December 08, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian
Yesterday, Hunter Biden was finally indicted — on tax charges. Here is a copy of the indictment, filed by Special Counsel David Weiss in the Central District of California, and signed by his principal deputy Leo Wise. The nine counts include three felonies. The indictment makes for moderately entertaining reading. The gist is that Hunter Biden, rather than paying taxes of about $1.4 million that he acknowledged he owed for years 2016-19, instead “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle.” Well, we all knew that.
A more important question is why it has taken until now to produce an indictment for crimes that were this obvious and on which the statute of limitations was running. One theory is that the indictment is a signal that the Democratic establishment has finally concluded that Joe Biden is expendable. I don’t buy that theory. The better hypothesis is that the indictment is a last-ditch effort to protect Joe by diverting attention to the only crimes of Hunter in which Joe isn’t fundamentally implicated. From the New York Times today:
Republicans immediately hailed the indictment . . . as a validation of their inquiry. . . . Yet in the most critical respect, the indictment is far from helpful to the Republicans: It never mentions President Biden, not even indirectly, and provides no evidence linking the misdeeds of the son to the father.
So where are the bribery charges? Those are at least as clear and obvious as the tax charges. The difference is that they would inherently implicate the President. The failure to bring them shows that our Department of “Justice” continues to view its role as protecting the politically-favored incumbent from clear and serious criminality, while simultaneously prosecuting his main political rival in two separate cases of highly questionable merit.
For background on the still-unbrought bribery charges against Hunter that would inherently implicate Joe, see the first ten parts of this series, “The Bidens: “Stone Cold Crooked.” The series focuses mostly on the facts surrounding Hunter’s $1 million per year directorship at Burisma and the firing of the Ukrainian General Prosecutor in 2016 (although there are facts implicating the Bidens in bribery involving other countries including China, Romania and Kazakhstan).
The gist of the Burisma/Ukraine facts implicating the Bidens in bribery can be summarized in a brief timeline (all taken from the previous posts in this series that can be found at the link):
In March 2014 Vice President Joe Biden became the “point man” for U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine, including controlling U.S. aid to that country. This was immediately after the previous Russia-aligned Ukraine government of Viktor Yanukovich had fallen, and Vladimir Putin had just invaded Crimea. During the Yanukovich era, Burisma, headed by Russia-aligned oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, had somehow been granted the lion’s share of Ukraine’s valuable natural gas leases.
In May 2014 Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board of directors at a pay rate of $1 million per year.
In early 2015 Viktor Shokin was appointed General Prosecutor of Ukraine, and began investigating Burisma for corruption.
A large inter-agency group of U.S. bureaucrats was set up to evaluate whether Ukraine under its new government had made sufficient progress against corruption to warrant approval of a new U.S. aid package without conditions. In a memorandum reflected in an email chain of October 1, 2015, the inter-agency group concluded that Ukraine had made sufficient progress to earn the aid.
In a November 2, 2015 email chain between Vadym Pozharsky of Burisma and Hunter Biden, Pozharsky stated that his “only concern” was that they [Burisma and Hunter] were on the “same page re our final goals,” with the Burisma executive confirming that the “the ultimate purpose” was “to close down” “any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine.” “Nikolay” refers to Burisma’s chairman, Mykola Zlochevsky.
On December 4, 2015 a Burisma board meeting was held in Dubai. Hunter Biden’s partner and co-board member Devon Archer testified before Congress that during a dinner after the board meeting, Hunter along with Zlochevsky and Pozharsky stepped out to “call Washington.”
Joe Biden then traveled to Ukraine on December 8-9, 2015. During that trip Joe Biden suddenly imposed as a condition of approving some $1 billion of U.S. aid to Ukraine that prosecutor Shokin be fired. In a widely viewed video clip, Joe Biden has publicly admitted to making this demand at that time.
Shokin was then fired in approximately February 2016. All investigations of Burisma ended.
Despite the damning timeline, Biden has so far (when he has deigned to speak about this matter) taken the position that in demanding the firing of Shokin he was only carrying out official U.S. policy that had been devised by others. New information since my earlier posts now completely undermines that narrative. Two days ago on December 6 Mark Tapscott had a piece in the Epoch Times with the headline “VP Biden Linking Ukraine Loan to Prosecutor's Firing Surprised State Department Officials, Emails Show.” The piece indicates that the House Judiciary Committee under Chair Jim Jordan has made some additional emails available for review by the Epoch Times. Those emails show that the State Department staff was actually blindsided by the sudden Biden demand for the firing of the prosecutor as a condition of the aid:
Up until [VP Biden’s ultimatum demanding the firing of the prosecutor as a condition of U.S. aid], the U.S. hadn't made Ukraine's receipt of the IMF loan guarantees conditional on Mr. Shokin's removal. Briefing materials reviewed by the vice president during his December 2015 flight to Ukraine included planning for him to sign the U.S. agreement to back the IMF loans, with no reference to firing Mr. Shokin.
The Epoch Times quotes senior White House National Security aid Eric Ciaramella in a January 21, 2016 email as follows respecting the Biden demand that Ukraine fire Shokin:
"Yikes, . . . I don't recall this coming up in our meeting with them on Tuesday."
Also on December 6, Miranda Devine of the New York Post describes President Biden’s response to questions from a Post reporter that day. Steve Nelson of the Post managed to get a question to Biden as to “why you interacted with so many of your son and brother’s foreign business associates?” Biden’s response was “I’m not going to comment on that. I did not. And it’s just a bunch of lies.”
Is that all Biden can say in his defense? As Devine points out:
The evidence already amassed by the three congressional committees working on the impeachment inquiry is overwhelming. It comes in the form of subpoenaed bank records, sworn witness testimony, emails, text messages, WhatsApp messages, voicemails and photographs.
So far, no Democrat in Congress or other office, no member of the legacy press, no one in the Justice Department or FBI is breaking ranks on this. Will that really continue through the election?
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