct was not to share the information. Nonetheless, Hunter learned the names of several of the purchasers — for instance, Elizabeth Naftali.

Again, Lanette, the same Hollywood producer and Biden-booster who introduced Hunter to Morris and Berges, introduced Berges to Naftali. Naftali purchased two of Hunter’s paintings, the first in February 2021, shortly after his father’s inauguration. She later purchased another painting, spending a total of $94,000 for the pair.

During the committees’ questioning of Berges, they noted that on July 1, 2022, President Biden appointed Naftali to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. A committee lawyer added that while Joe Biden was vice president he had also arranged for Hunter Biden’s then-business partner Eric Schwerin to be appointed to the same board.

In addition to Naftali, Hunter Biden also knew the identity of Morris, who on Jan. 19, 2023, purchased, in the name of his LLC, Kuliaky Art, 11 paintings for $875,000. Berges explained that Morris had seen the paintings at Hunter’s exhibit in California in October 2021 and then negotiated the January 2023 sale with him by telephone. 

Berges further explained that Morris did not pay the galley for the paintings, but instead paid Berges his 40 percent commission and then paid Hunter (or reduced his loan balance) separately.

Comer notes in his readout from the interview of Morris that it was only after he purchased those paintings from Hunter that he scored a visit to the White House. But there is a bigger smoke cloud surrounding those purchases than Joe Biden welcoming his son’s benefactor to the White House.

Something Doesn’t Add Up

Why would Morris purchase paintings from Berges at all? As Berges testified, the reason gallerists don’t share the names of their buyers with the artists is so they aren’t cut out of the deal. Morris, however, likely didn’t want to ruin Hunter’s relationship with Berges, Berges reasoned. But that doesn’t explain why Morris wouldn’t have purchased art from Hunter before he had a gallerist.

Here we run into an interesting detail: Morris testified he had purchased two pieces of art from Hunter Biden before he had a gallerist. Why then wait for Hunter to enter a contract with Berges before purchasing more art? And why wait until January 2023, when he saw the art during an October 2021 exhibit? (It is also noteworthy that Berges got the impression from Hunter that he had never sold any artwork before retaining him as a gallerist.)

Morris’ $875,000 represented a huge chunk of Hunter Biden’s total sales of $1.5 million. In fact, Morris’ purchase represented such an “outlier,” as Berges put it, that the Soho gallery owner hasn’t renewed his contract with Hunter and is considering dropping him as a client.

“I look at the totality,” Berges explained. “If I look at the whole picture of this artist objectively, I would say, okay, this is great that we got someone to do a major acquisition, but let’s look at the general response and what the value is.”

“It’s not that impressive,” he concluded.

Morris negotiating with Berges over the price of the pictures, however, sidesteps questions of whether he overpaid for the art to make a then-taxable gift to Hunter Biden. Morris’ purchase also creates the impression that his friend’s art is worth the high price Berges was asking, even though “the general response,” without Morris, was “not that impressive.”

One must wonder, though, if the lack of interest in Hunter’s high-priced paintings stemmed from the spotlight on what appeared to be the latest pay-to-play scam scaring off the target audience for the artist: those seeking favors or access to the now-president. 

A Plan Foiled?

Without media coverage, it was a perfect plan: Hunter Biden reemerges as an artist and sends those he or his family want to shake down to Soho to buy his paintings from a gallerist who has independently set the prices of the paintings. Berges’ testimony indicates he is truly independent, for while he explained he has become friends with Hunter, much to his chagrin, he was forced to acknowledge donating multiple times to President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. Berges even hinted that he had voted for Trump and not his client’s father in 2020.

Hunter, in fact, even ensured he could learn the identity of the purchaser to confirm the transaction, although it soon became clear that wasn’t necessary; the buyer could just tell him or show him the artwork. But then the press got ahold of the story and, unlike the laptop scandal, this time they didn’t bury it. By the summer of 2021, the White House was forced to do damage control, claiming it was working on a deal with Hunter’s gallerist to ensure the identity of purchasers of his paintings remained anonymous. 

Berges testified he was surprised to hear that from the White House since he had never spoken with anyone there about his contract with Hunter Biden. Nonetheless, at Hunter’s request, Berges removed the disclosure requirement and replaced it with a provision prohibiting the gallery owner from disclosing the identity of the purchasers. They then entered a new contract on Sept. 1, 2021. 

Other than Morris’ large purchase last January, there seems to be little demand now for the paintings — leaving one to wonder if, without his target audience, Hunter’s art is as worthless as his board member skills. 

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

Testimony: James Biden Used Family Name To Trade $600K Loan For Promise Of Foreign Funding To Health Firm


BY: JORDAN BOYD | DECEMBER 19, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/19/testimony-james-biden-used-family-name-to-trade-600k-loan-for-promise-of-foreign-funding-to-health-firm/

check showing payment from James to Joe Biden

President Joe Biden’s younger brother James Biden took a quiet personal loan from one of his now-bankrupt investment companies on the condition that he would leverage his family’s political influence to increase their funding from the Middle East, testimony collected by the House Oversight Committee states. He then used those funds to line his elder brother’s pockets.

Shortly after the FBI raided Americore’s offices in January 2020, the health care company’s former CEO Grant White prepared a lawsuit accusing James of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and committing fraud. As Mark Hemingway reported at the time, documents prepared as part of the legal proceedings specifically alleged that James used company cash to stuff his pocketbook via a six-figure personal loan but did not deliver on his promise to use the Biden family name to bring the company investments from the Middle East.

“[Biden told me] there’s not a single door in the country that we can’t open. So if I wanted to meet, you know, the head of Google, it’s a phone call,” White said. “He always represented himself as the fundraiser for his brother’s campaigns. … He was the guy raising the money and so he knew everybody.”

Corporate media like Politico acknowledged that James “introduced Americore’s founder to his older brother” but never paid back the loan in full. James eventually paid Americore a $350,000 settlement over the loan dispute.

Americore Chapter 11 Trustee Carol Fox confirmed to the House Oversight Committee on Monday that the company quietly loaned $600,000 to James on the condition that his political connections would bring the company funding from the Middle East.

Americore handed over $200,000 of the loan to James in March 2018, a decision that Fox said the company deliberately decided to do without documentation. Shortly after he received the wire, James wrote a check for the same amount to his elder brother Joe that he painted as a personal loan repayment.

[RELATED: James Biden’s Role In The Biden Access-For-Hire Operation Shows It Was A Family Affair]

When House investigators showed Fox the check on Monday, she commented that $200,000 is a hefty sum. She also said that the money that eventually lined Joe’s pockets came from either “predatory loans or senior citizens’ money fraudulently invested by James Biden’s business partner, Michael Lewitt.”

The House Oversight Committee warned in October that the Biden brothers’ 2018 financial exchange warranted more scrutiny.

The $200,000 transfer is even more suspect in light of news that Joe received a $40,000 “loan repayment” in the form of a check from Sara and James Biden’s personal checking account in September 2017. That transfer followed shortly after a handful of transactions that were part of a deal Hunter Biden, Joe’s son and James’ nephew, struck with businessmen linked to communist China.

Just a few months prior in June 2017, Hunter had written in a WhatsApp message to his uncle and to other Biden business associates that he was hesitant to “sign over” the family “brand” to another associate. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith identified the “brand” as Joe.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Biden Can’t Be Trusted to Confront the Chinese Communists Who Pay His Family Millions


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | NOVEMBER 16, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/16/biden-cant-be-trusted-to-confront-the-chinese-communists-who-pay-his-family-millions/

Biden and Xi raise a toast at luncheon at the White House

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

MORE ARTICLES

President Joe Biden met Chinese dictator Xi Jinping for high-level talks in California on Wednesday, marking the first time the two leaders have spoken face-to-face in a year. While specific details of the conversation will assuredly remain under wraps, a White House readout of the discussion indicates that Biden and Xi covered a variety of hot-button issues, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s defense against Hamas terrorists in the Middle East, and Taiwan. The two leaders also agreed to revive communications between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.

Given Biden and his administration’s history of getting humiliated in talks with their Chinese counterparts, it wasn’t surprising that Wednesday’s meeting didn’t produce any headway on holding China accountable for its human rights violations, military aggression, or cover-up of Covid-19’s origins. But aside from Biden’s incompetence at juggling U.S. foreign policy, Wednesday’s U.S.-China talks raised a far more concerning question. How can Biden be trusted to manage U.S. relations with China when he and his family have received millions of dollars from Chinese entities connected to the Chinese Communist Party?

The Paper Trail

Despite Joe Biden claiming on national television that his son, Hunter, “has not made money” from Chinese entities, the New York Post published a bombshell story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, sourced to Hunter’s laptop, which called Biden’s assurances into question. Emails from the laptop showed Hunter had “pursued lucrative deals” with CEFC China Energy Co., a Chinese energy giant that operates as “an arm of the Chinese Government.”

As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported, one email obtained by the Post showed Hunter describing a business transaction as “interesting for me and my family.” Another listed the younger Biden as “‘Chair / Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC’ with pay at ‘850’ and could offer monetary compensation for six people.”

“Those involved in the email from James Gilliar of the international consulting firm J2cR, including Hunter, were allegedly part of the four people who created a ‘provisional agreement’ to split 80 percent of the ‘equity’ of the company equally with ’10 for Jim’ and ’10 held by H for the big guy,’” Boyd wrote. While “Jim” is in reference to Joe’s older brother James Biden, a highly credible confidential human source has since corroborated that “big guy” was a moniker used to refer to Joe Biden.

Hunter’s dealings with CEFC often involved Ye Jianming, the since-arrested head of CEFC who has ties to China’s military. In early 2017, Hunter worked for Ye “as a counselor and adviser” and was later hired by CEFC in September 2017 to serve as defense counsel for Chinese businessman Patrick Ho, “despite his little experience in criminal defense.” Ho — who served as Ye’s “top lieutenant” and whom Hunter referred to as “the f-cking spy chief of China” — was arrested and later convicted by the Justice Department for bribing the presidents of several African countries.

Bank records obtained by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office indicate that Hunter was paid $1 million for representing Ho. According to Yahoo News, however, “it is not clear what work, if any, [Hunter] did for Ho,” with court records of Ho’s case “show[ing] no indication that Biden or his law firm at the time … participated in Ho’s legal defense.”

A bevy of communication records released by the House Ways and Means Committee in September included a December 2018 WhatsApp text exchange between Hunter and Hallie Biden — who was the widow of Joe’s other son, Beau, and dated Hunter after Beau’s passing — lamenting Ho’s arrest and Ye’s disappearance. The records also showed how Hunter sold the Biden “brand” to overseas business associates to increase the family’s fortunes.

But as additional evidence released by House Republicans has shown, the Bidens’ financial connections with CEFC and its associates run deeper than previously known, and in several cases, further implicate Joe Biden. Despite the elder Biden repeatedly denying involvement in his family’s foreign business ventures, Hunter’s communication records indicate that Joe was keenly aware of his son’s overseas financial interests and served as a primary force behind the operation.

A series of July 2017 WhatsApp messages sent by Hunter to Chinese businessman Raymond Zhao show the younger Biden leveraging “his father’s name and threaten[ing] CEFC executives unless a lucrative deal was worked out with Ye.” In his messages, Hunter explicitly stated, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” He further threatened to leverage “the man sitting next to me and every person he knows” to punish Zhao should he fail to follow through on the arrangement.

Within 10 days of that conversation, a CEFC subsidiary poured roughly $5 million into a Biden-linked bank account. Bank records recently obtained by House Republicans show that on the same day, Hunter “transferred $400,000 out of [that account] and into his corporation, Owasco P.C.,” before wiring $150,000 of these CEFC-tied funds to a company owned by James and his wife, Sara, who withdrew $50,000 from said company and deposited the money into their personal checking account. Less than a month later, on Sept. 3, 2017, Sara signed a $40,000 check to Joe, claiming it represented a “loan repayment.”

As noted by The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland, “the $40,000 Joe ‘the Big Guy’ Biden received was exactly 10 percent of the $400,000 Hunter Biden received from CEFC.”

Untrustworthy at Best

At a time when China is becoming increasingly aggressive towards the U.S. and its allies, Americans need leaders doing everything in their power to stand up for U.S. interests and limit threats to their security. But with Biden at the helm, that’s no longer a guarantee.

Lunch Bucket Joe and his family’s financial ties to individuals and entities connected to Beijing’s communist government make him a liability for the United States. Americans can’t — and shouldn’t — trust that Biden’s judgment over anything having to do with U.S.-China relations is fully within their best interests.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Grassley’s Bombshells Show House Investigators Exactly Where to Aim Their Next Biden Subpoenas


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | NOVEMBER 09, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/09/grassleys-bombshells-show-house-investigators-exactly-where-to-aim-their-next-biden-subpoenas/

Chuck Grassley

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

The chair of the House Oversight Committee issued a slew of subpoenas on Wednesday, including to Hunter Biden and James Biden. Additional subpoenas, as well as requests for transcribed interviews, were served on other Biden family members and business associates. These investigative steps are solid, but the House committees charged with the Joe Biden impeachment inquiry need to issue subpoenas for the witnesses and documents Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, not-so-subtly suggested late last month.

“I’ve obtained the names of 25 DOJ and FBI personnel to interview at a future date,” Grassley wrote in a late-October letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray concerning the latest details the Iowa senator uncovered related to obstruction of the Biden-family corruption investigation. While the House Oversight Committee is understandably focused on unraveling the extent of foreign influence-peddling, the House should not ignore the second half of the scandal: the DOJ, FBI, and now the Biden administration’s cover-up of the scandal and their cover-up of the cover-up.

Grassley has been focused on that aspect of the scandal for several years, raising concerns “about political considerations infecting the decision-making process at the Justice Department and FBI.” Having heard from several whistleblowers about the scope of the obstruction, Grassley has said that if their allegations are true, it would establish the DOJ and FBI have been “institutionally corrupted to their very core.”

The House has followed several leads Grassley developed. The most significant was related to the FD-1023 summary of a “highly credible” confidential human source’s (CHS) reporting that Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes, which Grassley released earlier this year.

More recently, Grassley revealed that the Foreign Influence Task Force used an assessment opened by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten to mine FBI field offices for derogatory information related to the Bidens. The FBI then falsely branded the derogatory information as Russian disinformation, closing out the sources. That revelation was but one of many contained in the seven-page letter the Iowa senator penned to the AG and FBI director on Oct. 24, noting he had a list of some 20-plus agents to interview.

The House committees charged with overseeing the impeachment inquiry need to dissect that letter for leads relevant to the investigation into Biden-family corruption and also to unravel the DOJ and FBI’s corruption. 

Foreign Influence Task Force

Among other things, that letter revealed the complicity of the Foreign Influence Task Force in falsely branding the reporting of confidential human sources from several different field offices as Russian disinformation. As Grassley noted, it was also the Foreign Influence Task Force that “improperly briefed” him and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., about their investigation into the Biden family. That briefing served solely as a precursor to a media leak to spin the Republican senators’ investigation as contaminated by foreign disinformation. 

Every member of the Foreign Influence Task Force should be questioned by the House, and every communication between the Foreign Influence Task Force, Brian Auten, and the various FBI offices involved in wrongly closing out sources should be subpoenaed. The House should likewise subpoena the materials made part of that assessment and especially any sources or reporting closed out as Russian disinformation.

FBI Field Offices

Here, Grassley helpfully highlighted in his letter several relevant field offices. In noting that the FBI tried to improperly shut down the FD-1023, Grassley emphasized that the claim that the CHS’s bribery report was Russian disinformation was “highly suspect and is contradicted by other documents my office has been told exist within the Foreign Influence Task Force, FBI Seattle Field Office, FBI Baltimore Field Office, and FBI HQ holdings.”

The House should focus its investigative efforts there first. The FBI Seattle field office is a new thread to pull, as it has not been previously raised as relevant to the Biden investigation. A review of the underlying FD-1023 also suggests the Cleveland FBI field office merits attention, as the CHS who reported on the alleged bribes to the Bidens noted that he was introduced to the Burisma executives by Alexander Ostapenko. And the FD-1023 included a notation that the CHS’s reporting on Ostapenko was maintained at the Cleveland field office.

In seeking materials from these field offices and the Foreign Influence Task Force, the House should ask for all records using the terms “Russian disinformation” or “foreign disinformation” from January 2019 to the present. Why? Because that is what Grassley asked the AG and FBI director to provide. And when the Iowa Republican asks for something, he usually knows precisely what the DOJ has secreted away.

DOJ and FBI Documents

Likewise, the House should seek the other documents Grassley identified in his October 2023 letter because the Republican-led House can follow up with subpoenas if the DOJ refuses to comply, whereas Grassley can’t. In total, the Iowa senator named 15 different categories of materials he sought from the DOJ and FBI, and the House should mirror those requests.

Of particular importance are the communications between the U.S. attorneys’ offices for the Western District of Pennsylvania and the Eastern District of New York relating to Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden, and the FD-1023, as the Eastern District of New York had apparently concluded the FD-1023 did not match any known Russian disinformation. Subpoenaing FBI reports dating to Jan. 1, 2014, and referencing Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden, or Joe Biden will likely also turn up relevant information. 

Naming Names

In addition to subpoenaing these witnesses and the related documents, Grassley’s letter provides the names of several other individuals deserving of questioning. Significantly, the letter indicates that the individuals named had knowledge of Joe Biden’s potential complicity in his son’s money-laundering scheme. But Grassley also named individuals from FBI headquarters, the Washington field office, the Baltimore field office, Delaware FBI agents, and FBI management personnel. 

Finally, the House should take note of Grassley’s repeated references to Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault and the various documents he requested that connect to Thibault. Those references should give House investigators pause because Grassley’s apparent focus on Thibault strikes an odd note given the tune Thibault played in his transcribed interview: that he was new to the job and was only on the periphery of decisions to close out sources. 

Why then, would Grassley seek “[a]ll records derived from reporting on derogatory information linked to Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden, and their foreign business relationships that was overseen under the approval, guidance, and purview of ASAC Thibault from January 1, 2020, to his last day at the FBI”? And why would Grassley ask for a copy of “[a]ll opened and closed cases initiated by the Washington Field Office under the purview of ASAC Thibault that were ordered closed by ASAC Thibault and/or denied for opening by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and/or the United States Attorney Offices in the District of Columbia and Eastern District of Virginia”?

Grassley may not be able to force the DOJ and FBI to provide answers or those documents, but the House can — and it should, stat.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

Follow $40,000 From Communist China Directly to Joe Biden’s Bank Account


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | NOVEMBER 01, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/01/follow-40000-from-communist-china-directly-to-joe-bidens-bank-account/

Joe Biden in the Oval Office

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

Joe Biden received $40,000 from Chinese communists, funneled through his son and brother and their businesses, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer revealed Wednesday morning. 

“Where’s the money?,” President Joe Biden quipped over the summer when asked by a reporter to comment on the House’s investigation into the bribery scandal swirling around his family. Comer continues to answer that question for the country, with a press release and video detailing the House Oversight Committee’s latest discovery from subpoenaed bank records that establish Joe Biden directly profited from his family’s influence-peddling.

A 12-page memorandum from the Oversight Committee’s staff to the majority members of the committee, which The Federalist has reviewed, details the latest development Comer summarized in his video and press release. The bottom line is a $40,000 check from Sara and James Biden’s personal checking account written to Joe Biden on Sept. 3, 2017, claiming to represent a “loan repayment.” But following that money upstream reveals it originated from the Chinese “business” partners Hunter Biden had threatened a little over a month earlier in a WhatsApp message.

Hunter Biden had sent that WhatsApp message on July 30, 2017, to Raymond Zhao, an associate of CEFC, the Chinese energy giant Hunter and James Biden began courting in 2016, while Joe Biden was vice president. After Joe Biden left office at the end of the Obama administration, according to one of Hunter Biden’s business partners, the Chinese communist-connected CEFC sent them a $3 million wire in March of 2017 as a “thank you” for the Bidens’ assistance in furthering their business interests. 

But CEFC had committed to investing another $10 million, which an email recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop indicated would be used to form a joint venture. CEFC’s founder and chairman, Ye Jianming, was to hold 50 percent interest in the company, and Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, and some of their business associates would hold the other 50 percent. That email noted Hunter Biden would own a 10 percent interest in the holding company for “the big guy,” a moniker used for Joe Biden.

However, as of the end of July 2017, the $10 million cash infusion had yet to materialize, prompting Hunter Biden to text Zhao on WhatsApp, telling him to “Please have the director call me- not James or Tony or Jim- have him call me tonight,” with the “director” being an apparent reference to the executive director of CEFC, and James and Tony being business partners, along with Jim Biden. The text continued:

I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. I am very concerned that the Chairman has either changed his mind and broken our deal without telling me or that he is unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand. And now means tonight. And Z if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang (sic) or the Chairman I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. All too often people mistake kindness for weakness — and all too often I am standing over top of them saying I warned you. From this moment until whenever he reaches me. It I [sic] 9:45 AM here and i assume 9:45 PM there so his night is running out.

The Oversight Committee memorandum then detailed how in a WhatsApp message on July 31, 2017, Zhao responded, “CEFC is willing to cooperate with the family.” Hunter later followed up with a text to another CEFC associate, Gongwen Dong, stating, “The Biden’s [sic] are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnershipn [sic]. Please let’s not quibble over peanuts.”

The money soon began flowing, with Hunter Biden first opening a bank account on Aug. 3, 2017, for a new company, Hudson West III, which would serve as the joint venture between Hunter Biden and CEFC’s Gongwen Dong. Hunter Biden’s business, Owasco P.C., owned 50 percent of Hudson West III, and Dong’s company, Hudson West V, owned the other 50 percent.

On Aug. 8, 2017, financial records show Hunter Biden’s new business venture with CEFC received a $5 million wire from the CEFC-connected business Northern International Capital. That same day, Hunter Biden transferred $400,000 out of Hudson West III and into his corporation, Owasco P.C. From those funds, Hunter purchased a Porsche and transferred funds to other of his personal or business accounts. 

Then on Aug. 14, 2017, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 from his Owasco account to the Lion Hall Group — the company owned by James and Sara Biden. Two weeks later, Sara Biden “signed a withdrawal ticket for $50,000 from the Lion Hall Group bank account,” and on the same day deposited that $50,000 into her and James’ joint personal checking account. Soon after, on Sept. 3, 2017, Sara Biden signed the $40,000 check payable to Joe Biden.

The House Oversight staff memorandum provides a clear narrative of these transactions and copies of the relevant bank records. The memorandum also added this graphic to further crystalize the money trail: 

Significantly, the House memorandum also established that the $40,000 used to supposedly repay a loan to Joe Biden came solely from funds the communist China-connected CEFC paid to Hunter Biden to “cooperate with the family.” The House Oversight staff’s memorandum made that point clear by detailing, in addition to the flow of funds from CEFC to Joe Biden, the balances in the various accounts prior to the receipt of those funds. 

For instance, before Sara Biden transferred $50,000 into their personal checking account from which they paid Joe Biden $40,000, their balance was $46.88. And before Hunter Biden transferred the $150,000 into the Lion Hall Group bank account, that account showed a balance of $1,964.62. 

So, whether James and Sara Biden actually owed Joe Biden $40,000 is irrelevant because the money they used to repay the supposed loan came from the Chinese company that Hunter and James groomed to serve as the family cash cow during Joe Biden’s vice presidency. And CEFC only provided that capital after Hunter Biden — saying he and his father were sitting there trying to understand why the promised $10 million hadn’t yet materialized — threatened their Chinese counterparts.

It’s also interesting to note that the $40,000 Joe “the Big Guy” Biden received was exactly 10 percent of the $400,000 Hunter Biden received from CEFC.

With Wednesday’s release of a copy of the $40,000 check paid to Joe Biden, Comer has provided two examples of the now-president directly benefitting from his son and brother’s selling of his political influence. Earlier this month, Comer released evidence establishing James Biden paid Joe $200,000 in funds the president’s brother obtained from the since-bankrupted Americore. 

Wednesday’s news, however, proves even more scandalous because the funds originated from individuals connected to the Chinese Communist Party who first partnered with Hunter and James Biden while Joe Biden was vice president — and the payment followed Hunter Biden’s threatening text message, which invoked his father’s name (and presence) and warned of his wrath.

But to Joe Biden apologists, this will likely remain “no evidence” of corruption.

This article has been updated since publication.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

corruption

Tagged with:

Yes, The Biden Impeachment Hearing Presented Evidence of Corruption — Lots of it.


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/29/yes-the-biden-impeachment-hearing-presented-evidence-of-corruption-lots-of-it/

Biden Impeachment Inquiry

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

The corporate news media all but refused to cover the opening hearing of the House impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden on Thursday, and to the extent they did, it was only to repeat, at the behest of the White House, the exhausted mantra that there’s “no evidence” connecting Biden to his son Hunter’s international bribery scheme. 

(The New York Times ran with a cursory and misleadingly headlined article, “First Impeachment Hearing Yields No New Information on Biden,” that boasted “even their [Republicans’] witnesses said the case for impeachment hadn’t been made.” Which, of course the case hasn’t been made yet. That’s why you launch an inquiry, of which Thursday was day one.)

But if the media had actually covered it, the American public might have heard more about the mounds of damning evidence now piling up by the day, including the release on Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee of reams of text messages and emails between Hunter Biden, his uncle James Biden, and a colorful array of foreign oligarchs, business associates, and bagmen. All told, House Republicans presented more than two dozen pieces of evidence on Thursday linking Joe Biden to his son’s overseas business dealings. 

This evidence was the centerpiece of the hearing Thursday, which served to lay the groundwork for the impeachment inquiry. So far, the evidence suggests the Biden family “business” is exactly what it appears to be: an influence-peddling scheme on a scale never before seen in American history. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who testified at the hearing, said that even though Washington, D.C., is “awash” in influence-peddling, he’s never seen “anything of this size and complexity,” and that Congress has a “duty to determine if the president is involved in what is a known form of corruption.”

Based on what we already know, it’s hard to see how Joe Biden couldn’t have been involved or couldn’t have benefited from his son’s corrupt dealings. Consider just a few items of evidence mentioned during Thursday’s hearing. In one text exchange with his uncle in June 2017, Hunter refers to his father as his “family’s brand” and “only asset.” That echoes something Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner, said in his July testimony to the House Oversight Committee, that the value of adding Hunter to the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma was “the brand” — clearly a reference to then-Vice President Joe Biden. (Hunter had no experience in the energy sector and brought no value to the company other than access to his father.)

Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina brought up an FBI memo released Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee about another former business partner of Hunter’s, Tony Bobulinksi. In an FBI interview, Bobulinksi said that in 2015-16 Hunter and Hunter’s uncle James did business with CEFC, a Chinese company with close ties to the Chinese government. But because Biden was still vice president, Hunter and James weren’t paid right away. “There was a concern it would be improper,” Bobulinksi said, because of the company’s affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party.

But Hunter and James wanted to get paid. According to Bobulinksi, “they believed CEFC owed them money for the benefits that accrued to CEFC through its use of the Biden family name to advance their business dealings.” Once Biden left office, Hunter and James were paid more than a million dollars by CEFC. “Now we know why,” said Mace. “Because it was back-pay.”

Later in the hearing, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida showed organizational charts of Hunter Biden’s businesses created by the IRS team investigating the president’s son, including from 2014, when Joe Biden was vice president, and 2018, when he was a private citizen. The charts show a dizzying array of interrelated companies — none of which involved real estate or any other industry where you would typically see this kind of complex matrix of different business entities and shell companies. Donalds then shared a text message between Hunter and James Biden in which Hunter, discussing a business deal, tells his uncle, “You’ve been drawn into something purely for the purpose of protecting Dad.” 

This is just a sample, but you get the idea. Hunter was engaged in a patently corrupt scheme that involved selling access to his father, one of the most powerful politicians on the planet. The question the impeachment inquiry has to answer is whether Joe Biden knew about the scheme, whether he profited from it, whether he intentionally helped Hunter, and whether he changed U.S. policy as part of rendering that help. On every count, there is mounting evidence that the answer is “yes.”

But don’t expect Democrats to take any of this more seriously than the corporate media are. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, never one to miss an opportunity for self-parody, gravely asked all three Republican witnesses whether they were “presenting any firsthand witness account of crimes committed by the president of the United States,” as if the only evidence that counts is video footage of Joe Biden stuffing cash into a duffel bag marked “$$$ from China.”

Not to be outdone in performative stupidity, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat from Texas, went on a bizarre, emotional rant claiming President Biden is only “guilty of loving his child unconditionally,” which is the only evidence Republicans have brought forward. She added, “And honestly, I hope and pray that my parents love me half as much as he loves his child.” Ah yes, Joe Biden loved his son so much that he made him the frontman of an international bribery scheme and money-laundering operation. 

So much for the opposition (including the corporate press). They aren’t going to take this seriously, even if the impeachment inquiry turns up audio recordings of Joe Biden saying, “Why yes, I did fire that Ukrainian prosecutor for $5 million from Burisma.” Democrats and the media don’t care about Biden’s corruption and won’t tell the truth about it, no matter what evidence comes to light. After Thursday’s hearing, at least that much is clear.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Democrats Have Become the Party of Authoritarianism. They Only Understand Power


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/27/democrats-have-become-the-party-of-authoritarianism-they-only-understand-power/

Joe Biden

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

Perhaps you saw the news last week that two women in their 70s, Jean Marshall and Joan Bell, are each facing up to 11 years in federal prison for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic in 2020. Federal prosecutors charged the pair for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which Biden’s Justice Department has been aggressively enforcing against pro-life activists, convicting 26 people last year alone.

You might have also seen, a few weeks earlier, that a 42-year-old North Dakota man who ran over and killed an 18-year-old kid for being a Republican was sentenced to just five years in prison on a manslaughter charge, and with credit for time already served on house arrest, will spend only about four years behind bars.

Seeing these two things, maybe you wondered how it could be that two grandmothers might well spend twice as many years in prison for the nonviolent offence of sitting in front of an abortion clinic as a man who intentionally killed another man for his political beliefs. Maybe you thought, as @politicalmath put it on X (formerly Twitter), that the left needs “to start looking at this situation and admitting that this is not justice. They need to shake themselves awake and realize that their team is utilizing the justice system for political punishment and that this is destabilizing our entire culture.”

You might have thought the same thing recently about the Trump indictments. The hypocrisy is after all outrageous. Questioning an election is okay if Hillary Clinton and Democrats do it (as they did in 2016, 2004, and 2000) but it’s a “criminal conspiracy” if Trump and Republicans do it.

Or consider the draconian prison sentences for Jan. 6 rioters (22 years in one case) compared to the leniency shown to Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters, one of whom was sentenced to just 10 years despite setting a deadly fire in a Minneapolis pawn shop during the 2020 George Floyd riots — and this only after federal prosecutors invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and asked the judge to show leniency.

Or again consider the role of Biden’s Justice Department and FBI in protecting Hunter Biden and the president from congressional investigations that are, as of this writing, still uncovering damning evidence of corruption connected to Hunter’s overseas business schemes. Just this week we learned that two payments totaling more than a quarter-million dollars were wired to Hunter Biden from China, and the beneficiary address listed on the wires was Joe Biden’s home address in Delaware. (At the time the wires were sent, Hunter was living in California.) 

Surely, you might be thinking, not even the most rabid partisans on the left can think that this is justice, or that this will end well for the country. Surely they see the danger of supporting a politicized federal law enforcement bureaucracy that criminalizes the opposition and uses the justice system as a weapon. Even if they don’t denounce it publicly, certainly they’re talking amongst themselves about how terrible this is and how to stop it. Right?

Wrong. To think this way is to misunderstand Democrats and the left completely. No, they’re not worried about any of this. No, they don’t want it to stop, they want it to continue and intensify. They don’t want justice, they want power. 

You don’t have to take my word for it. Increasingly, Democrats will readily admit as much. For example, nearly half of them don’t believe in freedom of speech. A recent RealClear Opinion Research poll found that while solid majorities of Republicans (74 percent) and Independents (61 percent) believe speech should be legal “under any circumstances,” only 55 percent of Democrats agreed.

The same survey found that a third of Democrats think Americans “have too much freedom,” and a majority of them “approve of the government censoring social media content under the rubric of protecting national security.” Worse, about three-quarters of surveyed Democrats think the government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” posts on social media, and they are far more likely than Republicans or Independents to support censorship of political views.

That’s just one survey of course, but it captures a growing trend of authoritarianism on the left. We see it in polls, on college campuses and corporate boardrooms, on social media, and in how the left wields the power of the institutions it has captured, like the FBI and DOJ.

When you see these glaring disparities in how opponents of the Biden regime are treated by the Justice Department and the courts, when you see how corporate media cover the Trump indictments versus how they refuse to cover the Biden corruption scandal, when you see them calling for government censorship of “misinformation” on social media, understand that they are never going to take a step back and consider whether all of this is justice or injustice.

Despite the outdated moniker of “social justice warrior,” leftist Democrats aren’t interested in real justice. They’re interested in gaining and using power. Once they have it, they’ll use it against their enemies. Appealing to their desire for civil comity is futile. They have no use for comity so long as they have power.

This is to say, they won’t stop this until what they are doing to their enemies is in turn done to them. You don’t like left-wing district attorneys indicting the Republican frontrunner ahead of election season? Better find some GOP state attorneys general to indict Hunter and Joe Biden.

You don’t like Attorney General Merrick Garland using the Justice Department to protect a corrupt Biden administration? Better impeach him along with Biden. Don’t like a woke U.S. military funding abortions and gender surgeries on the defense secretary’s say-so? Better do as Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has done and use all available leverage to stop them. 

Power is the only language the left understands. So, if Americans on the right want to be anything more than a managed opposition — and let’s be honest, plenty of elected Republicans are happy to be exactly that — they had better figure out how to wield the limited power they do have. And they had better hurry. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:


House Launches Formal Impeachment Probe Into President Joe Biden’s Corrupt Family Influence-Peddling Business

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

4 MIN READ

McCarthy announces launch of impeachment

‘These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction, and corruption, and they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,’ McCarthy said.

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

MORE ARTICLES

SHARE

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced on Tuesday that the House of Representatives will be opening a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden to further investigate growing evidence and allegations surrounding the president’s family business dealings.

“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction, and corruption, and they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” McCarthy said during Tuesday’s press conference. “That’s why today, I’m directing our House committee[s] to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.”

In his remarks, McCarthy highlighted how House Republicans’ investigations into the Bidens’ business ventures revealed that Joe Biden lied when he claimed he had no knowledge of his son Hunter’s business deals. More specifically, McCarthy alluded to “eyewitnesses” to those dealings such as Mykola Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter sat. According to intelligence obtained by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, Zlochevsky has claimed to possess 17 audio recordings of conversations with the Bidens, two of which purportedly involve then-Vice President Joe Biden.

WhatsApp messages included in testimony by IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley further indicate Joe’s involvement in Hunter’s business affairs. In one message allegedly sent to Chinese businessman Henry Zhao, Hunter threatened to use his father’s political power to extort unfulfilled “promises and assurances” from Zhao.

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” the message reads. Hunter also purportedly indicated his “ability” to “forever hold a grudge that you will regret” with help from “the man sitting next to me and every person he knows” if Zhao did not meet his demands.

Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer also testified to at least 24 times Joe spoke with his son’s business associates. Curiously, since these revelations became public, the White House has shifted its narrative from claiming Joe never “discussed” business dealings with Hunter to now claiming the president “has never been in business with his son.”

During Tuesday’s press conference, McCarthy also pointed to Joe’s use of his office to “coordinate with Hunter Biden’s business partners about Hunter’s role in Burisma.” An FD-1023 obtained by Grassley’s office containing intel from a “highly credible” confidential human source (CHS) offers further evidence the then-vice president was instrumental in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma. It also contains allegations that the Bidens were paid $10 million for Joe’s role in firing the prosecutor.

[RELATED: Here Are All The People Who Have Corroborated Biden Family Corruption]

McCarthy also highlighted House Republicans’ discovery earlier this year that the Bidens were paid millions of dollars by foreign companies during and after Joe’s time in the Obama White House. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd previously reported, a review of bank records conducted by the House Oversight Committee “confirmed that at least nine Biden family members, including some children, received millions in diluted payments from foreign companies during and shortly after Joe’s vice presidency.”

McCarthy further emphasized the role the Department of Justice has played in protecting the Bidens from both criminal probes and congressional inquiries. According to testimony by IRS whistleblowers, federal prosecutors concealed critical documents from tax investigators probing Hunter Biden while officials from the Justice Department sought to undermine the IRS’s investigative efforts. One of the whistleblowers had previously alleged in May that his investigative team had been removed from the Biden tax probe at the behest of the DOJ.

In addition to its alleged interference in the IRS tax probe, the DOJ also sought to give legal immunity to Hunter regarding charges filed against him earlier this year. A Delaware judge ultimately exposed the agreement for what it was — a sweetheart deal designed to protect Hunter and, by default, Joe from future prosecution.

“The American people deserve to know that the public offices are not for sale, and that the federal government is not being used to cover up the actions of a politically associated family,” McCarthy said.

The impeachment inquiry will be led by Republican Reps. James Comer, Jim Jordan, and Jason Smith, according to McCarthy.

I want to go on the record in opposition to any impeachment proceedings. Since the President Clinton disaster, each Congress has had payback on their collective brains.

STOP IT! We have far more important issues to deal with. We have to stop this cycle of payback, or every administration will have to deal with this foolishness.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Viktor Shokin Interview Shows No Amount Of Biden Corruption Evidence Will Make Corporate Media Tell the Truth


BY: JORDAN BOYD | AUGUST 29, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/29/viktor-shokin-interview-shows-no-amount-of-biden-corruption-evidence-will-make-corporate-media-tell-the-truth/

Viktor Shokin

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

The corporate media’s reaction, or lack thereof, to ex-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s Fox News interview this weekend is the latest proof that no amount of Biden corruption evidence or corroboration will deter the propaganda press from protecting their preferred political candidate.

Shokin, the man tasked with investigating Ukrainian energy company Burisma, admitted that he believes then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son, who was paid tens of thousands of dollars every month to sit on the company’s board, were bribed in exchange for his firing.

“Do you believe that Joe Biden or Hunter Biden got bribes?” asked “One Nation” host Brian Kilmeade.

“I do not want to deal in unproven facts, but my personal conviction is that yes, this was the case,” Shokin said, through a translator. “They were being bribed. The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing, isn’t that alone a case of corruption?”

Shokin maintains that if his team was allowed to finish out the Burisma probe, “we would have found the facts about the corrupt activities that they were engaging in, that included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others.”

“The founder and CEO of Burisma started bringing in people who could provide protection for him. Hunter Biden was among them and the corruption network expanded as a result,” Shokin explained. “So yes, to answer your question, there was no doubt in my mind that Burisma was engaged in illegal activities.”

Shokin concluded the interview by mentioning that several attempts on his life have already been made.

A cursory internet search shows corporate media largely ignored Shokin’s further confirmation of the Bidens’ Burisma corruption. The handful of outlets that did mention the interview focused more on discrediting Shokin than heeding his testimony.

“The fired Ukrainian prosecutor is not a reliable narrator,” The Washington Post alleged.

Anyone who suggests otherwise, the author notes, is siding with Republicans who “have spent years suggesting that Biden’s motives were actually the opposite — that this was an effort to insulate Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that his son Hunter Biden worked for, from an investigation by Shokin.”

The article claimed that evidence that the elder Biden fired Shokin to protect Burisma “remains meager.” That is a lie.

Contrary to years of denials and lies from the propaganda press, there is “overwhelming evidence” — even without Shokin’s corroboration — that Biden leveraged his authority in the Obama administration to orchestrate Shokin’s removal to benefit the company his son was being paid by.

Biden business associate Devon Archer told Congress earlier this month that Burisma heads expressed their desire for Shokin to be fired.

The FD-1023 form that the FBI desperately tried to conceal from Republican investigators also contained testimony suggesting the Burisma chief coordinated with the Bidens to kill Shokin’s investigation. The “highly credible” confidential human source who gathered the information for the form reported that Burisma chief Mykola Zlochevsky claimed to have 17 recordings, including two of Joe Biden, that prove he “was somehow coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired.”

Biden himself even bragged in 2018 about threatening to withhold a billion dollars in U.S. loans from Petro Poroshenko, the then-president of Ukraine, unless Shokin was canned. That pressure came shortly after Biden gave a speech to the Ukrainian Rada explicitly calling for the end of corruption, the excuse he and American corporate media would use for urging Shokin’s firing.

When his interview with Shokin aired, Kilmeade said “that Viktor Shokin told him in the interview that no one had asked him for an interview despite his central role in the alleged Biden corruption scandal.” Corporate media outlets aren’t interested in hearing Shokin’s testimony because his claims run counter to the Biden coverup they’re spinning.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

Devon Archer: Joe’s Speakerphone Calls With Hunter’s Business Associates Were ‘An Abuse Of Soft Power’


BY: JORDAN BOYD | AUGUST 02, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/02/devon-archer-joes-speakerphone-calls-with-hunters-business-associates-were-an-abuse-of-soft-power/

Devon Archer interview with Tucker Carlson
Former Biden business associate Devon Archer

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

President Joe Biden abused his vice-presidential authority by joining speakerphone calls with his son’s business associates, former Biden business associate Devon Archer confirmed to Tucker Carlson in an interview on Wednesday.

In an attempt to build what Archer called “the Biden brand” and sell access to the then-vice president, Hunter Biden put his dad on speakerphone two dozen times in the presence of his various financial partners. Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman claimed mere minutes after House GOP investigators heard Archer’s testimony on Tuesday that Joe simply phoned into his son’s business meetings to discuss the “weather.” This proved to be a strong pivot from Democrats’ insistence that Joe, as he repeated in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, had nothing to do with Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Goldman’s claims were also strongly contradicted by Archer’s confirmation that Joe’s phone calls did influence the people in Hunter’s meetings.

“To be completely clear on the calls, I don’t know if it was an orchestrated call or not. It certainly was powerful, though, because if you’re sitting with a foreign business person and you hear the vice president’s voice, that’s prized enough. That’s pretty impactful stuff for anyone,” Archer confessed.

At the time, Archer appreciated the leg up he and Hunter’s company had because of its close relationship with the VP. But he later admitted that “In the rearview, it’s an abuse of soft power.”

“The power to have that access in that conversation, and it’s not in a scheduled conference call, and it’s a part of your family, that’s like the pinnacle of power in DC,” Archer said.

Phone calls weren’t the only means Joe used to contact Biden family associates. In addition to meeting Archer at least “20 times,” Joe penned the businessman a letter thanking him for partnering with Hunter.

“He was thanking me and thanking Hunter, I think, at the end of the day for bringing this idea of this government regulatory, strategic advisory business into the private equity world,” Archer said. “I think he was excited about the prospects for Hunter, and he was just thanking me; I think it was a nice gesture.”

“It was a nice gesture, for sure. Very polite,” Carlson said. “It gets a 10 on the etiquette scale. But he’s the vice president United States, and he’s talking about foreign business deals with you and thanking you for that.”

Archer admitted that “at the time, I think I hit the jackpot in finding the regulatory environment or company that can navigate right to the top” but eventually recognized the problems with the arrangement.

“Being a little bit too close to the sun ends up burning you,” Archer continued.

According to Archer, Hunter entered the world of influence peddling under the guise of private equity, a “complex business that takes years of training,” and “regulatory issues that you might have at the corporate level.” Hunter may not have personally had experience in this field, but Archer assured Carlson that “he led a team that had a sophisticated understanding of regulation.”

“You’ve got to be an expert in knowing the guy, and he was the guy that was the expert in knowing the guy,” Archer said, noting Hunter’s “brother, his father, some of his father’s siblings” made that list.

Archer admitted that it didn’t matter whether Hunter had experience in the field or not because “the brand of Biden adds a lot of power when your dad’s vice president.”

Carlson explained that Washington D.C., where Hunter often operated, is not known as a “money town” but a “selling access” city.

“That’s what it looked like to me,” Archer agreed. “I think that’s one of the core misconceptions. I mean, it seems like understanding a regulatory environment means selling access at the end of the day. That’s how I interpreted it. I think that’s how most people in Wall Street, whether they admit it or not, interpreted it.”

Archer said Hunter’s vast interconnectedness with government officials did benefit their company significantly.

“There are very like tactical elements that are regulatory and compliance and governance that you have to go through, and you’ve got to know the guy that worked at the old agency that now has a lobbying firm that can go back to the agency and get things put to the front of the line,” Archer explained.

“At the end of the day, he had the best advantage to do that because of where he was,” Archer added.

Hutner’s wheeling and dealing under the Biden brand, Archer admitted, was a sweet deal but deserved scrutiny.

“There are people that maybe were sons or relatives or brother-in-law’s of other high-ranking officials, but I think what we ran into and with what Hunter ran into was almost like an Icarus issue,” Archer explained. “He got a little, it was too close to the sun. It was too good to be true. And the connections were too close and the scrutiny too much. And it ended up destroying, left a wake of a lot of destruction and business over a number of years.”

Carlson said he understands why a business guy like Archer would “use every advantage” to advance financial goals but explained that the Bidens “are not business guys.”

“This is the vice president United States. He’s not allowed to be working on businesses with foreign governments while he’s vice president, I don’t think,” Carlson concluded.

“Not that I know of,” Archer replied.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Evidence Of Biden Burisma Corruption Is Overwhelming


BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | AUGUST 01, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/01/evidence-of-biden-burisma-corruption-is-overwhelming/

Joe Biden talking on the phone

Author Mollie Hemingway profile

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

VISIT ON TWITTER@MZHEMINGWAY

MORE ARTICLES

A key associate of Hunter Biden reluctantly admitted details about how the Biden family business was run — and those details are shocking.

Devon Archer, a longtime business partner and close friend of Hunter Biden’s, told congressional investigators Monday that at a meeting in Dubai on Dec. 4, 2015, top executives of Ukrainian energy concern Burisma asked Hunter Biden and himself for help from D.C. At the time of the meeting, Hunter Biden’s dad, Joe Biden, was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president as well as his point person on Ukraine. Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, a Burisma executive, wanted to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired as he was investigating the company for corruption, Archer told members of Congress.

Hunter Biden put Zlochevsky and Pozharski on a call with “D.C.,” Archer said, noting he was not part of the phone call so couldn’t possibly know who exactly was on the other end of the line. Joe Biden did meet and speak more than 20 times with various business associates who were paying for access to the Biden family, Archer admitted.

In this case, Burisma was paying Archer and Hunter Biden as much as $83,000 a month to serve on the Ukrainian energy concern’s board, despite the fact that neither man had relevant experience or expertise for the job outside of their frequent meetings and contact with the then-vice president. The two were hired the same month that the U.K. had opened an investigation into company officials. The money was well spent.

A mere five days after the Dubai meeting and phone call, Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech to the Ukrainian Rada, its parliament in Kyiv, attempting to lay the groundwork for firing Shokin.

It took just a few short months before Shokin was fired. Joe Biden bragged in a public speech in January 2018 that he was personally responsible for getting that firing accomplished so quickly. In fact, he claimed he had bullied the Ukrainian government into firing the investigator by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee unless he got what he wanted. Seriously:

And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t. So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said — I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired.

What an amazing series of events that led to Joe Biden personally fulfilling what Burisma was paying Hunter Biden to accomplish. What are the odds?

Not the Weather

After Archer’s transcribed interview, Rep. Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York who previously ran some of the Russia-collusion hoax as a congressional staffer, ran to the cameras to cushion the blow of the explosive new information.

For years, the corporate press and other Democrats had uncritically accepted Biden’s preposterous claim that he had never spoken with his son or his son’s business partners about the Biden family business. Even when Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski described — in detail, on the record, and with supporting evidence — how Joe Biden served as the “chairman” of the family business, the media largely ignored the explosive claims. With Archer echoing Bobulinski’s claims, and further noting that the business wouldn’t have worked without Joe Biden’s “brand,” Goldman and others like him had to concede that Biden did in fact speak with Hunter’s business associates. In fact, they had to admit he spoke with them frequently. However, Goldman claimed, they were only talking about the weather.

While no one actually thinks Joe Biden has a secret interest in meteorology that he only shares with corrupt foreign oligarchs who happen to be in business with his son, the claim is ridiculous for another reason.

As conservative broadcaster Larry O’Connor wrote, “Understand this: Hunter getting Joe on speakerphone WAS THE DELIVERABLE. It literally doesn’t matter what was discussed. Showing that he could get the Vice President of the United States on the phone was all Hunter had to show his clients to seal the deal. He was selling ACCESS not policy. Getting The Big Guy to pick up the phone demonstrated his ability to deliver that access. Case closed. Impeach.”

Otherwise, why would Joe Biden get on the phone with his business associates at all? Why would Barack Obama’s point man in Ukraine be talking to Ukrainian officials under suspicion of massive corruption who were paying large sums of money to his son? What was the point, exactly, if not as chairman of the family business?

We know Burisma was paying Biden family members for help getting powerful people in D.C. to get investigators off its back. We know Biden was the top official in D.C. related to Ukraine. Five days after Burisma made the request, Biden was laying the groundwork for the firing. And he has publicly bragged about getting the prosecutor fired.

n 2019, President Donald Trump was impeached for raising the issue of a potential corruption scandal involving Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Burisma. At that time, scores of corporate media and other Democrat activists asserted without evidence that Shokin was not investigating Burisma and that it was a lie to suggest otherwise. For instance, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post wrote in 2019, “Trump has falsely claimed that Biden in 2015 pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, because he was investigating Ukraine’s largest private gas company, Burisma, which had added Biden’s son, Hunter, to its board in 2014. There are two big problems with this claim: One, Shokin was not investigating Burisma or Hunter Biden, and two, Shokin’s ouster was considered a diplomatic victory.”

Since that false “fact” “check,” investigators in the House and Senate have shown that the Biden family business involves oligarchs and other powerful figures from Russia, Romania, China, and even France and other countries. Joe Biden reportedly met and spoke with his son’s employers from across the globe. The corporate press and other Democrats will fight disclosure about the Biden family business every step of the way, but Archer’s transcribed interview shows how important it is to reveal the truth of that business to the American people.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

Are The DOJ And Hunter Biden Attempting to Commit Fraud in Federal Court?


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 31, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/31/are-the-doj-and-hunter-biden-attempting-to-commit-fraud-in-federal-court/

Hunter Biden

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

One sentence — 13 words — out of the thousands spoken last Wednesday over the course of the three hours that federal prosecutors, defense attorneys, Hunter Biden, and Judge Maryellen Noreika discussed the president’s son’s plea agreement suggests the Department of Justice and Hunter Biden are attempting to commit fraud on a federal court. 

On Wednesday, Hunter Biden appeared before a federal court in Delaware prepared to enter a guilty plea on two misdemeanor tax counts. The hearing, however, did not go as planned when Judge Noreika, rather than rubberstamping the sweetheart deal the Biden administration had entered into with the president’s son, quizzed the attorneys and Hunter Biden on the terms of the agreement and their respective understanding of the government’s promise not to further prosecute Hunter. 

When Noreika questioned Hunter Biden about the $1 million Patrick Ho paid Owasco LLC on March 22, 2018, purportedly for legal representation, the president’s son was cornered. With the government and the defendant both telling the court that money represented fees for legal services, Hunter Biden had to explain how: “I think Owasco PC acted as a law firm entity, yeah.” That’s how Hunter replied initially, but then immediately equivocated: “I believe that’s the case, but I don’t know that for a fact.” 

Hunter’s hedge was a tell that what he had just told the court was not the truth. But it was imperative that the president’s son caveat his prior statement that his law firm entity was retained to provide legal services for Ho because the judge had made clear that Hunter Biden was under oath and that “any false answers may be used against [him] in a separate prosecution for perjury.”

While Hunter’s backtracking may have saved his backside from a perjury conviction, it may well blow up his plea deal because it highlighted that the “Statement of Facts” the government incorporated into the plea agreement contained a near-certain false representation: that the $1 million Patrick Ho transferred to Hunter Biden was “payment for legal fees.”

Statement of Facts?

While the government did not file the plea agreement or the exhibits incorporated into that deal on the public docket, during last week’s hearing the prosecutor and the court read excerpts on the record. Among other things, in the plea agreement, Hunter Biden “admits to the information contained in the Statement of Facts,” which was attached as Exhibit 1. And the Statement of Facts, as read by the prosecution, declared: 

On or about March 22, 2018, Biden received a $1 million payment into his Owasco, LLC bank account as payment for legal fees for Patrick Ho, and $939,000 remained available as of tax day. Over the next six months Biden would spend almost the entirety of this balance on personal expenses, including large cash withdrawals, transfers to his personal account, travel, and entertainment.

After commenting that having the U.S. attorney’s office read the Statement of Facts “into the record” “is not common in my experience,” Judge Noreika proceeded to question Hunter Biden on the facts to which he was admitting, engaging in this colloquy: 

COURT: All right. In the third paragraph, which is actually the second full paragraph, it says on or about March 22, 2018, you received a million-dollar payment into your Owasco bank account as payment for legal fees for Patrick Ho.

DEFENDANT: Yes, Your Honor. 

COURT: Who is that payment received from, was that the law firm? 

DEFENDANT: Received from Patrick Ho, Your Honor. 

COURT: Mr. Ho himself? 

DEFENDANT: Yes. 

COURT: Were you doing legal work for him separate and apart from the law firm? 

DEFENDANT: Yes, Your Honor. Well — 

MR. CLARK: That wasn’t through Boies Schiller, Your Honor, Mr. Biden was engaged as an attorney. 

COURT: Right. So that’s why I asked. You were doing work for him — 

DEFENDANT: My own law firm, not as counsel. 

COURT: So you had your own law firm as well? 

DEFENDANT: I think Owasco PC acted as a law firm entity, yeah. 

COURT: OK. 

DEFENDANT: I believe that’s the case, but I don’t know that for a fact.

The court then moved on to the next section of the Statement of Facts, and the hearing continued. It shouldn’t have, however. Rather, Judge Noreika should have questioned Hunter Biden more fully to ensure the representation attested to by both the government and the defendant and incorporated into the plea agreement — that Ho paid Hunter $1 million as payments for legal fees — was true. For the overwhelming evidence indicates that was a lie and that the money, at best, represented payment for influence peddling and, at worst, was a bribe.

Doesn’t Add Up

Of course, President Biden’s DOJ didn’t tell that to Judge Noreika nor provide her any evidence related to the $1 million payment. Instead, the DOJ declared the payment was for “legal fees,” and Hunter’s legal team enthusiastically nodded. But that’s not what the evidence indicates.

First, there’s the problem that the $1 million payment on March 22, 2018, was made not to Hunter Biden’s law firm, Owasco PC, but to Owasco LLC. And if you are going to pay $1 million for legal representation, you kinda want to pay the law firm supposedly providing those services. 

Second, not only did Ho not pay Hunter’s law firm, Owasco PC, Ho didn’t even pay Owasco LLC. Rather, Ho paid Hudson West III LLC $1 million on Nov. 2, 2017 — mere weeks before federal prosecutors charged Ho with bribing foreign officials to advantage the Chinese communist energy company CEFC. Then on March 22, 2018, Hudson West III LLC transferred that $1 million to Owasco LLC with a notation that it was for “Dr Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation.” 

According to a U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs finance report, Hunter “Biden stated that the incoming wire amounting to $1MM on 11/2/2017 from CEFC Limited foundation should have gone to Owasco LLC, however, he provided the wrong wire instructions, and due to the large amount the transaction was not corrected until 3/22/2018, which consisted of an outgoing wire for the same amount benefiting Owasco LLC.” 

The Senate report further explained that Biden had stated that “Boies Schiller Flexner is co-counsel for Dr. Patrick Ho’s case. Hudson West III LLC has no involvement with Patrick Ho Chi Ping[’s] case and won[’t] expect further transaction related to Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping trail [sic] for Hudson West III LLC. Owasco LLC and co-Counsel Boies Schiller Flexner will represent Dr. Patrick Ho Chi Ping [at] trial.”

But again, Owasco LLC was not Hunter Biden’s law firm; Owasco PC was. And even in hedging to the court last week, Hunter Biden claimed, “Owasco PC acted as a law firm entity.”

Saying he made a mistake during last week’s plea hearing and that it was actually Owasco LLC that acted as the law firm, however, won’t extricate Hunter Biden from the mess. As the president’s son stated in response to the court’s question of whether he was “doing work for [Ho]”: “My own law firm, not as counsel.” 

So, who was part of Hunter Biden’s Owasco LLC law firm at the time, if Hunter did not serve as counsel? And how did Owasco LLC pay its lawyers given that the government said over the next six months Biden would spend almost the entirety of the $1 million “on personal expenses, including large cash withdrawals, transfers to his personal account, travel, and entertainment?”

Then there is the Attorney Engagement Letter reportedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, dated September 2017, between Patrick Ho and Hunter Biden, which provided for a $1 million retainer for legal representation. Significantly, this agreement was not entered into between Ho and any of the Owasco entities, but with Hunter Biden personally. Yet on Wednesday, Biden told Judge Noreika his law firm was doing the work for Ho. But what law firm that was, Biden seemed not to know.

Of course, Hunter didn’t know because no “legal” representation was provided to Ho and none was expected. Yet that’s precisely what the government and Hunter Biden represent as true in the Statement of Facts, and they may have gotten away with the deception had Judge Noreika accepted the plea agreement without question. But she didn’t.

Instead, the judge asked the parties to brief the issue of whether the government could include its promise not to prosecute Hunter Biden for other crimes in a side diversion agreement, stressing she needed to make sure the plea agreement got Hunter Biden what he believed it got him, but also to make “sure that I do justice as I’m required to do in this court.”

There will be no justice, however, if the court allows the government and Hunter Biden to pretend the $1 million payment from Ho was for legal representation. At the next hearing, Judge Noreika must question both Hunter Biden and the government on this representation — because if it is false, as the overwhelming evidence indicates, it would be a fraud on the court and the country to accept the plea agreement.

In advance of that hearing, the House of Representatives should consider filing a supplemental brief detailing the above evidence because the U.S. attorney’s office has proven itself unwilling to provide an honest assessment of the evidence to the court. While neither the legislative nor the judicial branch has the power to force the executive branch to charge Hunter Biden with any specific crimes, the executive branch also lacks the power to force the judicial branch to blindly accept a false plea agreement.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated since publication

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

Law, Political

Tagged with:

Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Wasn’t Supposed to Protect Him, It Was Supposed to Protect Joe


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JULY 27, 2023

Rad more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/27/hunter-bidens-plea-deal-wasnt-supposed-to-protect-him-it-was-supposed-to-protect-joe/

Joe Biden wearing aviators

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

The twists and turns of Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal have been hard to follow, but it’s been clear from the outset that, like his business ventures in Ukraine, the deal was thoroughly corrupt. It’s now clear that the agreement was never meant primarily to shield Hunter from future prosecution, but to protect President Joe Biden.

In a Delaware federal court on Wednesday, Hunter’s lawyers ended up rejecting a plea deal once it became clear the deal would not confer broad immunity on the president’s son. Although the language of the plea deal has not been released, it was supposed to have Hunter plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, as well as enter a pretrial diversion agreement for illegal possession of a firearm. The deal fell apart, however, once the federal judge overseeing the case, Maryellen Noreika, started asking questions. Here’s how The New York Times reported it:

The hearing appeared to be going smoothly before Judge Noreika questioned whether the agreement meant that Mr. Biden would be immune from prosecution for other possible crimes — including violations related to representing foreign governments — in perpetuity. When a top prosecutor in the case said it would not, Chris Clark, Mr. Biden’s lead lawyer, initially hesitated and then said the government’s position would make the agreement “null and void.”

After a recess during which the lawyers for both sides scrambled to hash out an agreement, Judge Noreika, who earlier had said she felt she was being asked to “rubber stamp” the agreement, said she could not accept the plea deal. Hunter Biden then pled not guilty to the tax charges and the hearing was over. 

What to make of this? The most obvious explanation is that Hunter’s lawyers know what most Americans know: He was involved in complex foreign bribery schemes that implicate his father, President Biden. They were hoping to strike a plea agreement with the Justice Department that would protect him from future prosecution related to corrupt foreign business deals in Ukraine and China that involved trading on his family name, but once it became clear that the judge was not going to sign off on such an agreement, they backed out of the deal.

Why would they want such a deal in the first place? Maybe because they know the Republicans in Congress continue to amass evidence that Joe Biden and his son took millions in bribe money from Ukrainian oligarchs for protection against prosecution. Hunter’s plea deal, in other words, wasn’t meant to shield Hunter from future prosecution, it was meant to protect Joe. A plea agreement granting Hunter broad immunity would make it harder to dig into his murky overseas business deals — deals which increasingly appear to have involved his father. 

As we have detailed here in recent days, the Biden bribery scheme in Ukraine is shaping up to be the great political scandal in American history. If it’s true, it would mean the end of Biden’s presidency, either by impeachment and conviction or by abandonment by the Democrat Party establishment ahead of the 2024 election. 

Consider what’s come out just recently. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, last week released an unclassified FBI document detailing reports from a “highly credible” informant who says the founder and CEO of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, bragged about paying the Bidens $10 million to make the oil and gas company’s legal problems disappear. Specifically, Zlochevsky wanted Ukrainian authorities to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma.

And of course, that’s just what happened — after then-Vice President Joe Biden, by his own admission, threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was fired.

This same informant says top Burisma executives admitted that the only reason they hired Hunter to sit on their board (for a jaw-dropping $83,000 a month) was “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”

The FBI, for its part, tried to hide this document from IRS investigators and Congress, and the corporate media have done their best to ignore the story altogether. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. Indeed, the story keeps growing. As Margot Cleveland reported in these pages earlier this week, the Pittsburgh FBI office told the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office it had corroborated multiple aspects of the informant’s claims, including travel records confirming the informant had indeed traveled to the locales detailed in the document during the relevant time period.

We also know the FBI and Justice Department not only prevented a pair of IRS whistleblowers from learning of the document but also kept hidden portions of the materials found on Hunter’s laptop. That’s no small thing. One of those whistleblowers suggested the FBI informant’s claims could corroborate other evidence the IRS special agents had gathered during their investigation.

As this story develops, it’s becoming obvious that the point of the FBI and DOJ’s obstruction is to protect the president and suppress further evidence of the Biden bribery scheme. That’s why a special counsel won’t cut it. The deep state isn’t going to get to the bottom of this, and the corporate press is going to keep aggressively ignoring it. If the federal courtroom circus on Wednesday demonstrated anything, it’s that we’re going to need an impeachment inquiry to find out the truth about President Biden’s corruption.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Biden Family Scandals Are So Much Bigger Than Hunter’s Hookers And Burisma Bribery


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 26, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/26/biden-family-scandals-are-so-much-bigger-than-hunters-hookers-and-burisma-bribery/

Joe Biden at his desk talking on the phone in black and white

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

When the New York Post broke the news that documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, the corporate media — to the extent they didn’t frame the story as Russian disinformation — pretended the reporting solely concerned Hunter Biden’s personal life. The scandal, however, was never about Hunter’s sordid sex life and history of drug abuse. Rather, it concerned Joe Biden’s abuse of power as vice president for financial gain. But now it reaches much further — including 10 distinct scandals.

Saturated in Scandal

1. The Many (Uncharged) Crimes of Hunter Biden

While the current scandals swirling around the laptop are unrelated to Hunter Biden’s sex life or drug abuse, the president’s son features in the first scandal: Evidence indicates Hunter Biden committed numerous crimes, including felonies. Evidence suggests Hunter Biden acted as an unregistered foreign agent for, at a minimum, Ukraine and China in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The confidential human source’s (CHS) reporting suggests Hunter also accepted bribes from Burisma or alternatively helped extort $10 million from the Ukrainian oil and gas company for himself and his father. 

IRS whistleblowers and federal prosecutors also believed the evidence supported multiple felony tax counts. Lying on a federal firearm application is a serious felony as well.

The evidence that the president’s son likely engaged in extensive criminal conduct for over a decade is a huge scandal, but it also bred a separate scandal: the DOJ and FBI’s efforts to protect him, No. 7 below. 

2. Joe Biden’s Business Lie

Hunter Biden’s laptop also exposed the reality that Joe Biden lied to the American public, dating back to September 2019. During a campaign stop, the then-Democrat presidential candidate snapped at Fox News’ Peter Doocy, claiming: “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”  

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1175486006348460032?s=20

More than two years later, after The Washington Post and New York Times belatedly confirmed the authenticity of the emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, Doocy asked then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether “President Biden still maintains he never discussed overseas business deals with his son Hunter,” to which Psaki replied, “Yes.”

While Biden and his team stuck with that lie for two-plus years, his current press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is attempting to snuff out that scandal by reframing Biden’s denial. “I’ve been asked this question a million times. The answer is not going to change. The answer remains the same: The president was never in business with his son,” Jean-Pierre said on Monday.

Moving the goalposts won’t erase the lie. 

3. Joe Biden’s Corruption

The much more serious scandal, however, concerns extensive evidence of Joe Biden’s widespread corruption. Bank and corporate records, suspicious activity reports, emails and text messages recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, travel records, reporting from a “highly credible” CHS, and testimony and expected testimony from Hunter Biden’s business partners indicate that Joe Biden, while vice president, exchanged political favors for payments to his family members — with a cut of the cash coming to the “Big Guy.” 

People and/or organizations from Romania, Ukraine, Russia, and China, among others, all paid Biden-related business entities millions of dollars, with evidence indicating the now-president received a cut of the bribes. The evidence indicates that in exchange, the individuals received access to the then-vice president. In the case of Ukraine, Biden forced the firing of the prosecutor general who was investigating Burisma, the company where Hunter held a board seat and which allegedly paid Joe and Hunter Biden each $5 million in bribes.

The evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption is bad enough, but the scandal deepens when one considers the president has supplied Ukraine with cluster bombs and billions in American tax dollars.

Cover-Ups

While the first three scandals involve misconduct and likely criminality by Hunter and Joe Biden, there are at least twice as many distinct scandals that flow from cover-up efforts to protect the Bidens.

4. FBI’s Interference in the 2020 Election

By December 2019, the FBI had authenticated the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. Yet, knowing the laptop was real and contained spectacularly damaging details implicating Joe Biden in corruption, the FBI spent the months leading up to the November 2020 election grooming tech giants to believe a “hack-and-leak operation” was imminent. The FBI also pushed social media companies to change their terms of service to prohibit the posting of so-called hacked materials.

These combined efforts prompted social media companies to censor the New York Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 blockbuster article, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad.” After the story broke and after initially confirming its authenticity to Twitter, the FBI refused to comment on whether the material had been hacked or was Russian disinformation, leading to its continued widespread censorship. Not only did the FBI improperly protect Joe Biden and prompt the censorship of true political speech, it interfered in the 2020 election and likely handed Biden the White House. 

5. Intelligence Agencies’ Interference in the 2020 Election

Former and current members of intelligence agencies soon joined the FBI in interfering in the 2020 election. The House Intelligence and Weaponization Committees previously detailed evidence of that interference in their report titled, “How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.” 

That report established that the infamous October 2020 letter, which was signed by 51 former intelligence officials and falsely framed the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, was concocted by Biden-campaign officials, including now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who served as a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. Then-candidate Joe Biden would cite that letter in his final debate with Donald Trump to lie to the American people (again), telling the country the laptop was Russian disinformation.

It is scandalous that scores of former intelligence officials would use their prior positions and reputations to deceive Americans in a way that likely affected the 2020 election. That any of those individuals retained security clearances adds to the scandal, as does the role of the Biden campaign and the involvement of at least one CIA employee in soliciting signatories for the statement. 

6. Intel Agencies’ Failure to Protect America Against Foreign Influence

Not only did intelligence agencies interfere in the 2020 election, but in their efforts to protect Joe Biden, they likely also failed to provide necessary defensive briefings, putting Americans at risk.

To protect our country, intelligence officials must have frank discussions with leaders (and candidates) about the risks of foreign malign influence. Given how hard the FBI and intelligence agencies tried to bury the news of the laptop, it seems likely they omitted any reference to the laptop and details contained on it in briefings to then-President Trump, then-candidate Biden, and the Biden campaign. 

To date, this scandal has been overlooked and merits further inquiry to determine whether the intelligence apparatus fulfilled its duty to the country or omitted inconvenient facts in briefings to protect Joe Biden. Of particular concern is whether intelligence agencies assessed and warned about the risk that the Russians had stolen a second Hunter Biden laptop that contain materials the Biden son believed rendered him susceptible to blackmail.

7. DOJ and FBI’s Handling of Biden Investigations

When it comes to how the DOJ and FBI handled investigations into Biden family corruption, the evidence of potential misconduct is overwhelming.

Broadly, this scandal includes conflicts of interest between Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys — including the Pennsylvania U.S. attorney handling an investigation into the Jim Biden-connected company Americorp, and the California and D.C. U.S. attorneys who reportedly refused to bring felony charges against Hunter Biden. Likewise, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s conflict of interest proves scandalous given the numerous efforts by the DOJ and FBI headquarters to interfere in the investigations.

Beyond conflicts of interest, the IRS whistleblowers and another whistleblower who’s provided information to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have revealed numerous instances of DOJ and FBI procedural violations, the burying of evidence such as the FD-1023, the false labeling of derogatory evidence as disinformation, and limits on the investigative steps agents could take. Consequently, the DOJ charged Hunter Biden only with misdemeanors and one firearm felony that could be dropped, and to date it appears no investigation has occurred into Joe Biden or his brother, Jim Biden, on allegations of bribery and money laundering.

While Democrats counter the growing evidence of corruption by wrongly claiming it has not been corroborated, that fact does not vindicate the Bidens: It implicates the DOJ and FBI in a separate scandal. 

Cover-Ups of the Cover-Ups

8. DOJ and FBI’s Cover-Up of Failure to Investigate Bidens

Once whistleblowers began exposing the Biden administration’s interference in the family’s pay-to-play investigation, the DOJ and FBI began to cover-up the cover-up. We saw this most clearly when Garland professed that there was no political interference in U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s investigation into Hunter Biden. Garland stressed that, as a Trump holdover, Americans could trust Weiss’s independence.

Garland’s testimony cannot be squared with the extensive interference coming from FBI headquarters and the limitations the DOJ placed on investigative techniques. When Grassley pushed on the point, Garland maintained that Weiss had ultimate charging authority. According to an IRS whistleblower, however, Weiss said otherwise, claiming he wasn’t the ultimate decision-maker. 

Here, the cover-up of the cover-up began in earnest, with Garland and Weiss writing a series of letters and making public statements that attempted to obscure the ultimate question of whether Weiss had ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden and whether DOJ or FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation. This scandal has yet to be unraveled. But on Monday, the DOJ sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee offering up Weiss to testify — indicating Biden’s Justice Department might be preparing to throw Weiss under the bus.

9. Democrats Lying to Protect Joe Biden 

Many Democrats are also wrapped up in lying to protect Joe Biden. Some of these lies predate the election when they spun the laptop as Russian disinformation. But more recently, we saw Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin lying to the American public about the FD-1023 form. Had former Attorney General William Barr not gone on the record to correct Raskin’s falsehood, the public would have been none the wiser.

Seeking to protect Joe Biden from damning bribery claims, Raskin falsely claimed that Trump appointees Barr and U.S. Attorney Scott Brady had reviewed the CHS’s reporting contained in a June 2020 FD-1023 form and closed out the investigation. Raskin also portrayed the CHS’s reporting as connected to Rudy Giuliani.

But as The Federalist first reported, Barr unequivocally said that Raskin’s claim was “not true.” The investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.” “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.” Likewise, Barr explained the CHS’s reporting was unrelated to Giuliani.

10. Press Acting as Biden-Run Media

When the Post broke the laptop story, the legacy media either silenced it or framed it as Russian disinformation. Even two years later, after belatedly authenticating the material recovered from Hunter Biden’s computer, the corporate media refused to cover the implications — that the emails, documents, and texts indicated Joe Biden was involved in a massive corruption scandal. The corrupt press still refuses to cover the news fairly, opting instead to brand the evidence as a conspiracy theory. 

The media’s refusal to seek and report the truth proves the most dire of all the scandals because without a free press checking government corruption, the corruption will only grow.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

Victor Davis Hanson Op-ed: The Biden Family Caricatures


Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson / July 21, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/07/21/biden-family-caricatures/

From “nibbling” on a young girl in Helsinki, Finland, to this awkward hug exchange June 15 with actress and film director Eva Longoria on the South Lawn of the White House, President Joe Biden has earned a bad reputation for his behavior with girls and women. (Photo: Alex Wong/ Getty Images)

The Biden first family seems determined to confirm every stereotype of their antisocial behavior — to the point of dysfunctionality. During the 2020 campaign, at least eight women alleged that then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in the past had serially and improperly touched, kissed or grabbed them.

One, Tara Reade, alleged she was sexually assaulted by Biden, who denied the charge. Yet Biden himself finally was forced to apologize for some of his behavior. Or as he said at the time, “I get it.” He claimed that he would no longer improperly invade the “private space” of women and had meant no harm. But Biden’s obnoxious conduct extended well beyond the eight accusers.

Women as diverse as former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Biden’s own daughter-in-law Kathleen Buhle have both alleged in their memoirs that Biden made them feel uncomfortable through his intrusive touching and embraces. On several occasions, Biden developed a strange tic of becoming too physical with young girls. He habitually attempted to hug them while blowing in their hair.

His daughter Ashley wrote in her diary that she feared her past adolescent showers with her father had been inappropriate. Even as president, Biden has weirdly called out young girls in his audiences to note their attractiveness. On one occasion, the president interrupted his speech to address a female acquaintance — enlightening the crowd that, “We go back a long way. She was 12 and I was 30, but anyway … .”

As a result, Biden has likely been warned repeatedly to forgo intimate references to young women.

He has no doubt also been advised by his handlers to stop all close, supposedly innocent contact with young girls and children — if for no other reason than to prevent his political opponents from charging that Joe is “creepy,” “perverse,” or “sick.” And yet like some addict, Biden cannot stop — regardless of the eerie image he projects around the world.

Last week, the president jumped the proverbial shark by embracing a young child in a crowd while on the tarmac of the Helsinki, Finland, airport. In his strangest act yet, Biden kept moving his mouth near the face of the young girl. He was apparently trying to nibble the youngster, almost in turkey-gobbling fashion.

She recoiled.

No matter. Biden continued at her shoulder.

Again, she flinched.

Biden then reverted to form, and sought with a second try to smell her hair and nestle closer.

Had any other major politician in the age of #MeToo committed such an unnerving stunt, he would likely have been ostracized by colleagues and mercilessly hammered by the media. Not in Biden’s case. The apparent media subtext was that it was either just “Old Joe” trying to be too friendly, or a symptom of his cognitive decline and thus not attributable to any sinister urge.

Senescence now provides paradoxical cover for Biden’s creepiness — a newfound exemption for his old boorish behavior.

Also, during the president’s latest antics, cocaine was found in the West Wing of the White House. All the White House spokespeople had to do was to reassure the public that the drugs most certainly did not belong to first son Hunter Biden — despite his being a frequent guest resident of the White House and a former crack-cocaine addict. Instead, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed reporters for requesting such clarification.

Then the official narrative went through several contortions as to where and how the bag of cocaine was found. The disinformation only added suspicion that the White House either would not or could not be transparent about the discovery of illicit drugs abandoned at the very nexus of American governance. Requests for clarity were understandable, not just because Hunter has had a long history of drug addiction. He also has a troubling habit of leaving a public trail of evidence of his drug use. Hunter forgot his crack pipe in a rental car. He abandoned his laptop that contained evidence of his own felonious behavior. And his unlawfully registered handgun turned up in a dumpster near a school.

In sum, the president and his son both have quite disturbing and all-too-public bad habits. Americans in response assume both would be careful not to offer the tiniest shred of evidence that their pathologies continue.

White House handlers should keep the president from even getting near small children and young women. And they should be just as unambiguous that Hunter Biden has never, and would never, even get too close to illicit drugs while inside the White House. Sadly they can do neither.

These suspicions are force multipliers of the mounting evidence of Biden family corruption. They feed narratives of heartlessness about disowning a granddaughter born out of wedlock. And they add to worries of presidential senility.

The result is the caricature of a first family, one that is utterly dysfunctional — and increasingly detrimental to the country at large.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

COMMENTARY BY Victor Davis Hanson@VDHanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

Category:

Family, Opinion, Political

Tagged with:

7 Things the House Oversight Committee Should Ask IRS Whistleblowers


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 18, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/18/7-things-the-house-oversight-committee-should-ask-irs-whistleblowers/

one of the IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

The IRS whistleblowers who exposed the Department of Justice and FBI’s interference in the investigation into Biden family corruption will publicly testify on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.

The duo, Gary Shapley and a man known now only as Whistleblower X, had previously sat for transcribed interviews with the House Ways and Means Committee. And while some details from that closed-door testimony should be reiterated during the on-camera congressional hearing, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer should corral Republicans before Wednesday to coordinate the questioning of the whistleblowers so the country learns the depth of the scandal.

Here’s what they should ask Shapley and the soon-to-be-named second whistleblower and how they should do it.

1. Let the Whistleblowers Do the Talking

Because the legacy press will be poised to present Wednesday’s hearing as a Republican witch hunt and their supposed continued hounding of Hunter Biden, the representatives on the right side of the aisle should save the grandstanding for another time and let the agents speak for themselves.

As experienced agents, both Shapley and Whistleblower X know how to testify in a clear and understandable way. They also know how to respond to a hostile cross-examination, which unfortunately will be what they face from Democrats. Republicans should ask the agents open-ended questions that call for narrative responses and allow the whistleblowers’ words to convey to America the protect-Biden scandal they witnessed.

2. Start with Preliminaries, Not the Most Salacious Details

While it is understandable that the House Oversight Committee will want to strike hard and fast with the most devastating testimony, Republicans must remember the media blackout over this scandal means most Americans remain ignorant of many of the basics of the Hunter Biden investigation and how it connects to now-President Biden. Many Americans likely also know little about the two witnesses and may even believe the Democrats’ defamatory branding of the whistleblowers as “bought and paid for” by extreme MAGA Republicans.

For these reasons, before delving into the details, Republicans should ensure the country learns of the whistleblowers’ extensive and impressive professional background. Comer should also ensure the whistleblowers come clean about any political leanings they have, which appears to be none or, if any, leaning more to the left than the right. The whistleblowers’ opening statements will likely cover these preliminaries to some extent, but providing another minute for each witness to briefly remind Americans of your experience with the criminal investigation division of the IRS and explain to the country where you stand politically would be wise.

3. Begin Big-Picture Before Hitting the Details

The committee should then move to the origins of the investigation and the big picture of the scandal. More detailed questions will follow, but could you first broadly explain why and when the investigation began? Can you summarize the staffing of the investigative team and how the FBI field offices, FBI headquarters, the IRS criminal division, and the U.S. attorneys’ offices interacted at the beginning of the investigation, and then later throughout the investigation? 

Again, let the whistleblowers tell their story, using follow-up questions to draw out more details, if necessary, but from a big-picture perspective. And once the whistleblowers explain how the investigation proceeded, broadly speaking, ask: Was that staffing and interaction, especially with the DOJ and FBI, the norm?

4. Evidence and Interference

With the above backdrop established, the committee should focus next on two main lines of questioning: the evidence uncovered of potential criminal conduct and the interference the agents faced when investigating the case. 

The most effective and efficient way to present this testimony will be by requesting the whistleblowers walk the committee through the chronology of the investigation, identifying at each stage what evidence was uncovered and how, and whether there was any interference in the investigation. 

Follow-up questions for each leg in the investigative journey should inquire of any witnesses or evidence they know of to corroborate their testimony and what steps they normally would have taken absent the interference. 

Because the committee has the transcript of the whistleblowers’ previous closed-door testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, the staffers should be able to easily sequence the questioning to ensure it is accessible to ordinary Americans.

5. Weiss’s Weasel Words and Garland’s False Ones

While the whistleblowers’ prior testimony revealed scores of ways in which the DOJ and FBI interfered in the investigation, equally concerning is U.S. Attorney David Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s attempts to cover up that interference. 

For instance, Shapley testified about the D.C. and California U.S. attorneys’ refusal to file charges against Hunter Biden, and Weiss’s inability to indict the president’s son in those venues without permission from the Department of Justice — permission Weiss allegedly claims had been denied him. According to Shapley, Weiss made that statement during an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting and said he was “not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.”

Neither Weiss nor Garland has expressly denied Shapley’s claims, but both made statements that cannot be reconciled with Shapley’s testimony. Garland, for his part, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss “has full authority” to bring cases in another jurisdiction if he deemed it necessary. Weiss similarly claimed in a letter to Congress that “he had been granted the ultimate authority” over the Biden investigation, but the Delaware U.S. attorney quickly clarified in a second letter that he didn’t have that authority yet but had been assured he would be granted it if necessary. 

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee should ask Shapley to retell the events of the Oct. 7 meeting because the IRS agents’ testimony implicates Weiss and Garland in a cover-up. Republicans should also ask Shapley whether it is possible Weiss said during that meeting that he had been denied a request to be appointed a special attorney as opposed to a special counsel, as some Democrats are suggesting Shapley misunderstood Weiss. A quick follow-up here, however, will also make clear that no matter which “special” appointment Weiss said he was denied, the U.S. attorney clearly said he wasn’t the decisionmaker.

6. Evidence Seen or Not Seen

The DOJ and FBI also interfered in the investigation by withholding evidence from Shapley and his investigative team. For instance, both Shapley and Whistleblower X stated they were not aware of the FD-1023 form that summarized a confidential human source’s claims that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5 million in bribes from Burisma. Shapley also testified that he was prevented from seeing all the evidence on the Hunter Biden laptop, even after the FBI had removed documents potentially protected by attorney-client privilege. The committee should elicit testimony from Shapley and Whistleblower X concerning this withheld evidence.

Republicans should then attempt to learn what other evidence may have been secreted from the investigative team. The committee should read off a litany of the evidence it has and ask the whistleblowers if they were familiar with that evidence. Similarly, the committee should provide a list of witnesses with likely knowledge of the pay-to-play scandal and ask whether the whistleblowers knew of those individuals’ potential involvement and whether they were questioned. 

This line of questioning may reveal new areas of inquiry — something the whistleblowers may not have known of previously. But in that case, the whistleblowers may not be able to respond to the questions because only the House Ways and Means Committee has the authority to receive protected tax information. The right questions, though, will give the whistleblowers the opportunity to convey that they have not seen the particular evidence referenced and therefore cannot respond to the query in this setting, but would be happy to provide the Ways and Means Committee a supplemental affidavit. 

7. Anything More That Could Be Done

The whistleblowers have already made clear the statute of limitations ran out on potential felony tax charges against Hunter Biden because the Delaware U.S. attorney lacked the authority to indict the president’s son in another state. But what about the allegations contained in the FD-1023 or the other banking records recovered by the various House committees? Does that evidence indicate additional crimes have been committed for which the statute of limitations has not yet expired? 

The whistleblowers should be asked: What potential crimes? What investigative techniques would you recommend? Given the international scope of these potential crimes, does the Baltimore FBI field office have the expertise to investigate adequately? Do you and your team have the ability to investigate this evidence and determine if there is a there, there?

Ending the hearing thusly will send a message that Weiss may have called off the investigation, but that doesn’t mean the case of corruption against the Biden family is dead.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

More on the Hunter Biden Cover-up Deal


Sen. Ron Johnson to Newsmax: Hunter Plea Deal Attempt to Keep Truth From Public

By Brian Freeman    |   Tuesday, 20 June 2023 02:46 PM EDT

The Hunter Biden plea deal for failing to pay federal income tax and illegally possessing a weapon is highly suspicious and appears to be an attempt to keep the truth from the American public, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Tuesday.

“The timing is more than interesting — just as we find out about a credible source claiming a $5 million to $10 million bribery scheme and [Hunter’s business associate] Devon Archer poised to testify before the House committee,” Johnson told “National Report.”

“Is this the Justice Department’s attempt to try and seal this all up and keep the truth from the American public? This is what I fear.”……………..

For the rest of the article go to https://www.newsmax.com/us/donald-trump-classified-documents-trial-date/2023/06/20/id/1124171/

Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Is A Coverup Disguised As Justice

BY: CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD | JUNE 20, 2023

Hunter Biden

To hear President Joe Biden’s supporters tell it, Hunter Biden was finally held accountable Tuesday, and the long national nightmare of him facing any scrutiny at all can finally end.

This accountability for the president’s son, however, was little more than a chiding for offenses that have virtually nothing to do with the serious allegations the Department of Justice should actually be pursuing — like giving a speeding ticket to “the getaway driver after a bank robbery,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley remarked.

Over the past two weeks alone, congressional Republicans have revealed a paid, “highly credible” FBI informant’s report that $10 million was paid in bribes to Hunter and his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, by Ukrainian oligarch and Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

Zlochevsky called the then-vice president “the big guy,” a nickname also used in the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt China dealings. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed the existence of two audio recordings Zlochevsky reportedly made of Joe Biden (and another 15 he made of Hunter) discussing their dealings, which Zlochevsky reportedly kept as a sort of “insurance policy” that he’d get what he was paying for.

What was he paying for? Emails from the chairman of Burisma (revealed three years ago) show “the ultimate purpose” of “the deliverables” was “to close down for any cases/pursuits against [Burisma’s president] in Ukraine.” That case was indeed closed down, when Vice President Biden pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor pursuing Burisma.

Congressional investigators also revealed that Hunter helped Burisma executives open an account for their transactions at Satabank,……….

For the rest of the article go to https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/20/hunter-bidens-plea-deal-is-a-coverup-disguised-as-justice/

Hunter Biden’s Wrist Slap On Gun, Tax Crimes Is A Complete Smokescreen

BY: JORDAN BOYD | JUNE 20, 2023

Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Hunter Biden at inauguration in 2021

President Joe Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice is so desperate to distract from Republicans’ exposé of the Biden family bribery scandal that it finally brought a handful of weak charges against Hunter Biden for his tax and gun crimes.

Under the guise of serving equal justice, the DOJ announced on Tuesday that it would charge the president’s youngest son with two federal misdemeanor counts for failing to pay his taxes and one federal felony charge for possessing a gun while being an illegal drug user and addict.

Hunter’s lawyers are scrambling to declare “the five-year investigation” into their client as “resolved.” Corporate media like NBC News, similarly, claimed the DOJ’s “resolution suggests that prosecutors did not find cause to file charges related to Hunter Biden’s dealings with foreign entities or other wrongdoing.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Just like when it strategically timed its political arrest of a Republican congressman to coincide with a GOP press conference detailing evidence of Biden corruption, the DOJ is working overtime to ensure that Hunter serves as a distraction from the bigger Biden problem.

Since at least 2021 when Politico exposed records and receipts, the public has known that Hunter, who has an extensive and public history of illicit drug use, appeared to lie about this drug use on the Firearms Transaction Record he filled out during a revolver purchase in 2018.

Government officials such as local police, the Secret Service, FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, likely knew about the lie earlier than 2021 since the .38 revolver soon became the center of a missing gun investigation, in which the Secret Service reportedly tried to interfere on behalf of the Biden family.

Similarly, most of the preliminary federal investigation into Hunter’s 2017 and 2018 financial wrongdoings was completed by 2020.

Yet, U.S. Attorney David Weiss delayed bringing charges against Hunter because, as Politico described, “the investigation would become a months-long campaign issue” that would hurt Biden’s presidential chances. It wasn’t until Republicans’ increasingly evidenced probe into the Biden bribery scheme, which the Biden administration continues to hamper, that Weiss finally decided to target the president’s son.

That timing is not a coincidence………….

For the rest of the article go to https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/20/hunter-bidens-wrist-slap-on-gun-tax-crimes-is-a-complete-smokescreen/

Hunter Biden’s Charges Are Nothing But A Diversion

BY: BRETT TOLMAN | JUNE 20, 2023

Hunter Biden

What a breathtaking and damaging act of misdirection. After five years of investigation into a host of criminal acts by Hunter Biden, the Department of Justice (DOJ) finally brought charges against the president’s wayward son. But while the DOJ hopes the public focuses on words like “charges” and “guilty” to form an image of accountability for all, it’s letting Hunter walk away with the kind of slap on the wrist most defendants can only dream about from inside a prison cell.

In the same breath in which DOJ announced it was filing charges against Hunter Biden, it also stated that the case had already been resolved. Hunter will plead guilty to and serve probation for two tax fraud misdemeanors while a felony firearm possession charge will disappear after he completes pretrial diversion. It’s a resolution that if the defendant’s last name weren’t Biden would sound almost too good to be true.

The feds are notoriously tough on firearms. Nationally, for example, 94.2 percent of federal firearms convictions in 2022 involved some prison time, and the median sentence was 39 months.

Of course, Hunter won’t even have to end up with a conviction. This is an even rarer event. In 2021, fewer than 1 percent of cases filed by U.S. attorneys in federal court resulted in the kind of pretrial diversion offered to Hunter.

It’s that disparity between Hunter’s case and everybody else’s that’s the true problem, not necessarily the sentence itself. After all, the law in question, which prohibits individuals suffering from an illegal drug addiction from possessing a firearm, likely violates the Second Amendment. Plus, diversion programs across the country have improved public safety at lower cost to taxpayers than prison alternatives. 

But that’s clearly not how things are shaking out in practice at DOJ, and President Biden has expressed an ongoing willingness to harshly punish firearms offenses. His DOJ is defending this law in court, and he signed a law in 2021 to increase maximum penalties from 10 years to 15 years in prison. Apparently, President Biden does not believe offenders should be treated with kid gloves — at least when it’s not his kid.

Indeed, if Hunter’s were a typical case, ………….

For the rest of the article go to https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/20/hunter-bidens-charges-are-nothing-but-a-diversion/

Category:

Crime, Law, Political

Tagged with:

EXCLUSIVE: Bill Barr Confirms Rep. Jamie Raskin Lied About Biden Family Corruption Investigation


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JUNE 07, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/07/exclusive-bill-barr-confirms-rep-jamie-raskin-lied-about-biden-family-corruption-investigation/

William Barr with Christopher Wray in the background

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

“It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” William Barr told The Federalist on Tuesday in response to Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s claim that the former attorney general and his “handpicked prosecutor” had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe. “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”

Former Attorney General Barr went on the record with The Federalist following statements Raskin made to the press Monday afternoon. Soon after attending a closed-door meeting with House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and the FBI — at which lawmakers reviewed the FD-1023 form summarizing a CHS’s detailed allegations that then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions — Raskin spoke to the media. 

“What I learned,” Raskin claimed, “was that Attorney General Barr named Scott Brady, who was the U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania, to head up a group of prosecutors who would look into all the allegations related to Ukraine.”

“After Rudy Giuliani surfaced these allegations,” Raskin continued, Brady’s team looked into the FD-1023 and “in August determined that there was no grounds to escalate from an initial assessment to a preliminary investigation,” and so “they called an end to the investigation.” 

The Maryland Democrat then reiterated his claim that this was “under Attorney General William Barr and his handpicked prosecutor Mr. Brady, who was a Trump appointee.” “They were the ones who decided” there were no further grounds for investigation, Raskin’s claimed, adding: “If there is a complaint, it is with Attorney General William Barr, the Trump Justice Department, and the team that the Trump administration appointed to look into it.” 

Raskin would then double down on his claim that it was Barr and Brady who closed down the investigation, issuing a press release saying that in August 2020, Barr and his “hand-picked U.S. Attorney” signed off on closing an assessment into the FD-1023 form that memorialized the CHS’s claims. 

But that’s just not true, according to the former attorney general. Instead, the confidential human source’s claims detailed in the FD-1023 were sent to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office for further investigation, according to Barr. That, however, was just one of Raskin’s deceptions: The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee also falsely suggested the CHS’s allegations were related to the investigation of information Rudy Giuliani had unearthed of the Biden family corruption in Ukraine. 

Not so, according to an individual familiar with the investigation who told The Federalist that the CHS and the FD-1023 summary of his statement were both “unrelated to Rudy Giuliani” and “not derived” from any information Giuliani provided. This corroborates the House Oversight Committee’s representation that the June 30, 2020, FD-1023 “stands on its own” and was not part of the documents Giuliani provided the FBI in January 2020. 

In fact, according to the House Oversight Committee, the FD-1023 in question “contains information from the FBI’s confidential human source dating back to another FD-1023 generated in 2017,” which completely removes Giuliani from the mix.

Raskin’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Two Huge Scandals

These new revelations prove significant for two reasons. First, there’s the underlying scandal of the FBI’s alleged failure to investigate the FD-1023 and FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten’s opening of an assessment in August 2020 to discredit that information, which “caused investigative activity to cease.” 

Knowing that the FD-1023 originated in Brady’s Western District of Pennsylvania proves explosive because Grassley’s whistleblower alleged that in September 2020, FBI headquarters placed the information contained in Auten’s assessment in a restricted-access sub-file that only the particular agents who uncovered the CHS’s info could access. How then could the FBI agents in Delaware further investigate the allegations? 

And those allegations, further detailed by Comer on Tuesday, are shocking. “A trusted confidential human source obtained information from a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Biden,” Comer told The Federalist. So, the CHS didn’t just pass on information from some random third party: He spoke directly with the individual who claimed to have bribed Biden. FBI headquarters branding that information as “disinformation” without undertaking an appropriate investigation is outrageous — especially since the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office was directed to further investigate the FD-1023.

The way all this is unfolding sounds more and more like something you would expect to come out of communist Russia, Cuba or China. Such cover-ups are totalitarian in origan, and practiced by the same.

The second scandal is equally as large because it reaches the top of the FBI: Director Christopher Wray. 

Wray may well have been in the dark about FBI headquarters falsely labeling the FD-1023 as misinformation and secreting it away from other agents. But framing the intel from the “highly credible” longtime FBI CHS as coming from Giuliani reeks of a cover-up. And suggesting that Barr and Brady closed down an investigation into the FD-1023 when it was instead sent to Delaware for further investigation is a cover-up.

“The more the FBI leak and coverup machine spins for President Biden, the worse the bureau looks,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told The Federalist upon learning of Barr’s statement. “Enough is enough. It’s past time for the FBI to come clean and show their work if they have any hope of salvaging their own credibility.”

Comer went further, telling The Federalist, “The FBI is attempting a coverup, and Democrats are doing their bidding by lying to the American people.”

“The FBI must produce this record to the House Oversight Committee’s custody,” Comer continued, and “if not, we will take action on Thursday to hold Director Wray in contempt of Congress.”

Given Barr’s statement, that should be the least of Wray’s concerns.

Mollie Hemingway contributed to this report.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

All Biden Has To Do Is Explain Why Foreign Governments Paid His Family $10 Million — But He Can’t


BY: SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | MAY 17, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/17/all-biden-has-to-do-is-explain-why-foreign-governments-paid-his-family-10-million-but-he-cant/

Joe Biden and Xi Jinping

If Republicans had a spine or a brain — only one is required for this task — they would relentlessly pursue President Joe Biden for his long-standing cash-for-influence scheme, both during and beyond the 2024 presidential election.

During a May 10 press conference, the House Oversight Committee confirmed that since at least 2009, Joe Biden and his family received a minimum of $10 million from foreign entities. As The Federalist reported, this money entered the Bidens’ coffers through a complicated scheme of layered transactions deposited into multiple bank accounts.

Biden could make this entire story go away if he had a good reason for why his family received $10 million from foreign entities. Surely, if they weren’t corrupt, if this money came from non-sketchy and actually legitimate means, he could explain where this money came from and what services or goods his family exchanged to attain it. But this isn’t the case, as we continue to learn, so he cannot explain away the money.

Why did the Bidens receive this comically large sum of money? Well, no one really knows. But it probably has something to do with the fact that their last names are “Biden” and their family patriarch, the incumbent president, is one of the longest-serving federal officials in American history and has been able to avoid any meaningful public scrutiny for much of his career. As such, it increasingly appears the Bidens used their family’s political and corporate connections to engage in an elaborate foreign influence peddling scheme.

But as was the case with Hunter Biden’s role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where he was handsomely paid despite having zero energy sector experience, the corporate media continues to downplay the first family’s blatantly corrupt business dealings. “House Republicans ramp up claims Biden family received money from foreign contacts,” reads one headline from NPR. “Comer releases Biden family probe update without showing link to president,” declares one from Politico. CNN whitewashed the Biden family’s corruption by writing, “The latest report does not show any payments made directly to Joe Biden, either as vice president or after leaving office.”

And regardless of whether or not “the big guy” who benefited from the foreign business ventures of Biden family members is the current president, there remain glaring ethical and political issues about influence peddling — which House Republicans are continuing to pursue as they prepare to introduce legislation banning influence peddling — and a slew of potential legal issues arising from tax negligence.

Considering the federal government, for at least the short and medium terms, simply will not touch the Biden family, this rules out most legitimate risks of prosecution they might face, even if House Republicans federally criminalize influence peddling. This means that, realistically, the only way to hold them accountable is through utilizing political mechanisms. As such, the GOP should make the Bidens’ foreign benefactors central to their 2024 campaign messaging.

It’s obvious to everyone with functioning eyes and ears that Joe Biden is neurologically compromised, and it’s obvious to everyone paying attention that he and his family are financially compromised, as well.

Until there is a prosecutorial path forward, the GOP must proceed with political means and fill the airwaves in 2024 battleground states with messages amplifying how Joe Biden and his family sold out the country to enrich themselves.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.

Author Samuel Mangold-Lenett profile

SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT

VISIT ON TWITTER@SMLENETT

MORE ARTICLES

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

9 Questions Corporate Media Should Ask Biden About Latest Corruption Evidence But Won’t


BY: JORDAN BOYD | MAY 12, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/12/9-questions-corporate-media-should-ask-biden-about-latest-corruption-evidence-but-wont/

President Joe Biden talks to the press

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

Corrupt corporate media outlets love scandal but when it comes to questions about whether President Joe Biden sold out the U.S. to enrich his family, they deliberately turn a blind eye.

There are plenty of questions ripe for the asking about the Biden family’s dealings with people tied to some of the nation’s biggest foreign adversaries. Republicans have spent months searching for answers, but every piece of evidence of corruption they uncover simply raises more questions. Meanwhile, press outlets that usually busy themselves with aiding Democrat investigations of this nature either deny the evidence or remain silent altogether.

Here are nine questions the corporate media should ask POTUS about his latest scandal but likely won’t.

1. What Exactly Is the Biden Family Business?

Perhaps the biggest question the American people deserve to know an answer to is: What exactly does the Biden family do to warrant massive payments from foreign nationals? Outside of spending decades influencing U.S. domestic and foreign policy, nobody seems to know.

“We know what [Trump’s] businesses were. I’m not saying whether I agreed with what he did or not but I actually know what these businesses are. What are the Biden businesses?” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer asked during a press conference this week.

2. Why Did Your Unqualified Grandchild Get Paid?

Joe Biden’s son Hunter receiving checks from foreign energy moguls makes some sense if you overlook his suspect rise to fame in the international energy sector. Why at least one of Biden’s grandkids, some nieces or nephews, and even an ex-daughter-in-law are all on the receiving end of funds from foreign nationals is unexplainable.

Despite having no formal experience or education that would qualify them to receive payments from foreign energy companies or “legal fees,” bank records show that at least nine people, between Biden family members and their lovers, spent decades getting rich on at least $10 million from people associated with some of the United States’ biggest foreign adversaries.

3. How Many More Bidens Received Money from Foreign Nationals?

If Hunter’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle profited off of deals she claimed to have “my head buried in the sand” about, it’s more than fair to ask the president just how many more members of the Biden circle benefitted from these international deals.

4. Why Dilute Payments from Foreign Nationals?

Payments to the Bidens were diced up and transferred to a spread of Biden associates before hitting the family’s bank accounts. These transactions often occurred within weeks of significant political action by the then-vice president in the country of the transactions’ origins.

“It’s very hard to come up with any legitimate business reason to conduct transactions in this type of complex way,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong noted during a recent Oversight Committee presser. “Why would separate payments go to Hunter Biden’s business and to himself individually? Why would Walker transfer money from his business account to his personal account before distributing the money? Why are other Biden family members receiving any of these payments?”

These are fair questions, based not on speculation but on the pure facts outlined in the Biden family bank records. If the Bidens’ multimillion-dollar “business” is legitimate, the president shouldn’t have a problem answering basic questions about the complexity of transactions from Chinese, Romanian, and other companies.

5. How Many More Biden Bank Accounts and Shell Companies Are There?

Republican investigators say they’ve looked into four of at least 12 apparently Biden-linked bank accounts and have discovered “a web” of more than 20 companies that were “formed during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.” The question of how many more are out there has yet to be determined but could be helped with clarification from the president.

6. Why Did You Repeatedly Lie about Your Knowledge of Hunter’s Dealings?

During a presidential debate in October 2020, Biden told the nation that neither he nor any of his family members profited from overseas business deals with companies connected to communist China.

That is completely false. It’s also evident that Biden knew about his family’s dealings.

In fact, visitor logs show that Hunter’s associates visited the White House more than 80 times while the elder Biden was vice president. During some of these meetings, several of Hunter’s closest assistants and business partners met with Biden and Biden aides and even attended VP briefings. Vice President Biden also welcomed Hunter on several official trips on Air Force Two, which Hunter appeared to use to secure deals that would enrich his family.

Why would the president go to great lengths to lie over and over and over about it?

7. Should Presidents’ Families Make Money off of People Associated with Our Top Foreign Enemy?

The White House maintains Biden’s hands are clean. Yet, even if Republicans do not find a direct link between the president and the millions sustaining his family’s lavish lifestyles, as corporate media repeatedly and hypocritically demand, he is at least eligible for scrutiny just for his closeness to the alleged corruption.

Biden’s approval with Americans is already low. His proximity to the national security threat his family transactions pose only serves to further hurt that low trust.

8. Have You Instructed the DOJ to Avoid Taking Action against You and Your Family?

Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C. both apparently blocked the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden, according to one IRS whistleblower. The Department of Justice also gave potentially false statements about information on the Bidens’ business in China. And the FBI, which falls under the DOJ’s authority, has refused to turn over records that allegedly implicate Biden in a bribery scheme, despite a congressional subpoena. What’s stopping the DOJ from continuing to do what’s politically favorable for the president and his family by ignoring the issue at hand? Certainly not Biden.

9. How Many Media Outlets Have You Asked to Defend You amid the Investigation?

Comer asked Democrats this week “Do you want to continue covering up the Bidens’ influence-peddling schemes when the evidence is being placed right in front of you?”

The same can be asked of the corrupt corporate media which, since before the 2020 election, offered the president and his family not scrutiny but defense. From the moment House Republicans officially launched an investigation into Biden’s corruption, the press inaccurately asserted there was “no evidence of wrongdoing.” In addition to repeatedly taking the White House’s assertions of innocence at face value, the press tried to distract from the Biden family’s scandals by conflating that corruption with the Trump family’s conduct and blacked out coverage of Comer’s ongoing supply of evidence.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Bidens Made Millions Exchanging Political Favors For Foreign Money, Then Tried To Cover It Up: Oversight Report


BY: JORDAN BOYD | MAY 10, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/10/bidens-made-millions-exchanging-political-favors-for-foreign-money-then-tried-to-cover-it-up-oversight-report/

Rep. James Comer and Oversight Committee detail Biden corruption

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

President Joe Biden and his family are at the center of an influence-peddling scheme in which they traded the patriarch’s decades of time in political offices to line their own pockets and then tried to cover up their profiteering with a myriad of complicated transactions and accounts, the House Oversight Committee confirmed during a press conference on Wednesday.

With the help of whistleblowers and congressional subpoenas, Republicans are confidently reporting that the Bidens received at least $10 million worth of diluted payments from foreign companies during and after the president’s time in the Obama White House.

These payments were diced up and transferred to a spread of Biden bank accounts within weeks of significant political action by the then-vice president in the country of the transactions’ origins.

“These complicated and seemingly unnecessary financial transactions appear to be a concerted effort to conceal the source and total amount received from the foreign companies,” the Oversight Committee’s latest memo warns.

At least nine Biden family members including the president’s son Hunter Biden, his brother James Biden, James’s wife, Hunter’s ex-girlfriend who is also his brother Beau Biden’s widow, Hunter’s ex-wife, Hunter’s current wife, and at least one grandchild and a couple of nieces and/or nephews profited from the funneling of funds.

“That’s odd,” Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said. “Most people with grandchildren, who work hard everyday, doesn’t get a wire from a foreign national or anything like that.”

The latest round of records, obtained by the Oversight Committee from four of the Bidens’ 12 apparent banks, detail yet another round of these payments — this time from China and Romania to the Bidens.

One $3 million payment came from the company of Gabriel Popoviciu, who is the subject of a criminal corruption probe in Romania, to the accounts of Biden family associate Rob Walker mere weeks after Biden, then-vice president, welcomed Romanian leaders to the White House to discuss “anti-corruption efforts” and just more than a year after Biden lectured in Romania about the threat corruption poses to national security. Those transactions were quickly funneled to Owasco (one of Hunter’s 15 companies), a Biden associate’s company, one of Hunter’s personal bank accounts, Hallie Biden, and “an unknown Biden bank account.”

The Romanian payments, the Oversight Committee alleges, further prove that the Bidens’ influence peddling operation was in full swing while Biden facilitated foreign policy discussions, especially in Eastern Europe, during the Obama administration.

The newest Romanian payment dilution strongly resembles how the Bidens appeared to use their more than a dozen companies to coordinate with Chinese nationals suspected of close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and “engage in financial deception.”

“The purpose of all these companies being created is to conceal money that the Biden family has been gaining because Joe Biden has been sitting at the upper echelon of our politics for almost five decades. That is the entire purpose here,” Rep. Byron Donalds explained on Wednesday.

These companies receiving funds from foreign nationals, the Republican asserted, serve no legitimate purpose other than enriching the president, his family, and his business associates.

“Joe Biden has no business, except his position in politics,” Donalds concluded.

“If it looks complicated and sounds complicated, it was intentionally made to be complicated so you could not follow the money,” Republican Rep. Nancy Mace added during her talking time. “What we’re trying to do today is show you how to follow the money.”

During a presidential debate in October 2020, Biden told the nation that neither he nor any of his family members profited from overseas business deals with companies connected to communist China.

“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China. I have not had—The only guy who made money from China is this guy [Donald Trump]. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China,” Biden said.

Despite the fact that the Oversight Committee has repeatedly proven Biden’s denials wrong with bank records detailing millions of dollars worth of transactions from foreign shell companies to the president’s family, the White House refuses to do anything but double down on the lie.

“House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is loudly and proudly broadcasting a press conference today to continue his long pattern of making absurd claims that President Biden has made governing decisions not in the interest of America, but of the Chinese Communist Party, using baseless claims, personal attacks, and innuendo to try to score political points,” White House spokesman Ian Sams told Fox News, after smearing the committee’s latest memo as an “absurd innuendo [that] ignores reality.”

The Oversight Committee once again rejected these claims on Wednesday and refuted them with hard evidence that several Biden family members, including Hunter, James, Hallie, an unknown “Biden,” and companies linked to the family “collectively received $1.3 million in payments” from Walker, whose company was paid millions by Chinese firm State Energy HK Limited, implicating the family in selling political favors to China.

The Biden family received the money via several bank transfers within six months of the vice president departing the Obama White House. Comer said in April that his committee still did not know who the unnamed Biden was in the China transaction because the Biden family holds so many bank accounts and LLCs.

“The Biden family needs to answer for this and the DOJ needs to get off its ass and investigate. We’ve done the work for them so that they can’t screw it up. Now, if these allegations, any of these allegations are proven true then someone with the last name Biden needs to be charged, prosecuted, and maybe spend a little time in prison,” Mace said at the conclusion of her remarks.

Last week, Republicans Sen. Chuck Grassley and Comer subpoenaed the FBI over a document they say alleges a criminal scheme between now-President Joe Biden and a “foreign national” during his years in the Obama White House.

The Oversight Committee led by Comer, who previously warned it “doesn’t look good for POTUS,” promised to continue investigating whether Biden sold out the American people to the nation’s foreign enemies to line family’s pockets.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Crime, Political

Tagged with:

Did FBI’s Censorship Liaison Hide Colleagues’ Connection to the Hunter Biden Scandal?


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 04, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/04/did-fbis-censorship-liaison-hide-colleagues-connection-to-the-hunter-biden-scandal/

guy in FBI jacket talking on the phone
A close analysis of the Missouri v. Biden court filings suggests the FBI is not being forthright in identifying the players involved

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

Evidence is mounting that both the Biden campaign and the federal government interfered in the 2020 election by running an info op to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Missouri and Louisiana have unearthed some of the most damning evidence in their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration, but a close analysis of the court filings suggests the FBI is not being forthright in identifying the players involved.

As part of the lawsuit Missouri and Louisiana’s attorneys general initiated, the states obtained limited initial discovery. Among other things, the plaintiffs obtained a list of government officials who communicated with Twitter about so-called content moderation and the deposition testimony of Elvis Chan, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco Cyber Branch.

In his deposition, Chan testified that he is one of the “primary” FBI agents who communicates with social media companies about so-called disinformation. During the 2020 election cycle, Chan coordinated meetings between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and at least seven of the major tech giants, including Meta/Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, Yahoo!/Verizon Media, and Microsoft/LinkedIn. Those meetings occurred at first quarterly and then monthly and weekly as the election neared. 

In questioning Chan, attorneys representing Missouri and Louisiana pushed him on several points related to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop. The lawyers succeeded in eliciting testimony from Chan that the FBI regularly raised the possibility of “hack and dump” operations with senior officials at the various tech companies. Those discussions included the FBI warning the companies of a potential hack-and-leak occurring shortly before the 2020 election, like the Democratic National Committee hack and WikiLeaks that occurred in 2016. 

The plaintiffs also quizzed Chan on the names of any government officials who discussed “hack-and-dump Russian operations” with the tech giants. Chan mentioned Section Chief Laura Dehmlow, “among others.” But Chan then danced around who those others were, saying he couldn’t recollect. Chan eventually identified four FBI officials that attended Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) meetings at which the FBI discussed the risk of hack-and-leak operations. These officials were Brady Olson, William Cone, Judy Chock, and Luke Giannini.

Regarding whether anyone within the FBI suggested Chan should raise the possibility of Russian hack-and-dump operations with the tech giants in 2020, Chan repeatedly said he could “not recall,” but at one point acknowledged, “They may have, but I don’t recollect at this time.”

The plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden claim Chan’s “I do not recall,” is not credible. They say it is “facially implausible that Chan does not recall whether other federal officials discussed warning platforms about ‘hack-and-leak’ operations during 2020, especially after the fiasco of censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.” Furthermore, the plaintiffs added, “the only aspect of [Chan’s] internal discussions with the FBI about hack-and-leak operations that he does not recall is whether someone from the FBI suggested or directed him to raise the issue with social-media platforms.”

Uncovering whether someone — and if so, who — directed Chan or other FBI agents to warn tech companies about a potential hack-and-leak operation is necessary to unravel the extent of the government’s info ops. Did FBI agents with knowledge of either the Hunter Biden laptop or the existence of damaging communications possessed by other governments, such as Ukraine or China, prompt Chan and others to warn of an impending hack-and-leak to protect the Biden family from any fallout?

Chan also appeared less than forthcoming when questioned about whether he had discussed the 2020 election with any of the people involved in the DNC hack. Here, an unnoticed tidbit from Chan’s deposition proves interesting: Chan testified that he served as the supervisor for the Russian cyber squad that investigated the DNC server before the San Francisco office handed it off to FBI headquarters. 

When asked whether “subsequent to the 2016 investigation of the hack of the DNC server,” he had “any communications with anyone involved in that investigation about the possibility that a hack-and-leak operation” could happen prior to the 2020 election, Chan initially provided a misleading response, saying he did “not remember discussing the potential for a 2020 election with any of the FBI personnel because they had moved on to different roles.” 

Catching Chan’s narrowing of the question from “anyone” to “FBI personnel,” the plaintiffs’ attorney quickly queried, “and people outside the FBI?” Chan then noted he would have discussed national security cyber investigations involving Russian matters with Sean Newell, a deputy chief at the DOJ National Security Division who also worked on the DNC hack. But Chan refused to say whether Newell or anyone else who worked on the DNC hack had raised the issue of a 2020 hack-and-release repeat.

Chan’s reticence raises red flags. But piecing together two exhibits filed in the Missouri v. Biden case reveals a thread to pull to start getting some answers. 

Exhibit 23 used during Chan’s deposition includes a series of emails related to the DNC hack that were filed in the special counsel’s criminal prosecution of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. In addition to Chan and Newell, the emails include names of about another dozen government agents. 

When those names are cross-checked against the names of the federal officials with whom Twitter “had meetings or discussions” about so-called content moderation issues — a list Twitter provided the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden in response to a third-party subpoena — two names overlap: Chan and Jonathan Sills.

Sills, an attorney with the FBI’s Office of General Counsel, appeared in several emails in which Sussmann and the FBI discussed logistical details for conveying a copy of the DNC server data to the FBI. Given Sills was only added to the email threads when they discussed whether the FBI would pay CrowdStrike to make a copy of the data, it seems unlikely Sills had a broader involvement in the DNC hack-and-release investigation.

But why then was Sills communicating with Twitter about so-called content moderation issues? Was it about payments to Twitter? Or something else?

Recall we still don’t know the identities of the “folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations,” as then-Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille complained in a Nov. 3, 2020, email to Jim Baker, the then-deputy general counsel for Twitter. “This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” Cardille noted.

Remember also that the FBI’s Baltimore field office provided coverage to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office out of which the Hunter Biden investigation was being run — to the extent FBI headquarters allowed.

When reached by phone in his D.C. office, Sills told The Federalist he was not authorized to comment on the matter, which is unfortunate because the people who can comment seem not to recollect the most pertinent points. A follow-up email to Sills went unanswered.

Eventually, though, these threads will all be pulled when discovery occurs in Missouri v. Biden. While some will lead nowhere, as the initial discovery proves, there is much to learn about the government’s involvement in the Hunter Biden info ops and its role in censoring speech on social media.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

GOPers Order Blinken to Turn Over All Communications with Hunter Biden After Emails Show He Lied to Congress


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MAY 02, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/02/gopers-order-blinken-to-turn-over-all-communications-with-hunter-biden-after-emails-show-he-lied-to-congress/

Blinken at a U.S.-Philippines Dialogue conference

Following revelations that he allegedly lied under oath to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is facing calls from Senate Republicans to turn over communication records related to Hunter Biden and his shady business engagements.

On Monday, Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent a letter to Blinken demanding that he turn over any and all records “referring or relating to Hunter Biden, his business dealings, or his family’s business dealings” by May 15. The request comes as part of Senate Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business ventures.

In the letter, Johnson and Grassley document a series of emails revealing how Blinken seemingly lied under oath about his prior communications with Hunter. While testifying before Congress on Dec. 22, 2020, Blinken was asked if he had any means of correspondence —including phone calls, emails, or texts — with Hunter Biden during his time as President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, to which Blinken replied, “No.”

Emails from Hunter’s laptop, however, appear to contradict Blinken’s December 2020 testimony. As documented in the Johnson-Grassley letter, Hunter emailed Blinken at his personal email address on May 22, 2015, asking if the then-deputy secretary of state was available to meet.

“I know you are impossibly busy but would like to get your advice on a couple of things,” Hunter wrote, to which Blinken replied, “Absolutely.”

Blinken sent another email to Hunter a few months later on July 22, indicating the two met in person.

“Great to… see you and catch up,” Blinken wrote. “You will love this: after you left, Marjorie, the wonderful african american woman who sits in my outer office (and used to be Colin Powell’s assistant) said to me :’He sure is pleasant on the eyes.’ Tell you wife.”

The Johnson-Grassley letter also raises questions regarding Blinken’s knowledge of Hunter’s role as a Burisma Holdings board member. Burisma Holdings is a Ukrainian gas company that paid Hunter $50,000 a month despite the president’s son having no prior energy experience. Joe Biden has claimed that while vice president, he threatened to withdraw U.S. aid if then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “didn’t fire state prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time.”

Despite Blinken claiming to have no knowledge of Hunter’s Burisma ties during his December 2020 testimony, emails from Hunter’s laptop reveal that Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, “corresponded directly with Hunter Biden (from her personal email address) in an apparent attempt to connect [Blinken] with representatives of Burisma’s U.S. lobbying firm, Blue Star Strategies.”

In what appears to be an email chain dated July 14, 2016, Hunter informed Ryan that “S” and “K” — who appear to be Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, Blue Star Strategies’ Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer — told him “they called the State Department and left a message.” In her email to Hunter, Ryan appeared to reference Blinken, writing “He didn’t get the msg” and “He said if we can get him their numbers he can call them late afternoon DC time tmrw.”

While this specific email exchange doesn’t name Blinken, Johnson and Grassley noted that State Department documents obtained during their inquiry “make it clear that [Blinken was] concurrently trying to connect with representatives from Blue Star Strategies.”

“It seems highly unlikely that you had no idea of Hunter Biden’s association with Burisma while your wife was apparently coordinating with Hunter Biden to potentially connect you with Burisma’s U.S. representatives,” Johnson and Grassley wrote. “Because your testimony is inaccurate, Congress and the public must rely on your records as the source for information about your dealings with Hunter Biden.”

These revelations follow testimony from an ex-CIA official, who claimed that Blinken, during his time as a Biden campaign adviser, was the catalyst for the creation of a debunked letter from former intelligence officials that falsely claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

MORE ARTICLES

Category:

Crime, Political

Tagged with:

Rep. James Comer: Investigation into Biden Corruption ‘Doesn’t Look Good for POTUS’


BY: JORDAN BOYD | APRIL 04, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/04/rep-james-comer-investigation-into-biden-corruption-doesnt-look-good-for-potus/

James Comer on Biden family corruption
‘This investigation is moving along at a lot faster pace, I think, than most people would have predicted,’ Comer said.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

In the House Oversight Committee’s (HOC) latest update on its investigation into the corruption of President Joe Biden, Chairman James Comer announced several former Biden family associates have eagerly agreed to speak with Republicans about how they were “left out to dry” by the Bidens.

“It doesn’t look good for @POTUS,” Comer warned during a Fox News segment on Monday.

Comer said that the HOC is in discussions with four associates who have inside knowledge about the foreign dealings the Bidens made with several of America’s political enemies. This, combined with potential testimony from two other associates who are currently tied up in litigation concerning their roles in Biden family businesses, could give the committee proof that the White House is compromised.

“If you look at everyone who’s ever been in business with Biden, whether it be Hunter Biden or Joe Biden, none of them ended well, none of the businesses ended well. Most of the businesses never got started off the ground,” Comer said. “Any money that was transferred in from China or adversaries around the world ended up in the Bidens’ back pockets.”

Now, Comer said, the HOC also has possession of the Biden family’s “suspicious activity” reports from the Treasury Department and subpoenaed the family’s bank records which will expedite Republicans’ investigation significantly.

The HOC confirmed in March that several Biden family members, including Hunter Biden, James Biden, Hallie Biden, an unknown “Biden,” and companies linked to the family “collectively received $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to Rob Walker, a Biden family associate.” Within six months of Vice President Joe Biden leaving the White House and after several bank transfers, the Bidens received the money.

Comer said the HOC still did not know who the unnamed Biden was in the China transaction because the Biden family holds so many bank accounts and LLCs.

“That right there is a red flag,” Comer said. “That’s one reason they got so many bank violations. If they’re in a legitimate business, why do you have to have so many different LLCs, and why, when China sends you a wire, do you have to send it through one, two, or even three LLCs to launder it before then hits a Biden bank account? This whole thing stinks to high heaven.”

Despite this, Comer said that once the HOC gains access to the LLCs, it can assess the Biden family’s bookkeeping habits.

“It’ll be interesting to see how and if they paid any taxes on this revenue that was coming in from our adversaries around the world,” Comer said. “What all did they write off?”

He also expressed optimism about the speed of the HOC’s investigation thus far.

“This investigation is moving along at a lot faster pace, I think, than most people would have predicted,” Comer said.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Law, Political

Tagged with:

Biden Nominates Federal Prosecutor with Massive Conflict of Interest Over Biden Family Corruption


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 22, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/22/biden-nominated-a-lawyer-for-pennsylvania-u-s-attorney-who-has-a-big-conflict-of-interest/

White House
There’s a serious potential conflict of interest given the nominee’s involvement in investigating a business run by the president’s brother.

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

A health-care executive who claims Jim Biden defrauded him was interviewed multiple times by the lawyer Joe Biden just nominated to serve as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. According to two sources, while the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office is aware of the allegations, that office is not investigating the potential fraud, leaving the matter solely in the hands of the conflicted-future U.S. attorney.

On Monday, President Biden named Eric Olshan, currently an assistant U.S. attorney in the Pittsburgh office, to fill the vacancy left open when former U.S. Attorney Cindy Chung was confirmed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

As I previously reported, Chung, whom President Biden had nominated to the federal appellate court, had been overseeing the criminal investigation into the bankrupt health-care business Americore—a business Jim Biden allegedly siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from to finance repairs for his beach house. Jim Biden is the current U.S. president’s brother.

Now, President Biden seeks to replace Chung with Olshan, raising serious concerns about a potential conflict of interest given Olshan’s involvement in the investigation of the Jim Biden-connected business, Americore.

Olshan had previously served as the lead investigator in the criminal case against Daniel Hurt. Hurt pleaded guilty to soliciting and obtaining kickbacks from the rural Pennsylvania hospital Ellwood City Medical Center, or “ECMC,” which Americore owned. ECMC had allegedly received some $25 million in fraudulent Medicare reimbursements.

According to an affidavit signed under oath by ECMC’s former CEO, Grant White, the president’s brother directed White to loan him (Jim Biden) approximately $400,000 to repay a past-due personal loan secured by Jim Biden’s Florida beach house. Jim Biden allegedly later pulled additional funds from ECMC, totaling about $250,000, but he would only repay about $25,000 to the medical center. ECMC would later go bankrupt and close, prompting a federal investigation.

To date, no charges have been filed related to Jim Biden’s alleged misappropriation of funds from Americore. Nor has anything come from the additional accusations made by Michael Frey, the president and CEO of the Tennessee-based Diverse Medical Management, against Jim Biden and his business partners.

Frey claims Jim Biden represented himself as a “principal” for Americore—even providing him a business card—and then entered into a scheme to defraud him. According to Frey, Jim Biden and his business partners promised to provide capital to implement Frey’s business model for rejuvenating failing rural hospitals.

But after Frey worked with various medical groups to put the plan in action, Jim Biden and his partners reneged on their agreement, he says. That left Frey holding the bag, forcing him to cover costs of about $1 million until he could unwind the various deals that had been put into motion.

The Tennessee business executive sued Jim Biden and the others allegedly involved in the scheme, before entering into a confidential settlement agreement with the defendants. The defendants breached the deal, however, according to Frey.

Frey plans to enforce the settlement agreement but told The Federalist he first intends to retrieve copies of the thousands of text and email messages exchanged by the parties, hoping those documents will assist in his efforts. Frey says the text and email messages will confirm his allegations against Jim Biden and the others involved in the deal.

Frey’s accusations against Jim Biden are particularly concerning because Frey discussed his allegations and evidence with an FBI agent from the Pittsburgh field office, as well as with Olshan.

“I spoke with Olshan both before and after Joe Biden became president,” Frey told The Federalist. They last spoke about six to eight months ago, Frey noted, adding that Olshan stated his office would reach back out to Frey. To date, however, he has heard nothing more.

Frey also told The Federalist he has never spoken with anyone from the Delaware or Baltimore offices. This proves significant because the U.S. attorney for Delaware, David C. Weiss, is handling the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and the documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop implicate Jim Biden in some of those deals.

Further, Weiss’s status as a holdover from the Trump administration has given Attorney General Merrick Garland the only cover he has from claims that a conflict of interest necessitates the appointment of a special counsel. But according to Frey, he has never spoken with anyone from the Delaware office. Nor has anyone from the Baltimore FBI field office—the FBI office covering Delaware-related investigations—contacted Frey, he says.

A person familiar with the Delaware investigation confirmed for The Federalist that while the U.S. attorney’s office there is familiar with Jim Biden and his wife Sara’s connections to the Americore case, the Delaware office is not investigating the matter. Rather, the investigation into Frey’s accusations was being handled out of the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Frey also told The Federalist that members of the House Oversight Committee have asked him to testify before Congress and he is open to doing so. “Somebody has to stop them from ruining people’s lives,” Frey said, referring to Jim Biden and his partners. “What they did to the $12-an-hour employees at these hospitals is a travesty.” 

Whether Jim Biden and his partners hold any criminal responsibility related to Americore’s raiding of rural hospitals is unclear. What is clear, however, is that with Joe Biden appointing Olshan to serve as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the entire Americore investigative record should be turned over to the Delaware U.S. attorney, stat.

The Federalist asked Olshan whether he would recuse from the investigation and refer the matter to the Delaware office now that Joe Biden has nominated him to serve as the next U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania. Olshan did not respond to the inquiry.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Despite Biden’s Explicit Denials, New York Times Confirms POTUS Involvement in Family Business


BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 12, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/12/despite-bidens-explicit-denials-new-york-times-confirms-potus-involvement-in-family-business/

Biden family during inauguration
The New York Times’ ‘nothing to see here’ approach to the Biden family business is crumbling in the publication’s own pages.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

To this day, President Joe Biden denies his long history of involvement in the lucrative Biden family business, but the corrupt corporate media are finally admitting the president’s participation in the financial dealings spearheaded by his son Hunter Biden.

The New York Times published an article this week claiming, “a close look at [Hunter’s] story shows that it differs in important ways from the narrative promoted by Republicans,” who, with their newfound majority in the House, are investigating the Biden family’s “deliberate, repeated deception of the American people, abuse of the executive branch for personal gain, [and] use of government power to obstruct the investigation.”

The article merely acknowledges what conservative media outlets have reported for years about Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s overseas business dealings. Yes, then-Vice President Biden, who was tasked with “overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine,” met with Hunter’s “main point of contact” at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma at a charity dinner event, the NYT confessed, but waved off Biden’s visit with Pozharskyi as the U.S. leader’s attempt “to spend time” with his addict son.

Followers of the unraveling Biden family corruption story have already known for over a year and a half that Pozharskyi confirmed this interaction in an email thanking Hunter for “giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together.”

Biden, The New York Times conceded in a paragraph buried deep in the article, also met with Hunter’s Chinese business partners. He even authored an optimistic note to Devon Archer, arguably Hunter’s closest associate, on White House letterhead to congratulate him on snuggling up to China’s then-head Hu Jintao.

The Times also reported that Biden “met regularly with Eric Schwerin, his son’s business manager,” and even handed over management of the then-VP’s personal finances. Schwerin, the Times admitted, would occasionally “pay a bill for Vice President Biden out of one of his son’s accounts and then assure that he was repaid.” Biden’s ties to Schwerin are no surprise considering that he reportedly rubbed shoulders with more than a dozen of Hunter’s business associates, sometimes in the West Wing of the White House. Yet The New York Times argues that the 2010 emails evidencing the existence of these shared accounts and entanglement of finances shouldn’t matter because anonymous sources reportedly close to the Biden family said Hunter and his dad never “had joint bank accounts or direct access to each others’ money.”

Over and over and over and over and over, Biden and his White House denied not just wrongdoing, but an association of any kind with Hunter’s money-making schemes. Apparently at the behest of the FBI, the regime’s allies in the corporate media have long accepted and helped amplify Biden’s lies, forming a bogus “fact-checking” and election-meddling apparatus for tech giants to censor anyone who exposed Biden family corruption.

Now, as mountains of evidence point to Biden’s deep ties to activity that’s at best unethical and possibly illegal, the Times, even in admitting Biden’s involvement, is once more writing off Hunter as “a man battling with personal demons against the background of family tragedy,” with his dad merely getting caught in the crossfire. In predictable spin, the NYT instead tries to make the story about Republicans, whom it says merely “intend to intensify their scrutiny of Hunter Biden in a bid to inflict damage on his father as he prepares for his likely 2024 re-election bid.”

An inquiry into the Bidens, however, is long overdue and an unsurprising development given the GOP’s newly acquired majority in the lower chamber. House Republicans’ investigation seeks to finally expose how the president’s proximity to his son’s twisted and likely illicit bargaining may have compromised the security of the United States. After all, Hunter didn’t just exchange access to his father, the then-second-highest executive officer in the United States, for cash to fund the family’s lavish lifestyle. He was paid off by oligarchs and businessmen in countries with a vested interest in meddling with U.S. affairs.

The New York Times’ attempt to write that off as “complex” is just further evidence of its allegiance to the Biden administration instead of the truth.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

FBI Office Investigating Hunter Biden Sent Twitter Numerous Censorship Requests Right Before 2020 Election


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | DECEMBER 27, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/27/fbi-office-investigating-hunter-biden-sent-twitter-numerous-censorship-requests-right-before-2020-election/

Hunter Biden in blue shirt sitting at a table for ABC News interview
When the bureau’s own former general counsel calls the FBI’s conduct ‘odd,’ it’s clear who’s discrediting the agency: It isn’t conspiracy theorists — it’s the FBI.

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

MORE ARTICLES

Emails released on Saturday as part of the latest dump of the “Twitter Files” reveal that the week before the 2020 presidential election, the FBI field office investigating Hunter Biden sent multiple censorship requests to Twitter — so many in fact, a top attorney for the tech giant found it “odd.” This blockbuster detail from the weekend came mere days after the FBI issued a statement framing coverage of the “Twitter Files” as “misinformation” being peddled by “conspiracy theorists.”

The FBI has “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations,” then-Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille stressed in a Nov. 3, 2020, email to Jim Baker, the then-deputy general counsel for Twitter. “This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” Cardille continued, before telling Baker to let her know if he had any other questions.” 

Less than an hour later, Baker responded to Cardille, noting it was “odd” that the FBI is “searching for violations of our policies.” 

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi published these emails as part of a 50-something Christmas Eve “Twitter Files” thread that he remarked showed “the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”

The entire thread is newsworthy, but that FBI agents in both the Baltimore field office and at FBI headquarters were running keyword searches for supposed Twitter violations proves hugely significant because both offices were involved in the Hunter Biden investigation. 

While the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office is — and was at the time of the 2020 election — handling the investigation into Hunter Biden, reportedly for potential money laundering and tax crimes, there is no separate Delaware FBI field office. Rather, the Baltimore FBI field office covers all of Delaware for the bureau and thus supported (and continues to support) the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office in its investigation of Hunter Biden. 

We also know from multiple FBI whistleblowers that FBI headquarters entangled itself in the Hunter Biden probe: In July 2022, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, announced that “multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions,” had claimed that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.”

“The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.

Given the involvement of both Baltimore FBI and FBI headquarters in the investigation of Hunter Biden — and the latter’s attempt to shut down the probe — the revelation that “some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ” were “doing keyword searches for violations,” suggests the FBI undertook a full-court press to interfere in the 2020 election.

Previously released “Twitter Files” and statements from Twitter and Facebook established the FBI lied to the tech giants, representing the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation and prompting the censorship of the Biden-family scandal mere weeks before the 2020 election. Internal Twitter communications also revealed that the night before the New York Post published emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, “the FBI used a private communications channel to send 10 documents to a top Twitter executive.” 

The “Twitter Files” also exposed “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary of the FBI,” as Taibbi explained in an earlier thread. The “Twitter Files” Taibbi previously reported showed that from “January 2020 to November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth.” Those communications indicated “agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.”

These earlier threads, however, all focused on either communications coming from the San Francisco FBI field office or discussed the monthly and then weekly meetings between Twitter and the federal government’s Foreign Influence Task Force, or FITF. As Taibbi noted, the FBI greatly expanded the number of agents assigned to the FITF following the 2016 election, with the task force swelling to 80 agents.”

With FBI San Francisco and the FITF already liaisoning with Twitter, why then would the Baltimore field office and FBI headquarters have any involvement in communicating with Twitter? And as Saturday’s emails reveal, those officers were not merely passing on information they received, they were, according to a Twitter legal executive, running “keyword” searches — something even Baker, who was previously general counsel for the FBI, found “odd.” 

And the Baltimore field office and FBI headquarters conducted these “keyword” searches and shared the results with Twitter for one reason only: to prompt Twitter to censor the speech the week before the 2020 presidential election. 

“Odd” doesn’t even begin to capture the situation — which, given the connection between those two FBI offices and the Hunter Biden investigation, suggests a new wing to the Big Tech scandal: one in which FBI agents proactively sought out people and speech to censor for the benefit their politician of choice.

Ironically, the Wednesday before Taibbi broke this latest news, the FBI issued a statement claiming that “the correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. … It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

When the bureau’s own former general counsel calls the FBI’s conduct “odd,” it’s pretty clear who is discrediting the agency: It isn’t conspiracy theorists — it’s the FBI.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud