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And yet, this shape-shifting fiend turns up again now in the Biden family global bribery matter, of all things. See if you can follow the convoluted tale coming out of Dybbuk Central a.k.a. Ukraine and the FBI. You may already know that in May, 2014, R. Hunter Biden, son of then-vice president Joe Biden, was appointed to the board of the Ukrainian natgas company Burisma, where he was paid $80,000-a-month for his expertise (he had none) in the global gas industry. As it happened, at exactly the same time Veep Joe Biden was appointed as then-President Barack Obama’s “point man” in Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan Coup, engineered by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the CIA, that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
By and by, Ukraine elected a new American-friendly president, Petro Poroshenko. Burisma was owned by an oligarch name of Mykola Zlochevsky. Apparently, the $80-K-a-month for Hunter Biden was not enough. The friendly American veep, Joe Biden, pressed Burisma’s Zlochevsky to provide $5-million payment each to Hunter and himself for additional Biden family services in Ukraine. ...
And, by the way, subsequent phone call recordings dating from December 19, 2016, are now circulating freely in the US of then-Ukraine President Poroshenko thanking then-Veep Joe Biden for getting the US DOJ off the case. As reported by Stephen McIntyre on Twitter (@ClimateAudit): Biden re-assured Poroshenko that the FBI had “stopped” and there was “no reason [for FBI] to talk to him again.” Biden undertook to “check that [with FBI] and confirm that with you.”
So fast forward to the present moment. Senator Chuck Grassley made a speech on the Senate Floor this week revealing the existence of all these tape recordings that detail $5-million plus $5-million bribes from Mr. Zlochevsky to the Biden family. Podcaster Dan Bongino has played them on his show several times this past week (episodes 2020, 2031, and 2032). Go there and listen for yourself.
Eighty-three percent of voters believe the FBI should make public its informant file that alleges President Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma Holdings, a recent Harvard/HarrisX poll found.
The poll asked respondents, “Do you think that the FBI report from an informant alleging that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe while he was Vice President should be made public or kept secret by the FBI?”
Overall, 83 percent said the FBI should make the file public, while only 17 percent say it should be kept secret.
Among partisans, 74 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of independents, and 92 percent of Republicans said the file should be public.
TAIPEI — Secretary of State Antony Blinken sparked controversy this weekend by voicing opposition to Taiwan independence. In response, Taiwan is kicking itself for not bribing the Bidens as was done by Ukraine and others.
By clarifying its stance on Taiwan, the Biden Administration has drawn a hard line against China, forcing the Communist country to keep doing whatever it wants to do without any repercussions.
"With a going rate of $5 million per Biden, it would have been a steal," said Taiwan's Foreign Minister while downing another shot of Kaoliang. "I'm soooo stupid!"
The inebriated diplomat continued, "I even called Hunter Biden today and offered incredible sums of money for protection, but the only response I got was a loud snorting noise and some ramblings about getting off with a misdemeanor."
At publishing time, the U.S. had finally come to the aid of Taiwan's fight for independence with a check for $60 billion after Taiwan elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy honorary President.
President Biden and his team stayed in contact with foreign leaders. White House and State Department officials spoke to the other major democracies, known as the Group of Seven; they added India and Australia as members of the “Quad.” They consulted with NATO and the European Union.
The message in all these calls, I’m told, was “cool it.” Don’t make the crisis in Russia more dangerous by seeking to intervene or profit from the disarray. This message was focused especially on Ukraine; U.S. officials stressed their desire that Kyiv not seem to take advantage of the strife in Russia in ways that might spiral into an even more dangerous moment. The Ukrainians, from what we can see, followed that advice.
🔥 Biden confidante Devon Archer testified in a close-door hearing in the Biden Bribery investigation yesterday. As we work through this convoluted story, and what it means, remember that the democrats (plus Mitt Romney) impeached Trump for just asking Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s involvement in Ukraine. So, they set the standard. The Republicans now have vastly more grounds to bring impeachment.
First, who is Devon Archer? Like all the star-crossed gentlemen found haplessly hurtling in the Biden orbit, Devon Archer is, shall we say, an interesting character. Archer, 58, has been variously described as Hunter’s best friend, business partner, and consigliere. He offers impeccable beltway blue-blood bona fides; Archer attended a prestigious prep school, got his B.A. at Columbia, and holds a law degree from Harvard.
More significantly, after corrupt Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holding’s board opened up to other influence seekers, I mean experts in the European energy sector, Archer joined that energy company’s board of directors along with Hunter, presumably accruing a vast unearned salary as well.
Hunter, Archer, and John Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz co-founded dodgy “investment firm” Rosemont Seneca.
The relationship may have soured when in 2018, Archer was convicted by a federal jury for a fraudulent scheme to use “tribal bonds” to defraud the Oglala Sioux Tribe and its investors. However, in 2019, U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams overturned his conviction after ruling that the evidence the jury used was insufficient to support the charges. The case against Archer was conveniently dismissed, and he was temporarily acquitted of all charges.
Rumors suggest Archer blames the Bidens for the prosecution, or for not protecting him from being prosecuted.
(Incidentally, Judge Abrams, a Yale graduate and Obama appointee, has been in the news twice recently. First, when Trump’s New York criminal case had a brief federal moment, there was a short-lived controversy over whether the judge should recuse herself, since she’s married to Greg Andres, who worked on Mueller’s Russiagate investigation. In the second high-profile story, Judge Abrams recently recused herself from Sam Bankman-Fried’s case, since her hubby Greg also worked as a lawyer for FTX. It’s a small club.)
In 2020, after Judge Abrams abruptly overruled the jury and sprung Archer, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Abrams, and reinstated Archer’s conviction. Not so fast, Devon. Since 2020, Archer has been fending off the sentence through a series of appeals, with the most recent rejected by the Second Circuit earlier this year. Archer’s lawyer promised a further appeal is in the works.
Last Friday — just one business day before his scheduled Congressional testimony — the Department of Justice sent Archer a highly unusual letter inquiring when he plans to report for prison.
Or, maybe Joe Biden was just reminding Archer that his drawn-out criminal case could wind up going the good way or the bad way. You never know. Something to think about. In any case, Republicans immediately identified the letter as Biden Administration intimidation trying to frustrate Devon’s testimony.
But despite the DOJ’s threatening letter, Archer testified yesterday. According to a written summary released by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, Archer carefully testified that:
— Hunter Biden put Joe Biden on the speakerphone nearly 20 times, while speaking with various sketchy “business associates,” to prove that Hunter had immediate access to his dad whenever necessary.
— “Burisma would have gone out of business sooner if the Biden brand had not been invoked. People would be intimidated to legally mess with Burisma because of the Biden family brand.”
— Joe Biden joined in on various phone conversations with Burisma managers to “sell the brand.”
— Hunter said Che Feng, a PLA-connected Chinese tycoon who helped them secure a multi-million-dollar venture in the communist state, loved Hunter for his "last name" and for “always traveling with handsome godlike Aryan men.”
— Joe Biden attended other business meetings with Hunter in person—in Beijing and in Washington, D.C.—with shady Chinese and Russian businessmen.
— Burisma pressured Hunter to “get help from D.C.” dealing with Ukrainian corruption prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
As you probably know, Joe Biden has publicly bragged about getting Mr. Shokin fired—based on never-charged claims that the prosecutor investigating corruption was himself corrupt. Joe began lobbying for Shokin’s removal five days after the phone call referenced above.
Democrats do not agree Archer’s testimony proves anything. They pounced on the fact that Archer told the Committee that the Bidens never discussed business on those calls. But this is a retreating position. Before Archer testified, democrats argued the calls never happened. But now, they are forced to admit the calls did happen, but have to argue about the calls’ substance. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to apologize for claiming the calls never happened in the first place.)
Conservative commentators, even restrained ones like George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley, are convinced Archer’s testimony, as noncommittal as it was, substantially moved the investigation forward. In an interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox last night, Turley explained the testimony proved Biden was involved with “almost two dozen calls with these corrupt business figures from Ukraine, Russia, and China … the question is what did they get for their money? We have to find the answers… This is shaping up to be one of the greatest corruption scandals in the history of Washington — and that is saying a lot. ”
Also yesterday, and totally coincidentally, in another story ignored by corporate media, U.S. Attorney General “Grandma” Garland announced he was finally appointing special counsel to review the Biden Bribery allegations and the latest allegations that Hunter was selling U.S. government access to wealthy criminals all around the world. Presumably it would include investigating Joe Biden as well. ...
It sounds like progress, but there was a catch.
The catch was, the special counsel Garland appointed is the exact same U.S. Attorney who just tried to slip a sweetheart plea deal past the judge in Hunter’s tax case: Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss. The plea deal would have exonerated Hunter for his involvement in the bribery transactions as well as anything else, although opinions on that differ.
So nobody is expecting Attorney Weiss to develop any criminal charges against Joe Biden. The democrats don’t care about whatever Joe did, and the Republicans don’t believe Weiss is a serious investigator.
After Garland’s press statement, the House Oversight Committee immediately tweeted its indignant response, angrily pointing out that Weiss’s appointment was obviously a pathetic attempt to whitewash the White House. Among other sharp comments, the Committee’s tweet said, “The Biden Justice Department is trying to stonewall congressional oversight as we have presented evidence to the American people about the Biden family’s corruption.”
One side effect of opening a special counsel investigation is that the Justice Department will almost certainly start refusing to provide any more information about the Biden Bribery cases citing its “ongoing investigation.” It’s political chess.
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) demanded Thursday that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) hand over all documents and communications in which then-Vice President Joe Biden used pseudonyms such as “Robert Peters,” “Robin Ware,” and “JRB Ware.”
Comer listed the pseudonyms in a letter to NARA in which he demanded access to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s documents and communications regarding official duties that overlapped with his son’s activities in Ukraine.
One email, which Comer says the committee has already seen, includes an attachment with the vice president’s schedule, indicating that he had spoken by phone to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The email was sent to a “Robert L. Peters” and cc’ed to the vice president’s son, Hunter Biden.
Joe Biden was the designated foreign policy point person to Ukraine during the Obama administration. The House Oversight Committee argues that Joe Biden threatened to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine in 2015 until the president of Ukraine fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had jurisdiction for an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
Burisma paid Hunter Biden $83,000 a month for a board position to obtain the Biden “brand,” as Biden business associate Devon Archer described the arrangement.
Let’s check in on the developing Biden Bribery story, which continued slowly dripping this week. The Federalist ran a story yesterday headlined, “Comer Demands National Archives Fork Over Info On Biden’s Business Pseudonyms.”
As early as 2021, reports based on Hunter laptop emails surfaced that Joe Biden had been using a variety of odd pseudonyms in his emails and maybe elsewhere. But, thanks to a coordinated media—deep state effort to discredit the laptop, combined with pandemic confusion, the story never went anywhere.
The story may have been lost, but it looks like it wasn’t forgotten.
On Thursday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer formally demanded the National Archives cough up any document or communication containing any of Joe Biden’s several aliases, including “Robert L. Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware.”
The Ware Group was a notorious communist spy ring that infiltrated a bunch of American institutions during the 1930’s, such as labor unions, universities, research institutions, arts and literary circles, media organizations, political groups, and government agencies. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
Comer recently revealed one of Biden's other pseudonyms, Robert L. Peters, was used in an email referencing an official government call with Ukraine’s president — but Hunter Biden was copied, for some reason. Biden's pseudonomous email address is (or was) Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov .
It’s sufficiently weird that a government official, never mind the vice-president, would be using a variety of email aliases. At minimum, it evidences a conspiracy to thwart public records laws. But the above email also gave the lie to Joe’s repeated claims that he never mixed Hunter’s business with government business. Never ever. Not one single time.
We’ll see what the Archives delivers, if anything. That’s the same group that was persecuting Trump over classified presidential records, so you can imagine they won’t be falling over themselves to help.
Anyway, if Joe Biden wants us to call him Bob Peters, that’s fine with me. I’m easy that way.
Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow, Senate Republicans revealed in their report on the younger Biden’s work in Ukraine.
Baturina is referenced in the 87-page report, which was released Wednesday, addressing her payment to Biden’s investment firm in early 2014.
“Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her plastics company, Inteko, received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor,” it said in providing background on the businesswoman.
The report described her involvement with Biden as “a financial relationship,” but declined to delve deeper into why the wire transfer was made.
The probe also found that Baturina sent 11 wires transfers between May and December 2015 to a bank account belonging to BAK USA, a tech startup that filed for bankruptcy in March 2019.
Nine of those 11 wire transfers were first sent to Rosemont Seneca Partners, the investment firm founded by Biden and Chris Heinz, stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, before being transferred to BAK USA.
All 11 transactions described the payments as “Loan Agreement” in the details section.
The report reads, “[B]etween May 6, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015, Baturina sent 11 wires in the amount of $391,968.21 to a bank account belonging to BAK USA LLC (BAK USA). Nine of the 11 transactions, totaling $241,797.14 were sent from Baturina’s accounts to a Rosemont Seneca Thornton bank account, which then transferred to the money to BAK USA. The 11 transactions all listed ‘Loan Agreement’ in the payment details section.
“BAK USA was a startup technology company headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y., that produced tablet computers in cooperation with unnamed Chinese business partners. BAK USA filed for bankruptcy on March 29, 2019, with a reported loss of $39 million. These transactions were identified because of Baturina’s reported criminal activity,” it continues.
In 1996 Luzhkov, hoping to advance his political stature on a national level, became the main advocate for a claim to the city of Sevastopol in Ukraine. In December, the Russian Federation Council passed a resolution officially claiming the city, affecting negotiations between President Boris Yeltsin and Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma over possession of the Black Sea Fleet (housed at Sevastopol) and helping spur Ukraine to seek a relationship with NATO.
On 12 May 2008 Luzhkov was banned from entering Ukraine by the Security Service (SBU) after his statement concerning the legal status of Sevastopol.
During a remarkable discussion this weekend on Jake Tapper’s CNN show, the celebrated anchor first surprised his viewers by correctly reporting that Hunter Biden did in fact somehow earn sketchy millions — “substantial sums” — from Ukrainian and Chinese sources. Tapper left unsaid, but painfully obvious, that nobody still knows what Hunter supposedly got paid for, exactly.
Maybe someday, someone will ask the Bidens that question.
https://twitter.com/RaheemKassam/status/1692588965121913081
Next, Tapper shocked CNN’s lefty viewers even more, when he correctly pointed out that, during the 2016 Trump-Biden debates, Biden firmly but falsely said “my son has NOT made money, in terms of this thing about, what you’re talking about, China … that’s NOT true.”
Biden clearly lied and did not make a mistake. Bob Peters, I mean Joe, didn’t say “I don’t know whether Hunter is getting paid by the Chinese.” Instead he said, “that’s not true.” While one of Tapper’s co-anchors gamely tossed out the prepackaged defense that “nothing connects Hunter’s money to Biden,” he protested too much. Tapper hadn’t yet accused Hunter of doing anything illegal that could be connected to Biden. So nobody else on the panel touched the premature defense, and it ingloriously died on the table.
That was good enough, but I almost coughed up a hairball when Tapper bluntly told the shocked panelists, “I mean … Trump was right.” That’s probably as much vindication as the former President will ever get. Trump should use it in a campaign commercial or something.
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