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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 10 months

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The Ukrainian oligarch Republicans claim bribed Joe Biden said he never actually talked to Biden, according to an interview transcript made public Thursday by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

Mykola Zlochevsky is a co-founder of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma that employed Biden’s son Hunter for several years. Zlochevsky served as Ukraine’s energy minister, but has been in hiding since fleeing corruption charges.

Republicans claim there’s evidence a Burisma executive — apparently Zlochevsky — paid Joe Biden a $5 million bribe when he was vice president in exchange for an official favor. They’ve demanded the FBI hand over a document reflecting a confidential source’s conversation with Zlochevsky.

Raskin has now countered with a document of his own — a three-page transcript of a 2019 interview between Zlochevsky and an acquaintance of Rudy Giuliani, who at the time was publicly seeking dirt on Biden on behalf of then-President Donald Trump.

“No one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden’s engagement” with Burisma, Zlochevsky says in the transcript.

When asked if the Vice President had assisted him or his company “in any way,” Zlochevsky says no.

In 2015, however, a Burisma executive named Vadym Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden in an email for having had the chance to meet his father at a charity dinner, though other guests told The New York Times they didn’t recall the elder Biden having a substantive conversation with Pozharskyi.

Politico in 2020 reported the contents of the Zlochevsky transcript, and Democrats have repeatedly referred to it in response to Republican claims that the FBI is withholding derogatory material against Biden. Democrats obtained the transcript in 2019 in their impeachment inquiry into Trump for pressuring Ukraine to announce a sham investigation of the Bidens.

Raskin has said FBI officials told him the Justice Department assessed the derogatory material on Biden and found it wasn’t worth formally investigating, but the bureau has declined to make any public statements to that effect. So Raskin has turned to what lawmakers already have on hand from Zlochevsky.

“Despite being interviewed as part of a campaign by Mr. Giuliani and his proxies in 2019 and 2020 to procure damaging information about the Biden family, Mr. Zlochevsky explicitly and unequivocally denied those allegations,” Raskin said in a letter to House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) on Thursday.

“Mr. Zlochevsky’s statements are just one of the many that have debunked the corruption allegations against President Biden that were first leveled by Rudy Giuliani and have been reviewed by former President Trump’s own Justice Department,” Raskin said.

In response, Comer insisted the FBI’s tip from a confidential human source who spoke to the Burisma executive has nothing to do with Giuliani. (He has not explicitly said the source is Zlochevsky, but has noted the source is in hiding. Other Republicans, including Giuliani, have named Zlochevsky.)

“The Burisma executive claims then-Vice President Biden solicited and received a $5 million bribe in exchange for certain actions,” Comer said in a statement on Thursday. “The executive also claims he didn’t pay ‘the big guy’ directly but used so many bank accounts that it would take ten years to unravel.”

State Department officials have said they considered Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board during his father’s vice presidency awkward because it looked like a conflict of interest. Joe Biden at the time was the face of the U.S. government’s Ukraine policy and urged the country to root out corruption, including by firing its top prosecutor.

Trump dispatched Giuliani to find evidence that Biden’s action was designed to protect his son, but Republicans have been unable to substantiate claims that the elder Biden bent U.S. foreign policy in his family’s favor. An investigation by Senate Republicans in 2020 concluded it was “not clear” that Hunter Biden’s position with Burisma affected the U.S. government’s stance toward Ukraine.

Nevertheless, Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have kept the story alive this year, seizing on the FBI’s refusal to hand over unverified raw material to argue the bureau is protecting the Bidens.

They have stepped up their efforts following this month’s federal indictment of Donald Trump on Espionage Act charges.

On Wednesday, Comer asked the Treasury Department to hand over any “suspicious activity reports” filed by banks on accounts related to Zlochevsky and other Burisma executives. In his letter to Treasury, Comer claimed his committee “has reviewed government documents that allege President Biden, while serving as Vice President, solicited and received a bribe from a foreign source in return for certain actions.”

Other Republicans have suggested that Zlochevksy might not be a credible source. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), for instance, said earlier this month that the bribery allegation “could be coming from a very corrupt oligarch who could be making this stuff up.”

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factcheckdotorg · 9 months

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#hunter biden #devon archer #joe biden #burisma #fact check #jim jordan #james comer

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lasseling · 17 days

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Kremlin Opens Criminal Investigation Into Ukrainian Gas Company Burisma

Moscow believes the Hunter Biden-linked company was used to fund terror attacks inside Russia.

#Kremlin #Criminal Investigation #Ukrainian #Gas Company #Burisma #hunter biden #biden crime family #russia #vladimir putin #moscow #terror attack

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gwydionmisha · 2 months

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#FBI #Joe Biden #Hunter Biden #Ukraine #Burisma #Alexander Smirnov #News

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jloisse · 10 months

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La Sénatrice Marsha Blackburn interroge le directeur adjoint du FBI, Paul Abbate, qui admet que le FBI a intentionnellement dissimulé le scandale de corruption Biden-Burisma, en cachant 17 enregistrements audio avec Joe et Hunter Biden.

#marsha blackburn #Paul Abbate #FBI #fbi corruption #hunter biden #hunter #joe biden #president biden #biden corruption #biden family #biden crime family #biden #burisma #corruption

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ophilosoraptoro · 8 months

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Kash Patel: Trump WILL Call Nancy Pelosi as WITNESS in January 6th Case

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tomorrowusa · 7 months

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Fox News retainer Brian Kilmeade got his balls handed to him by the former president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko. Kilmeade had tried to push a MAGA Hunter Biden conspiracy theory on live TV involving Ukraine.

At the heart of every single Republican conspiracy about both President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine is a single claim. The claim is that Joe Biden got Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin sacked in order to protect energy company Burisma, where Hunter Biden was on the board. That was the claim former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani brought back from Ukraine, and the basis on which Donald Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine and earned his first impeachment. [ ... ] The idea that Shokin was fired to protect Burisma has been debunked so many times that de bunk is exhausted, but it has seldom gone down with as much grim satisfaction as it did on Sunday when Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade interviewed former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. [ ... ] Kilmeade: Is that why he got fired? Because of the billion dollars and the former vice president, now president? Poroshenko: First of all, this is a completely crazy person. This is something wrong with him. Second, there is not one single word of truth. And third, I hate the idea to make any comments and to make any intervention in the American election. We have very much enjoyed bipartisan support. Please do not use such person like Shokin to undermine the trust between bipartisan support and Ukraine.

The Viktor Shokin thing has been debunked to death. Shokin is the "completely crazy person" Poroshenko refers to. But Republicans and far right US media have adopted the Goebbelsian strategy of endlessly repeating it in the hope that such repetition will cause it to get traction. It's the current version of "but her emails!".

Shokin’s own deputy testified that there was no active investigation into Burisma at the time of Biden’s actions. And not only was all this looked into as part of Trump’s impeachment, a Republican investigation launched in 2020 specifically to find any wrongdoing by Biden ended in an 87-page report that “contained no evidence that the elder Mr. Biden improperly manipulated American policy toward Ukraine or committed any other misdeed.” The claim that Biden did something wrong in Ukraine wasn’t true, isn’t true, and can’t be made true through repetition. Shokin was fired because he was corrupt, bad at his job, and everyone complained.

When the leader of their party is a four-times indicted, twice impeached, orange blob of mendacity, the only hope of the MAGA mob is to invest in a very dubious false equivalency.

Hunter Biden isn't Joe Biden. But if you really wish to compare presidential relatives, look to Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner who (unlike Hunter Biden) were in a position in the White House actually to influence policy. The Trump offspring and offspring-in law could conduct a clinic on corruption through capitalizing on their names.

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Facts never change the minds of brainwashed cult members. But if you shout louder and longer than the Trump cult it will reduce the impact they have on others.

#fox news #brian kilmeade #far right media #ukraine #petro poroshenko #hunter biden conspiracy theory #burisma #viktor shokin #trump corruption #donald trump #ivanka trump #jared kushner #the trump crime family #петро порошенко #віктор шокін #бурісма

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kramlabs · 16 days

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#metabiota #burisma #victoria nuland #biolabs #ukraine #russia #cofer black #Sullivan and Cromwell #Nathan Wolfe

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 months

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Drew Sheneman, Newark Star-Ledger

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What is it about Republicans and Russian spies?

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV

FEB 21, 2024

Guess what: A Russian spy has been spreading lies about the Democratic candidate for president through his connections with senior Republican officials. Oh, my goodness, can that be true? Where did I put my fainting couch?

This time the Russian spy is Alexander Smirnov, a serial liar and fabricator who has been making up stories on behalf of Russian intelligence about Democrats, chiefly Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and feeding them to senior Republican Party government officials. Last week, he was charged with just that – lying to the FBI that Joe Biden and his son Hunter each sought $5 million bribes from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma to fix an investigation into the company by Ukraine’s corrupt prosecutor general.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that this tired lie about the Bidens and Burisma and bribes was shopped around way back in 2018 and 2019 in the run-up to the 2020 election. Those were the days when the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Konstantin Kilimnik and Dmytro Firtash were running around trying to get “dirt” on the Bidens, and the infamous “perfect phone call” was made to Volodymyr Zelenskyy when Donald Trump, then the President of the United States, tried to extort the Ukrainian president into opening an investigation into the very thing that Smirnov is charged with lying about these five or six years later.

Oh goodness, I’m barely three paragraphs into this piece about what happened with Russian spies just yesterday and already I’m spinning down a rabbit hole we’ve been going down ever since a certain New York real estate magnate decided he would run for president as a Republican in 2015.

Here’s a handy-dandy flashback with a few of the players we’ve met along the way:

Remember Marina Butina? She was the Russian FSG bombshell who infiltrated the National Rifle Association on behalf of Russian intelligence and spread money around and had a wild affair with a Republican political operative named Paul Erikson and took a bunch of NRA officials and Republican politicians to Moscow to meet with her phony “gun rights” organization called “Right to Bear Arms” that she established in a country where there is no right to bear arms.

Remember George Papadopoulos? He was the Trump campaign “foreign policy adviser” who was running around London in 2016 meeting with a Russian intelligence agent named Joseph Mifsud, who was setting him up with meetings with another Russian intelligence agent, Leonid Reshetnikov, who ran some kind of Russian intelligence front called the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. Mifsud, who disappeared and has never been seen or heard from again, was the guy that Papadopoulos met in Rome, or somewhere, who out of the blue told him that Russian intelligence had “dirt” on Hilary Clinton, including “thousands of emails” that belonged to her.

The name Konstantin Kilimnik ring a bell? I know it gets confusing, because I already mentioned him about the whole Burisma thing, but Konstantin was the Russian intelligence guy who had worked with Paul Manafort in Ukraine when Manafort was running campaigns for Ukraine’s pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, who after being deposed by the 2014 Ukrainian revolution fled back to – you guessed it – Russia. Anyway, Konstantin was the guy connected to a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, to whom Manafort owed something like $14 million. The minute Manafort was appointed manager of Trump’s campaign, he emailed his pal Konstantin asking him how they could use the Trump campaign to “get whole” with Deripaska. So, Manafort ends up meeting with Konstantin in New York City while he was running Trump’s campaign and shared campaign information and polling data with him. Why Manafort was giving this highly secret political information to a Russian intelligence agent, well, that was never explained, but it does kind of bring up what “get whole” could have meant. Manafort went on to be indicted for various financial crimes, for which Trump pardoned him. Konstantin was indicted for obstruction of justice, and hell, even little honey-pot Marina Butina was indicted and spent a year behind bars in the U.S. before she was deported back to Russia and greeted as a returning hero by Russian intelligence.

That’s just a smattering of Russian intelligence agents with connections to prominent Republicans over the last eight to ten years, and what do you know? Here comes Alexander Smirnov peddling tired old lies about the Bidens and Burisma, and this time who’s listening to him? Oh, nobody but the two House Republican goofs in charge of the so-called impeachment investigation of President Biden, James Comer and Jim Jordan. And what are they investigating Biden for? Oh, let’s see…taking bribes from Burisma!

Now, having read all that history about the other Russian spies Republicans were listening to, involved with, giving information to, getting information from, and committing financial crimes with, what kind of a guy is Smirnov? Let’s just let the DOJ motion tell us in their explanation to the court in Nevada about why Smirnov needs to be in pretrial detention:

“First, he claims to have contacts with multiple foreign intelligence agencies and had plans to leave the United States two days after he was arrested last week for a months-long, multi-country foreign trip. During this trip, the defendant claimed to be meeting with foreign intelligence contacts. Those foreign intelligence agencies could resettle Smirnov outside the United States if he were released.”

Oh, by the way, Smirnov was arrested as he got off the flight from his multi-country trip “meeting with foreign intelligence contacts.”

But it gets better. Smirnov has lived in Las Vegas but has no business there. “Instead, he claims to have a ‘security business,’ that is registered in California,” according to the DOJ memo. He lives with a girlfriend “who does not appear to even know what he does.” What does he do for money? His bank records do not “reflect that he is in the ‘security business,’ as he claims.” Instead, his bank records “show large wire transfers from what appear to be venture capital firms and individuals.”

That gives him enough money to escape the country any time he wants to, according to the DOJ. How much money, you may ask? Oh, not too much. Smirnov “has access to more than $2.9 million, and his wife/girlfriend (he refers to her both ways) (hereafter “DL”) has access to more than $3.8 million.” According to the DOJ, those “funds are available to him because most of the money in DL’s account originated with Smirnov and she pays his personal expenses out of her account.”

Because most guys running around making international trips to multiple countries who have no visible means of support besides large money transfers from “venture capital firms and individuals” have millions of dollars in bank accounts in their names and in the names of their wife/girlfriends.

Are you able to follow this insane narrative? This is the guy the House Republicans have been relying on as their chief source of information about supposed $5 million bribes to both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. This is the crap they want to impeach Biden for? Smirnov, the star of his own private season of “Get Smart,” has been telling Comer and his buddies that Hunter Biden was taped making phone calls about the bribes in a hotel in Kyiv that was “wired” by Russian intelligence and “under control of the Russians.”

Only one problem: Hunter Biden not only has never been in that hotel, he has never been in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Prosecutors told the judge in Nevada that Russian intelligence is still using the Kyiv hotel to record “prominent Americans” in order to provide “kompromat” in the 2024 election. “Thus, Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States continues,” the DOJ memo concludes.

Ummmmm…isn’t this the kind of stuff that was happening back in 2016 in London and Rome and even Moscow when “operatives” for Trump’s campaign were meeting with Russian intelligence agents who were peddling “dirt” on Hillary Clinton? And Marina Butina was gamboling around with NRA officers and escorting them to Moscow and shacking up with Republican campaign operatives while she was employed as “special assistant” to Aleksandr Torshin, who was Acting Chairman of the Senate of the Russian Federation and a close pal of Putin.

With all the Russians and all the intelligence agents and all the meetings with Republican officials of one kind or another and all the secrets and lies passed between them all the way up to and including the campaign chairman of the Republican nominee for president, here is a simple way to understand it.

It’s the same playbook Trump has used his entire life. Get caught doing something, anything, and immediately accuse your opponents of the same thing or worse. Charge after charge of sexual harassment and assault? Hmmm, let’s see…how about a Pizza joint where pedophile Democrats are trafficking children out of the basement? In business up to your neck with Russians and taking money from foreign governments? Find some goofball with two or three foreign passports and bank accounts full of funny money traveling around the world meeting with Russian intelligence officials and get him to accuse the Bidens of taking bribes.

What Donald Trump has always called the “Russia hoax” was never a hoax at all. It was real, and it is continuing, and it now reaches into the United States Congress and is driving the movement there to impeach President Biden for things he never did, but ironically, for stuff Republicans have been doing for at least a decade.

So where is the big Biden impeachment investigation right now, after the fourth or fifth witness they’ve advertised as “the one” falls apart in a spectacular hail of indictments and DOJ memos alleging all kinds of Russian hanky-panky? Well, Comer and Jordan have their committee staffers purging the name “Smirnov” from anything with their fingerprints on it. Seems like they’ve got their work cut out for them.

#Useful Idiots #Drew Sheneman #Newark Star-Ledger #political cartoons #putin wing of the GOP #Lucian Truscott Newsletter #Russians #Russian disinformation #Putin Republicans #national security #Konstantin Kilimnik #Burisma #George Papadopoulos #Manafort #Marina Butina

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head-post · 8 days

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Insurance companies refuse to pay compensation to Nord Stream AG, Russia claims new details of terrorist attack

Insurance companies are refusing to pay compensation to Nord Stream AG, the operator of the blown-up Nord Stream pipeline, because they believe it was damaged by military action, while Russian media are publishing new data on the pipeline explosions, blaming the US, which used Ukrainian special services, and naming the likely perpetrators of the terrorist attack.

The insurance companies Lloyd’s of London and Arch Insurance argue that such risks were not included in the contract. Insurance policies for the Nord Stream pipeline, which was destroyed by explosions in 2022, did not cover the risk of destruction or damage in the event of military action.

The Russian Investigative Committee said that money that flowed through the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma Holdings over the past few years was used to finance terrorist acts in Russia and abroad, Russian media reported.

Ukrainian Burisma Holdings is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, the former Ukrainian minister of ecology and natural resources, and is linked to the family of the US president, as Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, joined its board of directors in 2014.

Earlier, separate investigators pointed to a separate US and NATO trail in planning the operation to destroy Nord Streams, as the US leadership has repeatedly stated its intention to destroy Nord Streams.

Read more HERE

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nosferdoc · 9 months

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#politics #national review #Andrew c McCarthy #joe biden #burisma #hunter biden #scandal

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 months

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On Thursday, the Justice Department announced charges against an FBI informant with inventing the claims that the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had hired Hunter Biden as a way of channeling bribes to Joe Biden. David Weiss—the Trump-appointed special counsel who had also levied charges against Hunter Biden—announced the charges, contending the informant had “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts” into salacious allegations targeting the president.

The informant, 43-year-old Alexander Smirnov, had allegedly given agents false information in 2020 and was known to strongly dislike Joe Biden. According to the indictment, Smirnov’s story fell apart upon questioning in 2023. He was arrested in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

So just how much does it matter to Republicans that this FBI informant has been charged with fabricating his claims? How much does it change the narrative about the “Biden crime family” that has become entrenched among both right-wing politicians and media?

We can’t assume the development will be taken seriously on the right, given Trump supporters’ distrust of the FBI. On Fox News, the biggest peddler of this narrative, the hosts ignored the news. But if it were taken seriously, it would come as a significant blow.

The FBI informant, who had not been publicly named previously, was the star figure of possibly the most credible accusation against the president. You may recall the whole drama from May 2023 in which Rep. James Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley demanded the FBI release “an unclassified record alleging a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national.” That was the form that contained this fabrication from Smirnov.

Known in the Fox News internet sleuth community as the FD-1023 form, it contained claims from an informant asserting that the then-unnamed Smirnov had spoken with Burisma’s founder and discovered that Burisma officials had tried to pay the two Bidens $5 million each for their help in ousting Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating Burisma for corruption. If that had been true, it would have been a true bombshell: As vice president, Joe Biden would have leveraged his power over U.S. foreign policy to protect a foreign company from prosecution in exchange for a bribe. In other words, it would have been a clear-cut case of corruption. But there was a real reason the FBI resisted sharing this form: It contained an unsubstantiated allegation from a dubiously reliable source. In 2020, the Trump DOJ had investigated Smirnov’s claims and failed to find any evidence supporting them. There was no reason to present the allegations as legitimate.

The FBI was right to worry that releasing the form would be dangerous. When it gave a redacted version of the form to the legislators, the Republican hype machine went into overdrive. In his position as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Comer repeatedly alluded to proof of corruption, seemingly based on the form. But more importantly, Fox News latched onto the allegations, accusing the FBI of covering up for the Bidens and portraying the informant as highly credible and in danger of retaliation. Sean Hannity emerged as the form’s biggest booster. According to data from the liberal group Media Matters, his show aired 85 segments promoting the bribery claim in 2023. On Fox, the president’s corruption became an assumed truth. Smirnov’s claims also became central to the House GOP’s failed effort to impeach Biden.

One might hope that there would be vast recriminations and public embarrassment now that the feds have formally charged the source of so much drama with making it all up. But the damage in public perception from this episode is done and likely can’t be corrected with the news of the informant’s arrest. Even if the right took it seriously, though, Fox News still has a few other “Biden crime family” storylines to mine that are not connected to Smirnov or his form.

As the Media Matters data showed, while Smirnov’s claims were the most exciting accusations, Hannity had even more segments (though fewer triumphant monologues) on Comer’s vague claims that Hunter Biden had used shell companies to “launder the money they were receiving from foreign nationals.” (The Washington Post reported that these were all actually legitimate businesses, except for one short-lived company that may have been unconnected to Hunter Biden.)

Then there’s the connected claim from a Comer memo that the committee had found more than $20 million in payments from “foreign sources” to Biden family members or their associates. None of the payments were directly connected to Joe Biden, and the Post found that only $7 million of that total went to Biden family members.

There’s also the 2017 email in which a Hunter Biden associate used the phrase “10 held by H for the big guy?” in discussions of a partnership between Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden and the Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC China Energy. The draft agreement and later official agreement that resulted from this exchange made no mention of Joe Biden; there’s no evidence the president was involved in any of this.

And finally, there’s a threatening 2017 WhatsApp message that Hunter sent to a Chinese executive: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” Democrats have maintained that this was pure bluster from Hunter, who was struggling with drug addiction at the time. An associate of Hunter’s testified that they were trying to create the “illusion of access.”

There are even more snippets the right has fixated on. For years now, the right-wing media world has been meticulously scouring all communications and documents related to Hunter Biden for evidence of his father betraying the American public. While officials have found evidence of Hunter’s illegal and unethical behavior around his taxes and use of firearms, there has been nothing officially tying Joe Biden to any wrongdoing. Smirnov’s claims were the most likely source of anything solid showing that the president was involved. Joe Biden may have been reckless in failing to prevent his son from using his family name for clout, but the Republicans’ case for actual corruption is now a lot emptier.

#us politics #news #republicans #conservatives #president joe biden #hunter biden #house oversight committee #impeachment #2024 #fbi #David Weiss #Alexander Smirnov #Rep. James Comer #sen. chuck grassley #Viktor Shokin #Burisma #Media Matters #the washington post #CEFC China Energy

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