In recent months, there have been increasing exposés of the Biden family, led by Hunter Biden with then-Vice President and current President Joe Biden, of influence peddling in return for huge financial gains, most of which were concealed from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Though the mainstream media is largely stoic in facing the revelations, the purchase of the social media platform, Twitter, by Elon Musk, has sharply levelled the playing field for former President Donald Trump. The expulsion of Tucker Carson by Fox News has backfired with the journalist hosting a highly popular program on Twitter. Far from calming passions in the “deep state”, efforts to impeach Trump are being intensified, in a bizarre synchronicity with damning revelations about the Biden father and son duo.
Biden: Leveraging power
Damning evidence of the corruption of the Biden family was proffered by Gal Luft, an Israeli-American professor working with a Chinese energy firm (CEFC), who went undercover after fearing for his life because of his knowledge about the Biden family. Luft informed the US government in March 2019, per his video posted on YouTube, to dissuade Biden from standing for President: “I have no political motive or agenda. I did it out of deep concern that if the Bidens were to come to power, the country would be facing the same traumatic Russia collusion scandal – only this time with China. Sadly, because of the DOJ’s cover-up, this is exactly what happened.”
In two days of testimony in Brussels, Luft shared “insider knowledge” about the Chinese firm and the individuals who enriched the Biden family, including a person identified as “Hunter Biden’s bag man.” He revealed that “Hunter was closely associated with a very senior retired FBI official,” codenamed “One Eye.” Luft said that the FBI was told about the Biden-CEFC deal long before they secured Hunter Biden’s laptop, but did not investigate the matter. The New York Post reported that Luft said CEFC was paying $100,000 a month to Hunter Biden and $65,000 to his uncle Jim Biden, for their FBI and other connections.
No charges were levied against Hunter or Joe Biden, but Luft was prosecuted. He alleged that Joe Biden, soon after his vice-presidential term ended, attended a meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, DC, with Hunter and officials from CEFC. This was substantiated by the Hunter Biden laptop, containing all the emails and receipts.
Another “highly credible” witness told the FBI in June 2020, that then-Vice President Biden agreed to accept $5 million from a foreign national to affect policy decisions under the Obama administration. The Senate Judiciary Committee is examining whether the FBI interfered in the elections by covering up negative information about Hunter Biden. In contrast, the FBI acted on a dubious tip from an Australian diplomat to probe charges that the Russians possessed dirt on Hillary Clinton and began an investigation into the Trump campaign.
Rudy Giuliani, speaking to Newsmax (June 3, 2023), said that in January 2020, he informed prosecutors that the former chief accountant at Burisma is willing to testify on the Biden crimes. The witness was willing to reveal the bank account transactions and receipts of all Biden’s (and other people’s) offshore accounts, but US Attorney General Anthony Barr gave the case to the US attorney in Delaware, who did nothing, while the woman faced death threats. Had the authorities acted, Biden would not have run for President.
The House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Kentucky) said members of the Biden family may have received over $40 million from foreign nationals in exchange for favourable policy decisions. The panel identified “six specific policy decisions” where Biden took actions that suggest he may have been “compromised;” four were made while Joe Biden was President. The Oversight Committee obtained banking statements and suspicious activity showing 30 to 40 different bank accounts, 30 to 40 shell companies, and at least nine “more Bidens” involved in the family’s overseas influence peddling scheme. The monies were concealed from the IRS.
IRS whistle blower Gary Shapely told Fox News that in 2017 and 2018 alone, Hunter Biden dodged a $1.2 million tax bill, and possibly failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars more in income from previous years, including around $400,000 from Burisma Holdings in 2014. Shapely told the House Committee that the Delaware US Attorney’s Office and the Department of Justice colluded in covering up the Biden family’s crimes. Despite knowing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop from investigators and having search warrants in April 2020, action was delayed until after the November 2020 election, and deferred thereafter.
Investigators were not allowed to follow up on WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud backup, where he suggested he was sitting next to his father. Assistant US Attorney Leslie Wolf ruled it inadvisable to execute a search warrant at President Biden’s residence, though she agreed that probable cause existed.
On May 22, 2023, Congress learnt about a second IRS whistle-blower against Hunter Biden (Washington Examiner), who worked in the IRS’s international tax and financial crimes group. He worked on the Hunter Biden probe since it was opened in 2018 but was suddenly dismissed mid-May, for doing the “right thing.” He was outed on social media and mocked for his sexual orientation.
Peter Schweizer, author of “Secret Empires,” told the House Oversight Committee that as Vice President, Joe Biden used a secret cell phone paid for by Hunter Biden’s firm, to communicate with Hunter and his business partners.
In June, Hunter Biden reached a deal with prosecutors whereby he would plead guilty to tax crimes and dispense with a gun charge, but avoid jail time. Assistant US Attorney Derek Hines, one of the prosecutors to sign off on the deal, previously worked under ex-FBI director Louis Freeh, a business partner of Hunter and a close friend of the Bidens. Freeh worked with Hunter on a $3million job consulting for Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu, who was facing a bribery conviction in 2015 (now under federal criminal investigation and probe by Congress). Hunter Biden’s plea deal contained a secret provision to provide him with legal immunity for all future federal charges currently under investigation. On July 26, 2023, US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika questioned the deal and it fell apart.
On July 14, 2023, House Oversight member, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, confirmed that Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky had allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden with $10 million. Zlochevsky was already paying Hunter $83,000/month to sit on the board of his energy company. Zlochevsky and Burisma executive Vadym Pozharski were facing corruption charges in Ukraine and urged Hunter Biden to get help from D.C. Hunter Biden obliged, in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and then-Vice President Biden threatened to withhold a $1 billion US loan guarantee to force prosecutor Viktor Shokin’s removal. The new prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, cleared Zlochevsky and Burisma of criminal charges in 2019.
In 2020, however, Zlochevsky and his associates were charged for offering $6 million in bribes to halt the ongoing investigation. Zlochevsky told the FBI that he had 17 recordings of conversations with the Bidens (two involving Joe), “many text messages” and two documents of “payment(s) to the Bidens.” He said the Bidens were paid “through so many different bank accounts” that it would take investigators “10 years” to unravel. Despite having so much evidence, the FBI decided to cover up the scandal.
Despite the track record of the Biden family, it was President Trump who was hounded for his tax returns for years, yet there was nothing when they were finally revealed. On July 27, 2023, Trump’s groundskeeper Carlos De Oliveira was charged with obstruction because he drained the swimming pool and water leaked into the basement where some documents were stored. The Department of Justice claimed he was trying to destroy the documents by that convoluted method!
The same day, the Department of Justice dropped all charges against Sam Bankman Fried of crypto exchange, FTX, of violating campaign finance rules; he was the largest contributor to the Democratic Party. SBF was allegedly behind $90 million in campaign contributions to around 300 political candidates or political action committees. Charges of defrauding customers and lenders of FTX and siphoning off billions of dollars of customer deposits remain.
By far the most damning testimony was by Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner, who confirmed to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on July 31, 2023, that Joe Biden lied when he claimed to have no knowledge of his son’s business dealings. In fact, as Vice President, Joe Biden attended dinners with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates in person or by speakerphone over 20 times. The phone calls included a dinner in Paris with a French energy company and in China with Jonathan Li, the CEO of BHR. As Vice President Biden wrote a letter of recommendation for college for Li’s daughter.
In the spring of 2014, then-Vice President Biden attended a business dinner with Hunter and his associates at Café Milano in Washington, D.C. Russian oligarch Elena Baturina attended the dinner, and later wired $3.5 million to Hunter Biden. She was omitted from the Biden Administration’s public sanctions list for Russian oligarchs.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) intends to launch impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Merrick Garland over an IRS whistle-blower testimony that he interfered in a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden.
Impeachment, indictment
Speaker Kevin McCarthy confirmed that the House is pursuing an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, on account of corruption charges against his son, Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings. Biden, he said, had weaponised the government “to benefit his family and deny Congressional oversight.”
The Democrats are trying to disqualify Donald Trump from holding office again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. Simon Ateba, White House correspondent at Today News Africa, observed that the first indictment regarding sex worker Stormy Daniels (who has denied an affair with Trump) won’t disqualify him. The Mar-a-Lago case about classified documents will be concluded only after the election. Hence the focus on the third indictment: “inciting an insurrection” on January 6, 2021. The fourth case of trying to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia will fizzle out.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states that, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a two-thirds vote of each House, remove such disability.”
This section was designed to prevent people who had joined the Confederate rebellion against the United States during the Civil War from holding public office. It does not explicitly refer to the presidency, but “any office, civil or military, under the United States,” could be interpreted to include the presidency. However, it would have to be convincingly proved that Trump “engaged in insurrection or rebellion”, which will not be easy.
Whatever the result of the 2024 presidential campaign, democracy will never be the same again in America. The muffling of dissident or inconvenient opinions on Facebook and Twitter (as sitting President, Donald Trump was ridiculed and de-platformed from Twitter) have made a mockery of free speech. The absence of a nationwide authority to register voters without interference from Governors of States, as in India, leaves the door open for certain malpractices to recur.
As the United States has long been upheld as the lodestar of democratic values in the post-Second World War era (no matter how imperfect in practice), the exposés of the Biden family corruption and de-legitimisation of the 2020 election will reverberate around the world with consequences that will echo long after the 2024 election is over. The United States has long been a world hegemon; its decline will be a messy affair, with immediate repercussions in Europe.
(The article was published on Vijayvaani.com on August 11, 2023 and has been reproduced here)
