Weight of evidence against Joe Biden and his family is growing by the day
Mounting evidence of corruption by the Biden family suggests Donald Trump’s phone call to Zelensky in 2019 was a far lesser crime that what Biden may have presided over.
Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July 2019 prompted the first effort to impeach a US president this century.
As Speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi was incensed that Trump had asked his newly elected counterpart to look into whether then vice-president Joe Biden in 2016 had pressured Ukraine to sack its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been nosing around Burisma, a shady Ukrainian gas company whose board Hunter Biden joined in May 2014.
“I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time,” Trump told Zelensky, a remark that formed the basis of Democrat bribery allegation against Trump, who had put $US400m in aid to Ukraine on hold only a week or two earlier.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do … would be great,” he added.
There’s even more talk about it four years later, after a welter of new evidence, including Hunter Biden’s laptop, bank records, FBI documents and congressional testimony, emerged that suggest not only had Biden corruptly leaned on Ukraine, but that he had for years been the golden goose atop an unseemly operation of peddling family influence.
In March, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, after poring over hundreds of documents subpoenaed from US banks, found that Hunter Biden, James Biden (the President’s brother), Hallie Biden (his daughter-in-law) and an unknown “Biden” were paid $US1.1m between 2015 and 2017 from funds ultimately coming from State Energy HK, a Chinese company.
In April, the committee said six more family members had received such payments. In May, it revealed the Bidens and family associates had created about 20 shell companies to receive more than $US10m from foreign national companies, including in China.
In June, two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers produced WhatsApp messages under oath allegedly from Hunter Biden to Chinese businessman and Communist Party official Henry Zhao in 2017. “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” Hunter allegedly wrote.
In July, Republican senator Chuck Grassley released an FBI document the agency had been fighting to keep under wraps that described how a long-time “highly credible” although unverified source told the agency in 2020 that Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky had reportedly said he had paid $US5m each to Joe and Hunter Biden for their help in removing Shokin.
By August, the House committee had found more than $US20m in payments, including from China, Romania, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine to Biden family and related accounts, including one for $US3.5m from Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina in February 2014. A few months later Baturina dined with Joe and Hunter Biden in Washington.
Interestingly, she was among a small group of Russian oligarchs not sanctioned last year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Also in August, Devon Archer, a former close friend and business partner of Hunter, who was similarly paid millions of dollars for his role on the board of Burisma, told the committee without “the Biden brand” Burisma “would have gone out of business”, and that Joe Biden had dined with Burisma executives in 2015 in Washington.
Hunter had put his dad on speaker phone about 20 times in front of his foreign business associates, Devon added in congressional testimony, stressing that the conversations, although “about the geography, about the weather”, were “a signal that they respected and thought was of value”.
A 2011 letter from Joe Biden to Devon Archer has since emerged too, in which the then vice-president said he was “happy you guys are together”, a seeming reference to their budding business relationships. “I hope I get a chance to see you again soon with Hunter,” he added.
Joe Biden’s repeated claims of never talking about business with his son, or having any knowledge of it, have been obliterated.
“I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Joe Biden said on the campaign trail in 2019. “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China,” Joe Biden said in 2020 in his pre-election debate with Donald Trump.
No wonder White House spokeswoman Karine Jean Pierre last month changed the form of words she had been using to dismiss questions about the Biden family finances: shifting from “never knowing anything about his son’s business” to “never in business with his son”.
This year’s evidence of influence peddling and potentially even bribery come on top of evidence in Hunter Biden’s infamous “laptop from hell”, which was left in a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019, before being handed to the New York Post a year later.
Far from being Russian “disinformation”, as intelligence experts and Joe Biden himself alleged, it provided an extraordinary trove of correspondence that suggested Joe Biden himself had benefited from his son’s business dealings.
“I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary,” Hunter wrote to his daughter.
Another email from a business colleague to Hunter flagged a proposed business deal with CEFC China Energy would set aside 10 per cent of the gains for “the big guy”, a term found 41 times on the laptop.
For all the mounting evidence, Democrats remain adamant that unless bank records emerge that show direct deposits of funds from foreigners into Joe Biden’s bank account no wrongdoing, let alone anything criminal, has occurred.
Regardless, the idea the First Family wasn’t selling their influence for profit, including when Joe Biden was vice-president, now appears absurd, especially given not even Democrats can point to any discernible service Hunter or the broader family were providing to justify such huge payments over many years.
Influence peddling is unseemly, regardless of whether Hunter Biden ultimately broke the law by ignoring a requirement to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which a separate US Justice Department investigation into him may yet find. But if the foreign money influenced US foreign policy, such as US support for the war in Ukraine, the Bidens could be at the centre of one of the biggest political scandals ever.
Max Abrahms, a professor of political science at Boston’s Northeastern University who has a special interest in the relationship between foreign policy, bribery and corruption, has been studying the evidence surrounding Joe Biden’s behaviour in 2016 and since for more than a year.
“There isn’t any doubt in my mind that (Shokin) was fired because of Burisma links, and the reason I say that is because the Biden family was being paid millions of dollars from Burisma,” he tells The Australian in an interview, suggesting the Ukrainian government had “kompromat” (damaging information) on the president.
“I’m not saying that Joe wouldn’t support the war, but what I am saying is that I don’t believe that Joe Biden has complete freedom of movement if he wanted to dramatically pull back American support for Ukraine,” he explains, explosively.
To be sure, Joe Biden in 2018 himself bragged that he was practically solely responsible for Shokin’s sacking. “I said, you’re not getting the billion (dollars). I’m leaving here in six hours, if the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden said at a speech at the Council of Foreign Relations.
Donald Trump’s hunch is looking better by the month. Since Trump’s phone call prompted Nancy Pelosi to launch impeachment proceedings in late 2019, a deluge of articles in US media to discredit Shokin emerged, claiming he was not in fact investigating Burisma at the time of his sacking.
In a new twist, earlier this month a video interview emerged from early 2020 between French journalist Olivier Berruyer and the reclusive Shokin, 71, in which the Ukrainian insists he was pursuing Burisma, pointing out that two weeks before he was removed from office he had seized the assets of the Burisma founder.
“The depiction of these investigations as ‘dormant’ has nothing to do with the reality of the facts,” Shokin says in the video. “I understand very well that the US has one of the best intelligence services in the world and, of course, the investigation into Burisma was closely monitored, not only by legal means, but also illegal.”
Devon Archer agreed with Shokin in an interview with Tucker Carlson published earlier this month: “He was a threat. He ended up seizing assets of Zlochevsky – a house, some cars, a couple of properties. And (Zlochevsky) actually never went back to Ukraine,” he said.
The US State Department has denied a visa to Shokin to visit the US. “There was a lot of bullshit co-ordination between Biden and other important figures in the international community, who basically corroborated his narrative that Shokin had to be fired because of his corruption – personally, methodologically, I would discount any statements by any official about Shokin after he was fired,” Abrahms says. “For me, the real scandal, as an American, is just how there’s such a lack of curiosity. It all reflects badly not just on the institution of the vice-president but the American media,” he adds, shocked at the double standards applied to Trump and Biden.
Indeed, the evidence of corruption against the Biden family that has emerged may have only scratched the surface. Best-selling author Peter Schweizer, in his 2022 book Red Handed, laid out some suspicious and brazen business dealing of Hunter Biden during and after his father was vice-president, including with Chinese businesses close to the Communist Party leadership.
Joe Biden maintained private phone lines at his official residence paid for by Hunter and his business associates, while Hunter declined secret service protection on certain overseas trips but not others.
“Joe Biden regularly met with his son’s foreign clients, particularly those from China and Ukraine,” Schweizer writes.
The Burisma revelations have damaged the US reputation abroad. Sali Berisha, a former prime minster of Albania, tells The Australian it was a “crystal clear conflict of interest because Ukraine was a client state of the US government”.
“The son should never have been involved in businesses with Ukraine and government as long as US government was dealing so intensively with Ukraine.”
Trump was relentlessly attacked, baselessly as it turned out, for being a “Russian asset” during his presidency, beholden to Moscow because of alleged videos of him with prostitutes, which ultimately were a fabricated commission of the Clinton 2016 presidential campaign known as the Steele dossier.
It would be ironic if it ended up being Joe Biden who was the one compromised, not by Russia, but Ukraine, to which the US has provided more than $US110bn in aid since February 2022.
“Both the alleged offence, as well as the strength of the evidence, are far more egregious in the case of Biden than for Trump’s phone call,” Abrahms says.
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