Let's Talk About Biden Corruption

November 27, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

It was back in September 2019 that there sprang into the news the story of Hunter Biden and his million-dollar-per-year gig as a board member for Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Hunter’s gig began in April 2014 — shortly after his dad Joe, then sitting VP, took on the role of “point man” as to U.S. policy toward Ukraine. The gig then ran until some time in 2017 — shortly after Joe had left office. It just happened that Burisma had gotten the lion’s share of Ukraine oil and gas lease deals under ousted (and Russia-aligned) President Viktor Yanukovich, and had strong reason to fear prosecution under a new Ukrainian President and chief prosecutor. In early 2016 VP Joe Biden got the new prosecutor fired, and later was caught on tape bragging about it.

Essentially the entire story about these events in the state media since 2019 has been the story of minimization and/or suppression of the facts and their significance. The suppression went to a whole new level a year later, in October 2020, when the New York Post broke the story of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that had been abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware. This was now just a few weeks before the 2020 election, with Joe Biden the Democratic candidate for President. The laptop contained extensive emails and other documents detailing Hunter’s business dealings in places where his father had major influence on U.S. foreign policy, including not just Ukraine, but also China, Kazakhstan, and other countries, as well as father Joe’s involvement in same.

Promptly, some 50 former U.S. intelligence officials issued a letter stating that the laptop had all the “earmarks” of “a Russian information operation.” The state media adopted that line as gospel. Most shamefully, all of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (Google) explicitly suppressed the story by either banning any information about it or minimizing its distribution on their platforms.

Well, perhaps the time has finally come when this story can be discussed. Probably the single biggest change has been the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. On November 23 a Twitter user with the handle “ALX” called upon Musk to “make public all internal discussions about the decision to censor the @NYPost’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 Election.” On November 24 (Thanksgiving) Musk responded: “This is necessary to restore public trust.” As of this writing the promised disclosure has not yet occurred. But when it does occur, it could be quite the bombshell.

On November 21, CBS News released the results of an expert analysis it had commissioned as to the contents of the laptop. The conclusion: the contents showed “no evidence of tampering or fabrication.” Thanks, CBS. Funny, but the New York Post had reached that conclusion in October 2020. The Daily Mail had reached that conclusion in March 2021. The New York Times and Washington Post both quietly admitted that the laptop was real in March 2022. Why now, CBS? Perhaps it’s a combination of the election just having passed, the new Republican Congress talking about an investigation, and Musk about to make disclosures that will yet further embarrass any member of the press that continues with the disinformation.

Now that discussion of Biden corruption is going to be officially allowed, permit me to reprise some prior Manhattan Contrarian coverage of the subject. For starters, there is “The Bidens: ‘Stone Cold Crooked’” from October 6, 2019; “The Bidens: ‘Stone Cold Crooked’ (2)” also from October 6, 2019; “The Bidens: ‘Stone Cold Crooked’ (3)” from October 27, 2019; and “The Bidens: ‘Stone Cold Crooked’ (4)” from October 29, 2019.

And then there’s this post from March 31, 2022 (occasioned by the belated concessions in the NYT and WaPo), titled “The Rules About Corruption Just Don’t Apply To The Bidens.” Both the Times and WaPo had spun their stories as if the evidence of corruption applied only to Hunter and not to Joe. Here were a few of my comments:

The funny thing is that outside the sole exception of the Biden family, large payments to the children of powerful government officials by those with interests potentially affected by those officials’ actions are universally understood to be corrupt efforts to influence the officials. In cases involving people other than the Bidens, whether the official/parent “personally benefited” from the payments or “knew details” of the transactions are considered completely irrelevant.

I drew the analogy to a federal prosecution of JP Morgan that had taken place in 2016, where the allegation was that JPM had systematically hired children of high Chinese officials in order to gain influence and win deal work.

According to [reporting in] 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.

Here’s the quote from the head of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department at the time (this was during the Obama administration!):

“The so-called Sons and Daughters Program was nothing more than bribery by another name,” said Leslie Caldwell, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.

Don’t expect the Justice Department to apply the same standard to Joe and Hunter Biden. But at least a little discussion of the subject will be healthy.