Politics
The Biden family has escaped its just deserts.
House Republicans released a little-noticed 291-page impeachment report that should have exploded over the Democratic National Convention like an October Surprise, but in the end fizzled like a wet July 4th sparkler. The facts are there, largely thanks to Hunter’s laptop, but the drive to impeach a lame-duck president seems to have missed its moment. The depth of the report and the impeachable offenses it delineates do add some interesting background as to why Joe Biden might have dropped out of the presidential race, however. It looks like he ducked a helluva punch.
The impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden found he committed several “impeachable offenses,” according to a report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees. Republicans have been investigating Biden for over two years, subpoenaing witnesses and riffling through documents pertaining to his family business. And of course, that laptop of Hunter’s.
The report shows that Biden participated in a conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich himself and his family. Among other aspects of this conspiracy, the Biden family and their business associates received tens of millions of dollars from foreign interests by leading those interests to believe they would provide them “access to and influence with the Vice President.” (Many of these transactions were detailed previously by The American Conservative.)
As vice president, Joe Biden attended dinners with his family’s foreign business partners and spoke to them by phone, often being placed on speakerphone by Hunter. For example, in 2014, Vice President Biden attended a dinner for Hunter Biden with Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, whose husband was the former mayor of Moscow. Following the dinner, Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, a front company created by Hunter. Then, months later, as Hunter and his business associates continued to solicit more money from Baturina, Vice President Biden participated in a phone call where he admonished Baturina, “You be good to my boy.”
In April 2014, a Kazakh oligarch wired $142,300—the exact price of Hunter Biden’s sports car according to the report—to a bank account used by Hunter. Biden and his business associates leveraged the vice president’s political power to obtain millions of dollars from a corrupt Romanian businessman. The report is chock full of such specific examples.
Several witnesses testified that Hunter Biden involved his father in business dealings with Romanian, Chinese, Kazakhstani, and Ukrainian companies, resulting in $27 million flowing to the Biden family. For example, around 2014, Hunter explored a joint venture with Chinese businessman Henry Zhao and his company, Harvest Fund Management, “a $300 billion Chinese financial services company closely connected to the Chinese Communist Party.”
When it appeared the deal was not going through, Hunter called his father for assistance. Similarly, while Hunter served on the board of directors of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma from 2014 to 2019, he utilized his father’s position to relieve pressure the company was under from a government investigation. In doing so, Biden changed U.S. policy in order to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee until Ukraine stopped the investigation into the company affiliated with Hunter Biden.
After leaving office, Joe Biden and his family continued their financial relationships with corrupt Chinese businessmen who would send the Bidens millions of dollars. Some of the money was laundered through one of Hunter’s front companies and returned “clean” in part to Chinese entities in the U.S.
The Biden family “leveraged Joe’s positions of public trust” to obtain over $8 million in loans from Democratic benefactors. Millions of dollars in loans have not been repaid and the paperwork supporting many of the loans does not exist.
Biden knowingly participated in this conspiracy. It is, per the report, “inconceivable” Biden did not understand he was enriching his family by abusing his office.
The evidence also establishes the Biden family went to “great lengths” to conceal the conspiracy. Foreign money was transmitted to the Bidens through complicated financial transactions. The Biden family laundered funds through intermediate entities including Joe’s brother Jim and broke up large transactions into numerous smaller transactions. “Substantial efforts were made to hide Biden’s involvement in his family’s business activities,” the report stated. While Jim Biden claimed he gave this money to Joe Biden to repay personal loans, Jim did not provide any evidence to support this claim.
The report concluded,
President Biden’s participation in this conspiracy to enrich his family constitutes impeachable conduct. By monetizing the Vice Presidency for his family’s benefit, he abused his office of public trust, placing the welfare of his family ahead of the welfare of the United States. He also put foreign interests ahead of the interests of the American people… Joe Biden conspired to commit influence peddling and grift. In doing so, he abused his office and, by repeatedly lying about his abuse of office, has defrauded the United States to enrich his family. Not one of these transactions would have occurred, but for Joe Biden’s official position in the United States government. This pattern of conduct ensured his family—who provided no legitimate services—lived a lavish lifestyle. The evidence uncovered in the Committees’ impeachment inquiry reflects a family selling the ‘Biden brand’ around the world with President Biden—the ‘big guy’—swooping in to seal the deal on speaker phones or in private dinners.
The House report also cites Joe for illegally retaining classified documents at his home and other locations and states under Biden’s presidential tenure, the FBI and the Department of Justice afforded “special treatment” to Hunter Biden regarding his criminal investigations. The FBI and DOJ allegedly “slow-walked” the investigation, interfered with routine investigative procedures and allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the most serious felony charges to benefit Hunter. The White House refuted the allegations, and called the report a “failed stunt.”
This was all supposed to be a bombshell, dropping on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. The problem was it was no longer Joe Biden’s convention—he had been removed from running for president via a coup within the Democratic party, leaving the report to fall on deaf ears. But before one gets too cynical over the timing of this report, remember the circumstances surrounding the initial report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the contents of which formed the backbone of these conclusions.
In Hunter’s case the laptop emails were buried by the establishment media, thanks to a cabal of security apparatus officials and media figures working for the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party since 2016, a group whose activities peaked in 2020.
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As the New York Post broke the story that a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s files contained potential evidence of Joe Biden’s quid-pro-quo activities just ahead of the presidential election, more than 50 former senior intelligence officials almost immediately produced and signed a letter saying the emails “have all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The signers claimed to be “deeply suspicious the Russian government played a significant role in this case. If we are right this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The letter was brilliant—evil, but brilliant. It played off the prejudice, dating to 2016, that the Russians interfered with American elections. In fact, most of the signatories—James Clapper and John Brennan among them—had played key roles in manipulating public opinion around the DNC server hack and, later, the Russiagate hoax. The establishment meme quickly became “the laptop is fake.”
The report released by the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees shows once and for all that it was no fake, and, had the information on the laptop been looked into when it was first released on the cusp of the 2020 election, those election results could have been very different. As it is, Joe Biden and his son Hunter cheated the hangman. Joe is a lame duck, Hunter a forgotten tragicomic vaudeville act. The report, which should have knocked Washington on its ear, instead will fade into obscurity. Joe Biden not only cheated on his country and made millions; he got away with it all. Not a bad trade for giving up on an election he was sure to lose anyway.