Where Was This Information In 2020?

On Wednesday, Scott Johnson at Power Line Blog posted an article about The New York Times’ reporting about Hunter Biden’s efforts in landing a Burisma deal.

The article reports:

Ken Vogel reports in the New York Times that “Hunter Biden Sought State Department Help for Ukrainian Company.” Subhead: “After President Biden dropped his re-election bid, his administration released records showing that while he was vice president, his son solicited U.S. government assistance.” The New York Post has an accessible account of Vogel’s story by Victor Nava in “Hunter Biden asked US embassy in Italy for help landing Burisma deal while Joe was VP.”

It’s interesting to see the lengths to which the government went to protect President Biden from the story. The Times had to bring a FOIA lawsuit to obtain the documents it suspected had been withheld from an earlier production. Vogel seems to be afraid that Republicans will “pounce” on this element of his story:

The Times challenged the thoroughness of the [State Department FOIA] search, noting that the department had failed to produce responsive records contained in a cache of files connected to a laptop that Mr. Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The department resumed the search and periodic productions, but had produced few documents related to Mr. Biden until the week after his father ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Harris for the Democratic nomination.

The article concludes:

The more apt headline for Vogel’s story in the Times would be Now it can be told! I would like to say that Miranda Devine apparently could not be reached by Vogel for comment. On X, Devine drily observes of Vogel’s story “[t]his might all come as a surprise to @nytimes readers but @nypost readers have known the score for four years.”

Rush Limbaugh used to talk about low-information voters. Now we have voters who read the New York Times who are uninformed and often misinformed.

What Was Actually In Those Documents?

Putting aside the fact that a Senator or Vice-President shouldn’t have classified documents in his home or garage, let’s take a look at what some of those documents were and how they might be related to other issues.

On Friday, The Epoch Times reported:

President Joe Biden retained documents related to Ukraine that were classified as “secret” and “confidential,” according to a report by Justice Department’s special counsel Robert Hur, released on Feb. 8.

The 388-page report states that the FBI found a folder labeled “VP Personal,” containing two documents—a telephone call sheet and talking points for a call with then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, which occurred on Dec. 11, 2015—marked as “secret.”

There is a handwritten note from President Biden in the upper-right corner of the sheet asking his executive assistant to “get [a] copy of this conversation from Sit Rm for my Records please.” The document was labeled “confidential” and “EYES ONLY DO NOT COPY.”

Additionally, one appendix in the report states that President Biden kept a memo with the subject line “U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine,” from September 2014. The results of the classification review indicate the memo was “confidential.”

President Biden served as vice president under the Obama administration at the time. His son, Hunter Biden, joined the board of directors of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings in May 2014.

Nothing like breaking the law to help and unqualified family member in his job.

The article concludes, reminding us:

Burisma contacted the source to seek assistance in buying a U.S. company to merge with, in the hope that it could go public in the United States.

After the disclosure of an investigation into Burisma by Ukraine’s prosecutor general Viktor Shokin in 2016, the source informed Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, that it could negatively affect the company’s prospective initial public offering.

Mr. Zlochevsky replied that Mr. Hunter Biden “will take care of all of those issues through his dad,” according to the document. Mr. Shokin resigned in March 2016.
President Biden in 2018 bragged at the Council of Foreign Relations that he got Mr. Shokin dismissed.

“‘We’re leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” he said about his interaction with Ukrainian officials, referring to a $1 billion loan guarantee he threatened to withhold. “Well, son of a [expletive]. He got fired.”

Mr. Shokin has said that the threat was cited when he was ousted. He said in a sworn statement that then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko asked him to resign because of “pressure from the U.S. presidential administration, in particular from Joe Biden.”

But as of now, there will be no consequences for President Biden ignoring the laws he should have been enforcing.

Action Is Good, But When Do We See Results?

On Friday, Townhall reported that Congressman Jim Jordan is seeking a specific document from FBI Director Christopher Wray regarding payments to the Biden family from overseas entities.

The article reports:

As House Republicans continue to explore impeaching President Joe Biden, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) has a request for FBI Director Christopher Wray. On Thursday night, Jordan sent Wray a letter informing him that the Committee is seeking an FBI FD-1023 form from March 1, 2017 to do with “a confidential human source (CHS) report about payments made to the Biden family from foreign entities.” As the letter explained, the FD-1023 in question “is referenced in a second FD-1023 from June 2020 detailing bribery allegations that involve President Biden and his son, Hunter,” and is needed to “evaluate whether sufficient grounds exist to consider drafting articles of impeachment.” 

The Committee knows about the FD-1023 thanks to testimony  that former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania Scott Brady provided, who had asked the FBI to find information on files to do with Burisma–where Hunter Biden served on the board of directors–after he had been tasked by then Attorney Bill Barr to sort through FBI files. 

As Jordan explained during his Thursday night appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity,” the 2017 FD-1023 “became the basis for…Brady… asking to talk to the [CHS] that produced the 1023 form we have.” They’re now asking for this form. 

Brady testified it was “correct” that the FD-1023 in question “was not information provided from the public.” The FBI also waited until being contacted by Brady to reach out to the CHS for more information. Brady categorized the FD-1023 as having “not been developed,” making clear “it’s fair to say that it had not been looked into or developed any further.” It was because of Brady’s directive that the FBI took action to develop the information in the FD-1023. 

Frankly, it is my opinion that all that will become of this is that Christopher Wray will stall until the end of the year, hoping that a few more Democrats will be elected to the House of Representatives and the issue will go away. We have seen so much obvious evidence of wrongdoing for years, and nothing has been done. I am not optimistic about that changing.

Providing The Appearance Of Justice While Avoiding Justice

On Friday, Red State posted an article about the indictment of Hunter Biden. The article quotes George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley.

Professor Turley notes:

“There are three glaring omissions in the indictment that tend to shield critical payments and conduct that implicate the president,” Turley wrote.

The Burisma-Ukrainian money

First, the special counsel only indicts tax evasion that occurred in recent years.

That’s because the long “investigation” into Hunter inexplicably allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the most controversial payments from Ukraine gas company Burisma.

Recent testimony from IRS whistleblowers suggests that wasn’t an accident. Investigators were stonewalled, they claimed, and the Justice Department was previously moving to reject any charges against Hunter Biden.

…Hunter, the Unregistered Foreign Agent

Yep, nowhere to be found in the indictment. Here’s Turley:

Recently, the Justice Department added a charge to the indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) that he ran afoul of FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA also was used to go after Donald Trump associates such as Paul Manafort.

The problem with charging Hunter with FARA is obvious.

It opens up questions about the millions of dollars going to the Biden family from foreign sources, a topic that Attorney General Merrick Garland has spent years avoiding.

Hunter, the Unindicted Co-Conspirator

“By focusing on tax evasion alone,” wrote Turley, “Weiss again avoids any direct reference to the focus of the influence-peddling used to raise these millions of dollars.”

However, he opined:

Even without mentioning the president, the implications of the indictment are devastating for the narrative and denials of Joe Biden.

The president has continued to maintain that he had no knowledge or interaction with these dealings. Those statements are clearly and knowingly false.

The president also maintained that his son has “never done anything wrong” and never accepted any money from China

That is also untrue, according to the Justice Department and Hunter himself.

On Friday, The U.K. Daily Mail reported:

Mel Monzack, 83, Joe Biden’s personal lawyer who is authorized to act on the president’s behalf in financial matters, is LINKED to Hunter’s newly filed criminal indictment

  • Corporate records obtained by DailyMail.com reveal links between Joe Biden’s confidante who has his power of attorney and Hunter’s business deals
  • Mel Monzack’s law firm was listed as the registered agent for Robinson Walker LLC – a company owned by business partner and Biden family friend, Rob Walker
  • The payments from Robinson Walker LLC are part of new criminal tax charges against the First Son filed Thursday in a California federal court 

I am wondering if Mel Monzack will be the fall guy in this mess with President Biden claiming his lawyer  handled everything and he had no idea where the money came from

Stay tuned.

While We Were Distracted

On Sunday, Just the News posted an article about the latest developments in the Biden family scandals.

The article lists the latest updates:

1. Hunter Biden did do something wrong

2. Viktor Shokin was a threat to Burisma

3. Joe Biden changed “official” US policy

4. Joe Biden met with Hunter Biden’s business partners

5. Hunter Biden did make millions from China

6. Joe Biden did get financial benefits from his family’s ventures

The article provides details for each one of these claims.

The most recent bit of new evidence is included in the sixth statement on the list:

“In 2018, James Biden received $600,000 in loans from, Americore—a financially distressed and failing rural hospital operator. According to bankruptcy court documents, James Biden received these loans ‘based upon representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections,” Comer said in an Oversight Committee post to X. Comer provided bankruptcy court documents and a record of the check exchanged between the brothers.

“On March 1, 2018, Americore wired a $200,000 loan into James and Sara Biden’s personal bank account – not their business bank account. On the same day, James Biden wrote a $200,000 check from this same personal bank account to Joe Biden,” Comer added.

While significant circumstantial evidence built up over time that Joe Biden benefited from his family’s endeavors while he was the Vice President, and afterwards a public figure, this is the first piece of concrete evidence that Joe Biden recieved direct payments from family members. 

Congress has a copy of that check. It remains to be seen if any members of the Biden family will be held responsible for their actions. We all need to remember that when large amounts of money are exchanged it usually involves the transfer of goods or services. Since we know no goods were transferred, what services were offered?

 

How Much Evidence Will It Take Before Someone Is Held Accountable?

On Wednesday, Townhall reported that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has released records of overseas deposits into Hunter Biden’s back accounts during the time that Joe Biden was Vice-President.

The article reports:

“During Joe Biden’s vice presidency, Hunter Biden sold him as ‘the brand’ to reap millions from oligarchs in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. It appears no real services were provided other than access to the Biden network, including Joe Biden himself. And Hunter Biden seems to have delivered. This is made clear by meals at Café Milano where then-Vice President Joe Biden dined with oligarchs from around the world who had sent money to his son,” Comer released in a statement. “It’s clear Joe Biden knew about his son’s business dealings and allowed himself to be ‘the brand’ sold to enrich the Biden family while he was Vice President of the United States. The House Oversight Committee will continue to follow the money trail and obtain witness testimony to determine whether foreign actors targeted the Bidens, President Biden is compromised or corrupt, and our national security is threatened.”

…According to the memo released by Comer, the Biden family received over $20 million in foreign transactions and the payments were distributed to multiple members. The payments were hidden through shell companies and funneled through Hunter Biden’s business partners, including Devon Archer. Archer and Biden earned $6.5 million from Burisma alone.

The article concludes:

“When President Biden ran as a presidential candidate, he assured the American people his family received no money from China. President Biden recently claimed the Committee’s bank records regarding his family’s receipt of funds from China are ‘not true,'” a second Committee memo states. “The White House refuses to correct President Biden’s dishonest statements. The lack of transparency surrounding the Biden family’s foreign business deals raises serious national security concerns.” 

There is no happy ending to this story. Impeaching President Biden will not work–even with overwhelming evidence, the Senate will NOT impeach. Even if the Senate were to impeach, we would then have President Kamala Harris. Meanwhile we have a President who not only is mentally compromised but is probably being blackmailed by half the countries in the world. At some point this charade has to end.

About That Judge…

On Tuesday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about the judge who is presiding over the special counsel case against President Trump.

The article includes a conversation between Sebastian Gorka and Kash Patel.

This is the conversation:

TRANSCRIPT – Kash Patel: “Judge Chutkan, for those who don’t know, represented Burisma, Hunter Biden’s fraudulent consulting firm, she was a lawyer at the same law firm with Hunter Biden. But Seb, let’s put that aside. What other matters are there for her recusal? In 2017 when Devin Nunes and I were running the Russiagate investigation, we figured out who paid for the Steele dossier. Fusion GPS, the DNC, and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Christopher Steele millions of dollars and they laundered it through the FBI and the FISA court to unlawfully surveil Donald Trump.  That’s big-time stuff.

On the eve of us winning that disclosu

re, before the world knew, Fusion GPS took us to federal court and that case landed in JUDGE CHUTKAN’S COURT ROOM. … After a month of heavy litigation where Judge Chutkan knew the ins and outs of Fusion GPS, our proceedings, all possible witnesses, etc., when she could not prevent us from prevailing, she recused -on her own- from that case. Why?”

“We found out her law firm, Boies Schiller, represented Fusion GPS.  The very client that was in front of her in federal court was one of her former clients. That is rule #1 for disqualification.”

GORKA: “Boies Schiller Flexner is the same company where Chutkan and Hunter Biden worked!”

PATEL: “You gotta ask yourself, Seb, how come it took Chutkan a month [to recuse herself]? … She wanted to block the bank records.

Imagine if we never found out who paid for the dossier. … She set the precedent. She cannot neutrally and arbitrarily preside over Donald Trump’s criminal trial when she recused herself from the very representation of the Democratic entrenchment: the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, because she was so biased because of her prior representation from Boies Schiller.

How could she possibly be allowed to stay on this case? And it wasn’t us, Seb. We got her off because of her own history. That precedent is what Donald Trump’s lawyers must apply this week.”

Obviously, this is something to watch.

The Priorities Of The Mainstream Media

On Tuesday, Newsbusters posted an article about the priorities of the mainstream media. Anyone who relies on the mainstream media for their news at this point is either uninformed or misinformed. There is no excuse for their ignoring major stories and showing extreme bias in what they do report.

Newsbusters reports:

Back on June 8, two massive political stories broke, but ONLY one of them got covered by the broadcast networks. 

On June 8, former President Donald Trump was indicted by the Special Counsel in the classified documents case. That very same day, it was reported that President Joe Biden had allegedly received $5 million dollars from an executive of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, the same company in which his son Hunter was involved.

Over 39 days (June 8-morning of July 18) the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) broadcast networks crammed their evening, morning and Sunday roundtable shows with a total of 527 minutes of coverage dedicated to the Trump indictment.

But how much did the Biden/Burisma alleged bribery scheme receive? 

Zero seconds.

The Burisma scandal story and its ties to Joe “Big Guy” Biden has legs. 

…Back on June 12, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer claimed the FBI has additional informant documents that link then-Vice President Biden to an alleged multimillion-dollar bribery scheme. 

On June 15, Comer “teased that new bank records his panel expects to obtain will reveal that the Biden family has accepted as much as $30 million from foreign nationals.”

More evidence keeps coming out about the alleged Burisma bribery scandal as Hunter’s laptop continues to be a treasure trove of incriminating e-mails, yet the networks continue to look the other way.

The media is working very hard to portray the Biden administration and President Biden in a favorable light while enthusiastically reporting every negative story about President Trump. The media is supposed to report the news–not try to control what Americans think.

The Overall Impact Of The Witch-hunt

The government bureaucracy has been after President Trump since he came down the escalator in June 2015. The government has broken its own laws to manufacture false evidence, people in the Department of Justice have lied under oath, and generally speaking, many in our government have compromised the principles that have made this country great. On Saturday, The Hill posted an article about the negative impact the indictment of President Trump has on America.

The article reports:

First, it reinforces the view, shared by many conservatives, that our government delivers a two-tiered system of justice — one for people on the right and another for those on the left. Donald Trump, after all, is not the only public official found to have mishandled secret documents. Special Counsel Jack Smith claimed, as he brought the indictment: “We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”

History suggests otherwise.

Former President Bill Clinton was found to have taken audio recordings of his discussions while in the White House and kept them in his sock drawer after his term was up. Judicial Watch sued to access the tapes, claiming they should be considered part of the presidential archive. But a judge ruled against the conservative group, claiming she had no jurisdiction and that such demands could only be made by the National Archives and Records Administration. NARA declined to seek the tapes.

The article also cites Hillary Clinton and President Biden’s mishandling of classified information.

The article continues:

Second, the announcement of Trump’s indictment just happened to occur on the very day that members of Congress were shown an FBI document containing credible allegations that Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian company. Instead of burrowing in on claims from a trusted whistleblower that our president, as vice president, accepted payment from Burisma in return for helping to oust Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Biden’s Justice Department created a powerful distraction. 

This is unacceptable. The allegations against Biden are not far-fetched. We know for a fact that Biden pushed Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, threatening to pull $1 billion in U.S. aid unless he did so. We know that because Biden actually boasted about it to a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations.

…Third, Biden has talked a great deal about protecting our democracy and the sanctity of open and fair elections. Call me crazy, but Biden’s DOJ indicting his most likely 2024 campaign rival on charges that, as in the case of Hillary Clinton, might or might not justify prosecution, seems to qualify as election interference. The president is running for another term; polls show his prospects are poor.

When a sitting president is struggling to get his approval ratings above 40 percent, he is in trouble. An NBC News survey from last month showed that 70 percent of voters, and more than half of Democrats, do not want Biden to run.

Unfortunately, many Americans who get their news from the mainstream media have not idea how politically weaponized our Justice Department has become. Unfortunately, by the time they wake up to reality, equal justice under the law may be a thing of the past in America.

This Reads Like Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy”

Those of us who are baby boomers remember “Spy vs. Spy” from Mad Magazine. To refresh your memory: On Tuesday, PJ Media posted the following headline:

REPORT: Burisma Founder Who Allegedly Bribed Joe and Hunter Biden Is a Russian Asset

Good grief!

The article reports:

Jennifer Van Laar, at our sister site RedState, just dropped a bombshell exclusive report about the founder of Bursima:

Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky, who allegedly paid a total of $10 million in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden in 2015 and 2016 in exchange for then-Vice President Joe Biden’s assistance in getting Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired, is believed to be an asset of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) by the United States intelligence community, according to a national security source speaking to RedState on condition of anonymity.

The anonymous source told RedState, “The US intelligence community has a high degree of confidence in their assessment of Zlochevsky as SVR. This is not a new assessment; the intelligence community under Obama knew this, and Obama was briefed on it. Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland were briefed as well.”

RedState also pointed to a tweet from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Monday, claiming that the foreign national who allegedly bribed the Bidens has audio recordings of his conversations with Joe and Hunter Biden. He kept the recordings “as a sort of insurance policy,” according to the senator.

The article concludes:

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) also read the document and tweeted, “Joe, the money is hidden in the DOZENS of LLCs you & your family created to HIDE THE MONEY. You can run, but you can’t hide from House Republicans.”

PJ Media’s Kevin Downey Jr. wrote last week, “This FBI document—attributed to a trustworthy and well-paid informant—is beginning to look like a smoking gun. This explains why the FBI went to such great lengths to keep the Oversight Committee from getting its hands on it.” He added, “When a reporter asked Joe Biden about the allegations that he ‘sold out the country,’ Biden laughed and joked: ‘Where’s the money?’ No one chuckled. Biden then went on to smilingly say it’s a bunch of ‘malarkey.’”

Is that the same malarkey that paid for his Delaware beach house?

You have to wonder if this is political theater orchestrated by the Democrats to remove Joe Biden from the White House in time to set up their 2024 candidate and also to set a precedent for removing a President from the White House in case Donald Trump wins the 2024 election.

More Insight On The Indictment Of President Trump

Robert Duchemin is a Florida attorney who posts on substack. He is extremely insightful, and is a master of research.

Here are a few of his observations on the indictment of President Trump:

As more evidence of Biden’s corruption comes to light, his corrupt Department of Justice comes to his rescue. Yesterday morning we learned that some of the bribe evidence the Department of Justice was hiding concerned a $5 million bribe from Burisma, the same Ukrainian company that received the lion’s share of the $50 million that the Obama and China Joe convinced a democrat-controlled US Congress to give Ukraine to “develop its fossil fuel industry.” Yes, that is the same fossil fuel industry that these people are trying to destroy in the USA, while giving our money to other countries to enable them to develop into our fossil fuel competitors.

And yes, Burisma is the same company that paid Hunter Biden about $180,000 per month to do nothing and the same company that was being investigated for corruption by Ukraine until Joe Biden withheld US aid until they would stop the investigation. You may recall the video of China Joe bragging about doing it. Bragging about doing the very same thing for which Queen Nancy and her corrupt kangaroo court impeached President Trump without any evidence. (video included in article here.)

So, the same DOJ that has been ignoring for at least six years evidence of China Joe accepting bribes has built in about six months an entire criminal case against President Trump based on documents, the possession of which are governed by a CIVIL statute.

In addition to the questionable actions of the Department of Justice in their quest to find President Trump guilty of something, Breitbart posted an article yesterday reporting on some questionable activities involved in putting the case together against President Trump.

The article reports:

An attorney who represents former President Donald Trump’s valet, who is under scrutiny as part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation, alleged in a letter that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor handling the case engaged in misconduct that is reportedly “being viewed as a problem,” within the DOJ, according to The Guardian.

Please follow the link to read the article for further details.

We are rapidly approaching banana republic status, if we haven’t already reached it.

 

An Incredible Coincidence?

About two years ago, many of us saw the following video clip on YouTube:

Basically, President Biden is bragging about having the investigator fired who was looking into the corruption in Ukraine involving Burisma, a company connected to Hunter Biden.

I was reminded of this clip after reading about some recent events in the United States Virgin Islands.

On January 2, The Conservative Treehouse reported the following:

After successfully settling a $105 million lawsuit against the estate of Jeffrey Epstein in early December, U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise N. George then filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase saying the “bank knowingly provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid.”

Attorney General Denise N George has just been fired.

The article points out:

AG George is fired from her position as USVI AG after filing a lawsuit against JPMorgan. Where did Joe Biden go on vacation? The U.S. Virgin Islands.

The article concludes:

AG Denise George also seems uniquely qualified:

...”Attorney George served as an Assistant Attorney General and trial attorney in the criminal, civil, family, juvenile, White Collar and public corruption divisions of the Virgin Islands Department of Justice for a period of over 18 years.  During her tenure, she successfully prosecuted a full spectrum of violent crimes, including murder, manslaughter, rape, domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse.  As a member of the Child Abuse Task Force, she co-authored the Virgin Islands’ first criminal child abuse and neglect statute.  In the Civil Division, she represented the V.I. government in civil lawsuits filed against and on behalf of the government.

Attorney George also served for several years as the Director of the White Collar Crime and Public Corruption Division.  During that time, she managed the division and successfully prosecuted complex white collar crimes of embezzlement, forgery, fraud, racketeering and public corruption.” (more)

Maybe this is just an incredible coincidence, but it sure looks familiar.

Is This A Problem? Will The Mainstream Media Report It?

On Thursday, Breitbart posted an article about President Biden’s claim that he was never involved in Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

The article reports:

Though Joe Biden and his staff have claimed at least seven times that the president has not been involved in the family business, 17 pieces of evidence suggest Joe Biden has played an influential role in his son Hunter and brother James’s activities. Fifty-eight percent of voters believe that Joe Biden has played a role in his family’s business. Sixty percent say Hunter Biden has sold “influence and access” to the president.

The article goes on to list seventeen examples of President Biden being involved in Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Here are just a few of them:

One:

In 2012, Vice President Joe Biden met with Eric Schwerin, the former president of the investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners — which Hunter Biden co-founded — and former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana Arango at the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s residence, on March 2, 2012, the New York Post reported.

Two:

In 2013, Hunter flew to China with Vice President Joe Biden aboard Air Force Two. During the excursion, Hunter introduced the vice president to his business partner Jonathan Li, the CEO of a company linked to Chinese oil interests to which the Biden administration reportedly sold 950,000 barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 2022.

China issued Hunter’s firm a business license ten days after the visit. The firm also won a $1 billion investment from a state-owned financial institution, the New York Post reported:

Ten days later, Hunter’s company inked a deal with the state-owned Bank of China and created the $1 billion investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), according to reporting by Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and the best-selling author of “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”

A representative for BHR told The New Yorker in July 2019 that Hunter Biden introduced his father to Chinese private equity executive Jonathan Li during the trip. Li later became the CEO of BHR.

Three:

Photos from 2014 reveal that Joe Biden met with Hunter’s Mexican business associates, billionaire Miguel Alemán Velasco and his son Miguel Aleman Magnani, in the vice president’s office.

“The then-vice president also flew Hunter and his partner Jeff Cooper on Air Force 2 to Mexico City in 2016 where Hunter arranged to meet Alemán’s son for meetings over a ‘flippin gigantic’ business deal,” the Daily Mail reported.

Four:

In 2014, a photo shows Joe Biden golfing with Hunter and Devon Archer, Hunter’s fellow board member at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Archer is now in prison for fraud.

“The photograph includes a fourth man who has not been identified. However, he is not Burisma’s top executive Taras Burdeinyi or founder Mykola Zlochevsky. Photographs of both men can be seen here and here,” Reuters reported.

You get the picture. For the rest of the list, please follow the link above to read the entire article. The facts are out there. The question is whether or not Americans care about the corruption in the Biden family and whether or not the mainstream media will report it. Americans can’t be expected to respond to information they don’t have.

Better Late Than Never I Guess

Townhall posted an article on Thursday about a recent article in the New York Times.

The article at Townhall reports:

The New York Times is out with a story today about the ongoing Department of Justice investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. Deep down in the text, the story confirms Hunter Biden’s laptop — full of salacious information and photos — is indeed authentic. 

“The Justice Department inquiry into the business dealings of the president’s son has remained active, with a grand jury seeking information about payments from around the world,” the New York Times reports. “People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation. In some of the emails, Mr. Biden displayed a familiarity with FARA, and a desire to avoid triggering it.”

The article at Townhall reminds us:

During the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post first reported on the laptop and its contents. As the oldest newspaper in the country, the New York Post was banned from Twitter for weeks after being accused of spreading “misinformation.”

This is the story that got the New York Post removed from Twitter as the story was described as “Russian disinformation”. The media spin was that the Russians made up the laptop contents to discredit candidate Joe Biden. Very few informed Americans who saw the New York Post story doubted its veracity, but it was suppressed so as not to have a negative impact on the Biden campaign for the presidency. The suppression of pertinent information is just one of many reasons that we have the most corrupt and ineffective President in American history currently residing in the White House.

When The Justice Department Is Compromised

Yesterday The Washington Examiner reported the following:

President Joe Biden has, for a second time, selected a nominee with ties to his son Hunter Biden for a top post at the Justice Department, picking a former longtime partner at the law firm where his son worked for years and that was involved in helping the younger Biden in his business dealings with Burisma.

Biden announced on Friday that he had nominated Hampton Dellinger, a Yale Law School graduate and former deputy attorney general in North Carolina, to be assistant attorney general for DOJ’s Office of Legal Policy. Dellinger’s LinkedIn indicates he founded Hampton Dellinger PLLC in November after working as a partner at Boies, Schiller, and Flexner from May 2013 through last year. Hunter Biden was a counsel at the same firm, starting there in 2010 and reportedly leaving in 2017. In 2014, the president’s son landed the Ukrainian energy giant as a client for the firm and took a lucrative position on its board.

Biden discussed the firm’s involvement in the Burisma saga in his memoir, Beautiful Things.

“I brought Burisma to Boies Schiller Flexner. … They wanted to see whether Burisma was legit or plagued with corruption before taking them on,” he wrote.

The article also notes:

Devon Archer, a business associate of Hunter Biden, was convicted in 2018 for securities fraud and conspiracy charges. Biden sent an email to Archer in April 2014 just over a week before then-Vice President Joe Biden gave a press conference with Ukraine’s prime minister, with Hunter Biden writing, “The announcement of my guys [sic] upcoming travels should be characterized as part of our advice and thinking — but what he will say and do is out of our hands.” In the laptop emails obtained by the New York Post, Hunter Biden also wrote to Archer about his financial expectations, saying, “If we are not protected financially regardless of the outcome we could find ourselves frozen out of a lot of current and future opportunities. The contract should begin now — not after the upcoming visit of my guy. That should include a retainer in the range of 25k p/m [$25,000 per month] w/ additional fees where appropriate for more in depth work to go to BSF [Boies Schiller Flexner] for our protection. Complete separate from our respective deals re board participation.”

In 2019, The New York Times reported that “unreported financial data from the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office show the company paid $283,000 to Boies Schiller for legal services in 2014.”

Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi messaged Hunter Biden and Archer in May 2014, according to laptop emails obtained by Fox News in October, worrying about “one or more pretrial proceedings were initiated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs with regard to Burisma Holdings.” Pozharskyi told Biden that “we urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message / signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions.”

Please follow the link to the article to read the entire story.

I have stated before–President Biden is not responsible for the behavior of his adult son. However, he is responsible for enabling, aiding, and abetting that behavior when it is illegal. To appoint people to the Justice Department who have ties to Hunter Biden’s questionable activities is a slap in the face to all Americans who believe in equal justice under the law.

Is there anyone in the Justice Department who cares about the reputation of the Department?

There Has Been More Than One Smoking Gun

The mainstream media has finally decided to report on some of the corruption in the Biden family.

On Friday, NBC News reported the following:

Hunter Biden’s former business partner sent him an email in 2017 saying he did not disclose on his tax returns $400,000 in income from the Ukrainian natural gas company where he sat on the board, according to a copy of the email obtained by NBC News.

The message from Eric Schwerin, then president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, says Hunter Biden would need to “amend” his 2014 returns to reflect the “unreported” income, according to the copy of the email.

“In 2014 you joined the Burisma board and we still need to amend your 2014 returns to reflect the unreported Burisma income,” says the email dated Jan. 16, 2017.

The email goes on to note that Hunter Biden, who is now the subject of a federal tax probe, netted more than $1.2 million for the year. The earnings include the $400,000 from Burisma as well as income from Rosemont Seneca Advisors and a legal firm.

The article also notes:

There’s no indication that his work for the Burisma national gas company is part of the investigation, but the email obtained by NBC News raises fresh questions about Hunter Biden’s tax affairs.

His lawyer, George Mesires, did not return a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Biden transition team declined to comment when sent a list of questions, including whether Hunter Biden amended his 2014 returns.

NBC News could not independently verify whether the email is authentic and unaltered, but provided with a copy of the email, the spokesperson did not dispute its authenticity.

NBC News made multiple attempts to reach Schwerin, but he did not respond to the requests for comment. The Justice Department declined to comment.

The article concludes:

In a 2019 interview with ABC News, he acknowledged that he was likely given the board seat because of his last name and said joining Burisma was “poor judgment.”

Biden stopped working with the company in 2019, NBC News has previously reported.

“In retrospect, look, I think that it was poor judgment on my part,” Hunter Biden said in the ABC News interview.

He added that he knows he “did nothing wrong at all.”

Joining the board may have been poor judgement, but somehow I don’t think he is going to return the $400,000.

 

Not Surprising To Anyone Paying Attention

Just the News posted an article today about some memos recently released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regarding the Burisma Holdings gas company in Ukraine.

The article reports:

The memos — released to Just the News and the conservative Citizens United watchdog under separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits — show State officials were acutely aware of the sensitivities of rebuffing a pressure campaign carried out by the Ukrainian natural gas firm that had hired then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son.

For instance, the embassy’s deputy economic counselor sent an email two weeks after Donald Trump won the presidency in November 2016 detailing efforts by Burisma’s founder Nikolay Zlochevsky to clear his company of long-pending corruption allegations.

It noted Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner and fellow Burisma board member, Devon Archer, had been indicted in the U.S. on fraud charges, adding to Burisma’s woes in trying to settle its corruption case with the newly installed Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.

“Despite his ruined name in Ukraine, Zlochevsky is actively campaigning for public rehabilitation, particularly with us,” the State official wrote on Nov. 22, 2016. “He has been sending letters to Ambassadors [Marie] Yovanovitch and [Geoffrey] Pyatt for months asserting his innocence. We have declined to get involved.

“I should note that there were two American members of the Burisma board: Hunter Biden and Devon Archer. Archer was recently indicted in a federal fraud case.”

The article includes a number of links to pdf’s of the documents released.

The article concludes:

“These are explosive documents, and that’s why the State Department hid them from the public until after the election,” Bossie said. “These emails make clear that what’s currently known about the Obama-Biden Administration’s dealings with Burisma and Hunter Biden is just the tip of the iceberg. The appointment of a special counsel is the only way to get to the bottom of this corruption.”

If Joe Biden is inaugurated as President, this corruption will never be investigated and those responsible will never be held accountable.

Censorship At Work

Censorship in social media is alive and well. The New York Post is reporting today that White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany has been locked out of her Twitter account for sharing an article in The New York Post that reflected badly on Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The article reports:

“Your account has been locked,” a message from the social media network informed McEnany, whose account has more than 1 million followers.

“We have determined that this account violated the Twitter Rules,” the network said, highlighting her prior tweet with a link to The Post’s article.

Without providing any evidence, Twitter said McEnany — who shared a screenshot with The Post — violated “our rules against distribution of hacked material.”

McEnany told The Post she will not comply with Twitter’s request that she delete her tweet to restore access to her account.

“This is a story reported by the New York Post and Fox News with the Biden campaign notably not disputing the authenticity of the emails,” McEnany said. “I will not comply with censoring reporting that may not fit the ideology of Silicon Valley. This is abominable and not the American way.”

Twitter on Wednesday blocked users from sharing The Post’s link to the story, which describes an alleged 2015 email from Burisma energy executive Vadym Pozharskyi thanking Hunter Biden for “giving an opportunity to meet your father.”

Joe Biden has claimed numerous times that he never even discussed Hunter’s business dealings with Hunter. The emails say otherwise.

I guess the question is, “Were Facebook and Twitter so reluctant to share information from President Trump’s stolen tax returns?”

Do You Believe Joe Or The Treasury Department?

The Washington Times ( to read the entire article, try opening it up in a private window) posted an article yesterday about the charge levied by President Trump that Joe Biden’s son Hunter took large sums of money of money from corrupt oligarchs and Chinese communists during the time Joe Biden was vice-president.

The article reports:

“That’s is not true. That report is totally false,” Mr. Biden said.

A Senate Republican report by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee says Mr. Trump is right, though it was not Moscow’s mayor, but his wife, whom the U.S. suspects of corruption in attaining billionaire status.

Hunter Biden received a single wire transfer of $3.5 million from Elena Baturina. The Senate report said she became a billionaire through illegal construction contracts awarded by her husband, since deceased.

This is based on Treasury Department reports received by committee Chairman Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican.

The Senate narrative is not specific, but the types of transaction records match the description of confidential suspicious activity reports that the Treasury issues when it suspects illegal activity.

The Senate report says, “On Feb. 14, 2014, Baturina wired $3.5 million to a Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC (Rosemont Seneca Thornton) bank account for a ‘Consultancy Agreement.’ Rosemont Seneca Thornton is an investment firm co-founded by Hunter Biden that was incorporated on May 28, 2013 in Wilmington, Del.”

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It provides a timeline of the appointment of Joe Biden as President Obama’s point man in Ukraine and Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings.

The Senate report also states:

“In addition to providing new and descriptive details about the nature, origin and extent of payments from Burisma Holdings to Hunter Biden, the documents acquired by the Committees also shed light on a much broader array of questionable financial transactions involving Hunter Biden, other members of the Biden family, and their associations with foreign nationals. These foreign nationals have questionable backgrounds that have been identified as being consistent with a range of criminal activities, including but not limited to organized prostitution and/or human trafficking, money laundering, fraud, and embezzlement.”

Re-electing President Trump would end the Biden family corruption. That would be nice.

 

 

This Could Be Very Interesting

This week will be the beginning of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the Russia and Ukraine investigations. The first witness will be former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. It’s a pretty safe bet that he will not remember things or claim that he cannot answer a lot of questions because of classified information involved. We shall see.

Just the News posted an article yesterday that details nine items to look for. I am posting the list. Please follow the link to the article to read the details.

Here is the list:

1.) Will Rosenstein admit to failures and talk about the 25th Amendment fiasco?

2.) Will the ODNI declassify more documents, including former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’ secret report to the CIA Inspector General highlighting flaws in the Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 elections? 

3.) What will the DC Circuit Court of Appeals do in the Flynn dismissal case?

4.) Who else will Graham’s committee interview or subpoena?

5.) Will any congressional committees zero in on former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s conduct in the Russia case?

6.) Will Attorney General William Barr and the special prosecutors he named, like U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut, to investigate the Russia case investigators bring any criminal charges?

7.) Will the Democratic strategy firm Blue Star Strategies comply with a subpoena in the Senate investigation into Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business dealings?

8.) Who else might Johnson subpoena in the Ukraine probe?

9.) Will Johnson’s committee issue an interim report this summer on the evidence it has already uncovered about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Burisma?

This does have the potential of being a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, but there is always the possibility that Congress might actually do its job and investigate the corruption that is Washington.

If You Depend On The Mainstream Media For Your News…

There are a lot of Americans who depend on The New York Times for their news. Generally these are well-educated people who respect the tradition of the Times as the newspaper of record. They are either unaware or unconcerned about the amount of false reporting that the Times has done in recent years. Essentially, the Americans who depend on The New York Times for their news are uninformed about what is true and what is false. Recently a story appeared in the news that illustrates the problem. The Russians have hacked into the records of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company the hired Hunter Biden. The New York Times has the story and PJ Media has the story. It’s not the same story.

The New York Times notes:

It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.

The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign. In that case, once they had the emails, the Russians used trolls to spread and spin the material, and built an echo chamber to widen its effect.

Note that the emphasis is on the election–the corruption that has already been proven is not mentioned–it’s all about embarrassment.

PJ Media notes:

GRU is responsible for other high-profile hacks of the DNC and John Podesta. Seven GRU officers were indicted in 2018 for conspiring to interfere with the 2016 election.

The hacking attempts against Burisma began in early November, as the Democrats’ impeachment efforts increased the profile of the company and Biden’s conflict of interests.

It is not yet known what the hackers found or what they were looking for. The New York Times says that “experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens.”

The PJ Media article concludes:

So what does this mean? Scott Rosenburg of Axios believes that awareness of the hacks “cuts both ways politically.” There are huge negative implications for Joe Biden and his presidential campaign, since “it means document dumps could happen at any time, with accompanying media frenzy and potentially damaging revelations.” Many on the left still believe—despite all evidence to the contrary—that Trump colluded with Russia in 2016, so Russian involvement with the hacks “means that any such revelations will come pre-tainted with a Russian label,” according to Rosenburg.

Despite the Russian connection, should damaging information be revealed, Biden’s campaign has the most to lose, as his repeated denials of knowledge of his son’s business dealings could be undercut by documentary evidence. New details about how Hunter Biden’s position on the board gave Burisma access to the White House during the Obama years may also be brought to light.

The New York Times is still beating the dead horse of collusion with the Russians (no evidence found in Mueller Report or since).  Unfortunately Americans are being misinformed by what was formerly ‘the paper of record.’

Lies That Went Unanswered

The Republicans were relatively successful in knocking down some of the lies told during the impeachment hearings, but they missed a few. At one point Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, under oath, asserted all the factual elements in John Solomon’s columns at The Hill about Ukraine were false, except maybe the grammar. John Solomon posted an article at his website yesterday disputing that assertion.

The article lists the following facts:

Fact 1: Hunter Biden was hired in May 2014 by Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company, at a time when his father Joe Biden was Vice President and overseeing US-Ukraine Policy. Here is the announcement. Hunter Biden’s hiring came just a few short weeks after Joe Biden urged Ukraine to expand natural gas production and use Americans to help. You can read his comments to the Ukrainian prime minister here. Hunter Biden’s firm then began receiving monthly payments totaling $166,666. You can see those payments here.

Fact 2: Burisma was under investigation by British authorities for corruption and soon came under investigation by Ukrainian authorities led by Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Fact 3: Vice President Joe Biden and his office were alerted by a December 2015 New York Times article that Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma and that Hunter Biden’s role at the company was undercutting his father’s anticorruption efforts in Ukraine.

Fact 4: The Biden-Burisma issue created the appearance of a conflict of interest, especially for State Department officials. I especially refer you to State official George Kent’s testimony here. He testified he viewed Burisma as corrupt and the Bidens as creating the perception of a conflict of interest. His concerns both caused him to contact the vice president’s office and to block a project that State’s USAID agency was planning with Burisma in 2016. In addition, Ambassador Yovanovitch testified she, too, saw the Bidens-Burisma connection as creating the appearance of a conflict of interest. You can read her testimony here.

Fact 5: The Obama White House invited Shokin’s prosecutorial team to Washington for meetings in January 2016 to discuss their anticorruption investigations. You can read about that here. Also, here is the official agenda for that meeting in Ukraine and English. I call your attention to the NSC organizer of the meeting.

Fact 6: The Ukraine investigation of Hunter Biden’s employer, Burisma Holdings, escalated in February 2016 when Shokin’s office raided the home of company owner Mykola Zlochevsky and seized his property. Here is the announcement of that court-approved raid.

Fact 7: Shokin was making plans in February 2016 to interview Hunter Biden as part of his investigation. You can read his interview with me here, his sworn deposition to a court here and his interview with ABC News here.

Fact 8: Burisma’s American representatives lobbied the State Department in late February 2016 to help end the corruption allegations against the company, and specifically invoked Hunter Biden’s name as a reason to intervene. You can read State officials’ account of that effort here

Fact 9: Joe Biden boasted in a 2018 videotape that he forced Ukraine’s president to fire Shokin in March 2016 by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid. You can view his videotape here.

Fact 10: Shokin stated in interviews with me and ABC News that he was told he was fired because Joe Biden was unhappy the Burisma investigation wasn’t shut down. He made that claim anew in this sworn deposition prepared for a court in Europe. You can read that here.

Fact 11:  The day Shokin’s firing was announced in March 2016, Burisma’s legal representatives sought an immediate meeting with his temporary replacement to address the ongoing investigation. You can read the text of their emails here.

Fact 12: Burisma’s legal representatives secured that meeting April 6, 2016 and told Ukrainian prosecutors that “false information” had been spread to justify Shokin’s firing, according to a Ukrainian government memo about the meeting. The representatives also offered to arrange for the remaining Ukrainian prosecutors to meet with U.S  State and Justice officials. You can read the Ukrainian prosecutors’ summary memo of the meeting here and here and the Burisma lawyers’ invite to Washington here.

Fact 13: Burisma officials eventually settled the Ukraine investigations in late 2016 and early 2017, paying a multimillion dollar fine for tax issues. You can read their lawyer’s February 2017 announcement of the end of the investigations here.

Fact 14: In March 2019, Ukraine authorities reopened an investigation against Burisma and Zlochevsky based on new evidence of money laundering. You can read NABU’s February 2019 recommendation to re-open the case here, the March 2019 notice of suspicion by Ukraine prosecutors here and a May 2019 interview here with a Ukrainian senior law enforcement official stating the investigation was ongoing. And here is an announcement this week that the Zlochevsky/Burisma probe has been expanded to include allegations of theft of Ukrainian state funds.  

Fact 15: The Ukraine embassy in Washington issued a statement in April 2019 admitting that a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa solicited Ukrainian officials in spring 2016 for dirt on Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in hopes of staging a congressional hearing close to the 2016 election that would damage Trump’s election chances. You can read the embassy’s statement here and here. Your colleague, Dr. Fiona Hill, confirmed this episode, testifying “Ukraine bet on the wrong horse. They bet on Hillary Clinton winning.” You can read her testimony here.

Fact 16: Chalupa sent an email to top DNC officials in May 2016 acknowledging she was working on the Manafort issue. You can read the email here.

Fact 17: Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, Valeriy Chaly, wrote an OpEd in The Hill in August 2016 slamming GOP nominee Donald Trump for his policies on Russia despite a Geneva Convention requirement that ambassadors not become embroiled in the internal affairs or elections of their host countries. You can read Ambassador Chaly’s OpEd here and the Geneva Convention rules of conduct for foreign diplomats here. And your colleagues Ambassador Yovanovitch and Dr. Hill both confirmed this, with Dr. Hill testifying this week that Chaly’s OpEd was “probably not the most advisable thing to do.”

Fact 18: A Ukrainian district court ruled in December 2018 that the summer 2016 release of information by Ukrainian Parliamentary member Sergey Leschenko and NABU director Artem Sytnyk about an ongoing investigation of Manafort amounted to an improper interference by Ukraine’s government in the 2016 U.S. election.  You can read the court ruling here. Leschenko and Sytnyk deny the allegations, and have won an appeal to suspend that ruling on a jurisdictional technicality.

Fact 19: George Soros’ Open Society Foundation issued a memo in February 2016 on its strategy for Ukraine, identifying the nonprofit Anti-Corruption Action Centre as the lead for its efforts. You can read the memo here.

Fact 20: The State Department and Soros’ foundation jointly funded the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. You can read about that funding here from the Centre’s own funding records and George Kent’s testimony about it here.

Fact 21: In April 2016, US embassy charge d’affaires George Kent sent a letter to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office demanding that Ukrainian prosecutors stand down a series of investigations into how Ukrainian nonprofits spent U.S. aid dollars, including the Anti-Corruption Actions Centre. You can read that letter here. Kent testified he signed the letter here.

Fact 22: Then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said in a televised interview with me that Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch during a 2016 meeting provided the lists of names of Ukrainian nationals and groups she did want to see prosecuted. You can see I accurately quoted him by watching the video here.

Fact 23: Ambassador Yovanovitch and her embassy denied Lutsenko’s claim, calling it a “fabrication.” I reported their reaction here.

Fact 24: Despite the differing accounts of what happened at the Lutsenko-Yovanovitch meeting, a senior U.S. official in an interview arranged by the State Department stated to me in spring 2019 that US officials did pressure Lutsenko’s office on several occasions not to “prosecute, investigate or harass” certain Ukrainian activists, including Parliamentary member Leschenko, journalist Vitali Shabunin, the Anti-Corruption Action Centre and NABU director Sytnyk. You can read that official’s comments here. In addition, George Kent confirmed this same information in his deposition here.

Fact 25: In May 2018, then-House Rules Committee chairman Pete Sessions sent an official congressional letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asking that Yovanovitch be recalled as ambassador to Ukraine. Sessions and State confirmed the official letter, which you can read here.

Fact 26: In fall 2018, Ukrainian prosecutors, using a third party, hired an American lawyer (a former U.S. attorney) to proffer information to the U.S. government about certain activities at the U.S. embassy, involving Burisma and involving the 2016 election, that they believed might have violated U.S. law. You can read their account here. You can also confirm it independently by talking to the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan or the American lawyer representing the Ukrainian prosecutors’ interests.

Fact 27: In May 2016, one of George Soros’ top aides secured a meeting with the top Eurasia policy official in the State Department to discuss Russian bond issues. You can read the State memos on that meeting here.

Fact 28: In June 2016, Soros himself secured a telephonic meeting with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to discuss Ukraine policy. You can read the State memos on that meeting here.

In the article John Solomon asks Lt. Col. Vindman to provide any information that contradicts these facts. If Lt. Col. Vindman is not able to do that, he needs to correct his testimony.

Don’t Look For This Name On The Witness List

Yesterday The New York Post posted an article about Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko.

The article reports:

Badly undermining Democrats’ impeachment narrative, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko told the press in Kiev on Thursday, “I have never seen a direct relationship between investigations and security assistance.”

That is, between the investigations President Trump wanted into 1) Ukrainian interference in the 2016 campaign and 2) Joe and Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian firm Burisma, on the one hand, and US aid that Trump put on hold this summer, on the other.

He specified that he didn’t hear that message from Trump’s top envoy, Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, who “did not tell us, and did not tell me exactly, about the relation between the assistance and the investigations.”

In summary: “Yes, investigations were mentioned, you know, in a presidential conversation. But there was no clear connection between these events.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also made it plain he never felt undue pressure to investigate the Bidens. And he never did, yet the aid went through anyway.

If you were paying close attention to the circus in Washington, you probably noticed that the charges against President Trump have suddenly changed from quid pro quo to bribery. That is the result of focus groups engaged by the Democrats that showed that the concept of bribery carried more impact that the idea of quid pro quo. When bribery doesn’t resonate the way they want it to, they will move on to something else. Meanwhile we have trade deals that need to be approved and infrastructure that is crumbling. Hopefully, the voters will replace the ‘resistance’ leaders in the House of Representatives in the next election.

All Of These People Have Histories

I haven’t watched the impeachment hearings today. It annoys me that they are even happening. I am sure I will hear about them later from various news sources. I am also sure that what I hear will depend on the news source I choose. That is one of the reasons America is so divided right now–we can’t even agree on basic facts and the mainstream media is reporting opinion–not facts. Just for the record, rightwinggranny is an opinion blog that deals in facts.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today about one of the witnesses in the hearing. It seems that George Kent has an interesting history.

The article reports:

Adam Schiff and the media will likely not touch on his controversial past in Ukraine.
According to Rudy Giuliani Kent was the official behind the dismissal of the Ukrainian government investigation of George Soros’s AntAC organization.

Rudy Giuliani tore into the Schiff show trials and their empty case against President Trump.

Rudy Giuliani: Also George Kent has a problem of his own. George Kent wrote a letter in which he asked that a case be dismissed by Lutsenko. And it was a case against Soros’s NGO AntAC and that company AntAC was right in the middle of gathering the dirty material on Trump, on Donald Trump Jr. It worked with Fusion GPS. The dismissal of that case has cost the government a lot of evidence that could be very, very damning in regard to collusion. But there’s enough left. There’s enough evidence left of collusion so that you got a very, very strong case that the DNC and Hillary Clinton were paying for and gathering information for Ukraine. In fact some of it is even documentary evidence… I would like to cross-examine George Kent. George Kent was her deputy, Marie Yovanovitch’s deputy. He was also the guy who set up the two so-called anti-corruption bureaus in the Ukraine that turned out to be Soros protection bureaus.

The article continues:

Kent is not a first-hand witness and much of his testimony is based off of second-hand knowledge. [Page 206-207]

Kevin Bacon has fewer degrees of separation to the Trump Zelensky call than George Kent.

That being said, his closed-door testimony revealed far more devastating pushback on the Democrat narrative than anything else.

Kent testified that it is appropriate for the State Department to look at the level of corruption in a country when evaluating foreign aid. [Page 103]

(Reminder: The Trump administration sent Ukraine lethal aid.)

Kent also testified that Hunter Biden being on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma while Joe Biden was VP was a conflict of interest. [Page 226-227]

And according to his testimony, when he raised corruption concerns with the Obama White House, he was rebuffed and was told “There was no further bandwidth to deal” with Hunter. [Page 226-227]

It really does look like we are investigating the wrong people.

Following The Money

We don’t pay our national leaders a lot of money, yet many of them become millionaires while in office or shortly after leaving office. It happens on both sides of the aisle, and I believe it is time we looked into how this occurs. Meanwhile, in one instance someone has.

The Ukraine News Agency is reporting today that Burisma Group, a Ukrainian energy company, paid former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden received $900,000 for lobbying activities. This was reported by Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada member Andriy Derkach, who cited investigation materials.

The article reports:

Derkach publicized documents which, as he said, “describe the mechanism of getting money by Biden Sr.” at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine’s press center in Kyiv on Wednesday.

“This was the transfer of Burisma Group’s funds for lobbying activities, as investigators believe, personally to Joe Biden through a lobbying company. Funds in the amount of $900,000 were transferred to the U.S.-based company Rosemont Seneca Partners, which according to open sources, in particular, the New York Times, is affiliated with Biden. The payment reference was payment for consultative services,” Derkach said.

He also publicized sums that were transferred to Burisma Group representatives, in particular Hunter Biden, a son of the former U.S. vice president.

“According to the documents, Burisma paid no less than $16.5 million to [former Polish President, who became an independent director at Burisma Holdings in 2014] Aleksander Kwasniewski, [chairman of the Burisma board of independent directors] Alan Apter, [Burisma independent director] Devon Archer and Hunter Biden [who joined the Burisma board of directors in 2014],” Derkach said.

“Using political and economic levelers of influencing Ukrainian authorities and manipulating the issue of providing financial aid to Ukraine, Joe Biden actively assisted closing criminal cases into the activity of former Ukrainian Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, who is the founder and owner of Burisma Group,” he said.

The article concludes:

It was reported earlier that Derkach publicized correspondence between the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and officers of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. According to publicized correspondence, starting from July 14, 2017, the lists of criminal proceedings undertaken by NABU officers were sent from the electronic mailbox of Polina Chyzh, an assistant to NABU first deputy head Gizo Uglava, to the electronic mailbox of Hanna Yemelianova, a legal specialist of the anti-corruption program of the U.S. Justice Department at U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.

Derkach also said that NABU-leak materials will be published on his Facebook account and materials that he got from investigating journalists have already been passed to Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations and the Prosecutor’s General Office.

He also said he will initiate the creation of an ad hoc parliamentary investigative commission and has already requested launching a criminal case against Ukrainian officials into interference into U.S. elections. The court session is scheduled for October 21, he said.

Burisma Holdings is a Cyprus-registered gas producing company holding assets in Ukraine. It is one of Ukraine’s top-three independent gas producers headquartered in Kyiv. Zlochevsky is the founder and the ultimate beneficiary owner of the company.

It may be a blessing to the Democrats that Joe Biden is no longer their leading presidential candidate.