The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (5)

July 27, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

With every passing day it becomes more and more clear that we have a President who has been for years, and may still be, in simplest terms, on the take. Using family members as fronts, and the prerogatives of elected office as bait, he has presided over a bribe-collection business that has leveraged U.S. foreign policy and foreign aid to rake in millions for the clan, mostly or entirely from business interests aligned with the worst of our adversaries on the foreign stage.

In your wildest dreams, could you ever have imagined that the U.S. presidency could sink so low?

And yet, even as the known facts become more and more definitive, and the remaining potential defenses more and more implausible, there continues to be complete unanimity among senior Democratic Party officeholders and their press supporters in the ongoing defense of the President. Is there any set of facts that could cause a few to break ranks?

One reason I haven’t written more about this subject recently is that most of the facts were out there, and the crookedness of the Biden clan was obvious, really from the time the Burisma matter first broke in the fall of 2019. During October 2019, I wrote four posts on the subject in quick succession: “The Bidens: ‘Stone Cold Crooked’” on October 6, 2019; “The Bidens: ‘Stone Cold Crooked’ (2)” also on October 6, 2019; “The Bidens: ‘Stone Cold Crooked’ (3)” on October 27, 2019; and “The Bidens: ‘Stone Cold Crooked’ (4)” on October 29, 2019.

So rather than re-invent the wheel, let me review where we were in October 2019, and then consider what is new in the past few weeks.

The very first of those posts, on October 6, 2019, discussed key facts that had recently come out, including: that Hunter Biden had taken a position as director of Ukrainian energy company Burisma in April 2014 at a pay of $1 million per year; that that appointment came immediately after Burisma’s president (Zlochevsky) and his patron the Russian-aligned President of Ukraine (Yanukovich) had fled to Russia in something called the “Euromaidan” revolution; and that Hunter’s appointment was also immediately after Vice President Joe Biden had been named “point man” for U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine; that a new President of Ukraine (Poroshenko) then took office in June 2014, and a new prosecutor (Shokin) had been appointed, who was investigating Burisma; and that Joe Biden in early 2016 had arranged to get the prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold vital U.S. aid to Ukraine, and had bragged on a video about that.

My comment at the time:

The truth is that that list of facts would be, in any courtroom trial, sufficient proof that the Bidens are “stone cold crooked.” . . . [Biden] allowed his son to take a position at crazy pay that everyone would view as protection money, and meanwhile the dad would be making the calls about U.S. policy and U.S. aid in the billions of dollars with a direct effect on the son’s position. The whole reason that a high official should not get himself into such a conflict of interest position is that, when an important decision is made that just happens to massively help the son, nobody is going to believe that helping the son was other than the main motive.

The October 2019 posts quoted from various pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and other sources seeking to defend Biden on the basis that his motives were pure since various (unnamed) sources had alleged that the prosecutor that Biden got fired was himself corrupt. My comment:

[T]here’s a right way to do this. First, Joe Biden needs to tell Hunter that he must resign from the Burisma board today if not sooner; and Hunter must in fact resign. Second, Joe Biden needs to get the next highest ranking available official of the U.S. government (in this case, perhaps Secretary of State John Kerry; but if Kerry was conflicted by his own step-son’s involvement with Burisma, then somebody else — maybe Secretary of Defense) to do the dirty work of telling the Ukrainians that they’re not getting their aid until Shokin is fired. If Joe Biden had followed this protocol, he would mostly have obviated any allegation of corruption, at least relating to the Shokin firing. (There could still be a question of what else Hunter was getting the $600K/yr for.) But Biden didn’t do this. As a result, Hunter got about $2 million more than he would have gotten if Joe had followed these obvious steps.

Over the course of succeeding months, it emerged that Joe Biden’s main defense to the corruption allegation was going to be that the business deals were only Hunter’s as a private citizen, and Joe knew nothing about them and had never discussed them with Hunter. This defense never made any sense — and yet was taken up by the entire leftist press as some kind of gospel. I discussed this preposterous defense in a March 31, 2022 post titled “The Rules About Corruption Just Don’t Apply To The Bidens.” Among other things, I covered how the Justice Department treated payments to sons of government officials when the payees were not named Biden, using as an example a recent prosecution of JP Morgan:

For example, in the early 2000s the investment bank JP Morgan Chase in its operations in China had a program of hiring the sons and daughters of powerful Chinese government and business officials in positions of junior analysts. . . . According to the WSJ, the bank’s idea was that by hiring the offspring of top executives, it would get a leg up in winning investment banking business from those state-controlled firms. The U.S. Justice Department was not amused. There is no mention in the WSJ piece of whether the parents/officials in question either “personally benefited” from the JPM jobs or “knew the details” of the kids’ involvement. But Justice’s position was that the jobs were inherently a corrupt effort to influence the parents. In November 2016 Justice extracted a settlement of $264 million from JPM.

Given this context, the revelations of the past few weeks, while meaningful, really only fill in a few blanks in a story where the key pieces have been known for years. For example, there was the FBI FD-1023 form, released by Senator Grassley on July 20. That form reported on a conversation between an unnamed FBI confidential source and Burisma’s Zlochevsky, where Zlovchevsky clearly admitted that he viewed the payments to Hunter as protection money, and said he paid $5 million to Hunter and also $5 million to Joe, the latter through a chain of banks so complex that it would take years to unravel. Next up is prospective congressional testimony of Hunter’s erstwhile business partner Devon Archer, expected to testify that Joe personally participated in numerous conference calls as to Hunter’s business dealings, thus belying the contention that he knew nothing about them. Finally, we can await the production of further bank records detailing times and dates of payments to various Bidens and/or Biden shell companies.

For me, these thing are mainly valuable for keeping the story in the news day after day. But the essential corruption is definitively established.

Back in August 1974, shortly after the Supreme Court ordered the disclosure of the White House tapes thought to have recorded conversations incriminating to President Nixon, a delegation of Republicans from Congress visited Nixon to tell him that they could not support him in the coming impeachment. A few days later, Nixon resigned. Maybe it’s just me, but I think the Biden corruption scandal — taking payments of millions of dollars from Russian-aligned Ukrainians and from the Chinese — is far worse than the Watergate burglary as a political scandal. But so far, no Democrat in Congress or in the press has broken ranks. Maybe when the bank records come down that might change.