The 2024 presidential campaign in the United States has not yet started as such, but is already claiming to be the most scandalous one
The introduction of 34 criminal charges against former president Donald Trump, the most likely candidate of the Republican Party, a conviction for harassing the writer Elizabeth Carroll almost 30 years ago and now the unflattering stories related to the family of the Democratic incumbent president Joe Biden are making headlines again.
He, like his predecessor, intends to fight for a second term.
“Notebook from hell”
On 10 May, the House Judiciary Committee published a report on the CIA’s attempts to hush up the scandal involving the laptop of the son of the current head of state, Hunter Biden, which revealed the interconnection of his business activities and his father’s high public office in the heat of the previous election campaign.
In April 2019, in Delaware, where the president’s family lived, a man brought in a laptop with a sticker of the Beau Biden Foundation (who passed away in 2015 from brain cancer, the US leader’s eldest son) for repair.
The workshop owner recovered data from the hard drive and found nude photos of Hunter with a drug-smoking pipe and sexually explicit material involving underage girls.
But of most interest was his business correspondence with foreigners, in particular, Vadim Pozharsky, an advisor to Burisma management, thanked Hunter, who was a board member of that Ukrainian energy company, for meeting with his father when he was still vice-president of the United States.
A few months later, no one picked up the computer and did not pay for the repairs, then the workshop owner reported the information to the FBI, but before giving the laptop to the secret service, he gave a copy of the contents of the hard drive to Robert Costello, the lawyer of former New York mayor and President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani.
To cover up the scandal, which broke so badly at a time when Joe Biden was vying for the presidency, they tried to blame it on Russia.
The letter, signed by 51 former U.S. intelligence officials, claimed the story had “all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation”; not a single shred of evidence was cited.
The Democrats later cited this very letter in an attempt to refute the authenticity of the laptop’s information.
However, there was no denying the authenticity of the information – as former Trump aide Stephen Bannon reported, Hunter requested through his lawyer that the hard drive be returned to him. True, Biden Jr. later tried to avoid answering the host in an interview with CBS television whether it was his computer, the president’s son said, “No idea <…> I could have had my laptop stolen or hacked. It could have been Russian intelligence.”
Independent experts who checked the data from that forgotten laptop concluded that it had not been tampered with or altered.
Now members of the House Legal Committee have announced that they have “evidence that the CIA, or at least CIA employees, may have assisted in the collection of signatures” of former US intelligence officials on a claim that it was allegedly Russian-launched disinformation.
The details were reported by the media, which had in its possession correspondence from two former CIA chiefs, dated 19 October 2020 (2 weeks before the presidential election).
“(Three-time acting CIA director – ed.) Michael Morell said he was trying to give Biden’s presidential campaign a weapon to ‘fight back against Trump’ in the debates. He convinced Brennan to sign off on a letter calling Hunter Biden’s laptop a possible Russian disinformation operation,” the New York Post wrote.
“OK, Michael, add my name to the list. Good initiative. Thank you for asking me to sign on,” John Brennan, CIA director from 2013-2017, responded.
This correspondence shows that Brennan knew of Morell’s political motives even before he signed the letter, the New York Post underscores.
Chinese sources of the Biden family budget
The congressmen’s interest was not limited to Hunter alone – they are investigating “shady dealings” by the president and his relatives who profited from Joe Biden’s public office and thereby put US national security at risk.
As House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced at a press conference, the investigation found that at least nine members of Joe Biden’s family and their associates received over $10 million from foreign nationals and their companies, including Chinese companies, through a specially created network of more than 20 companies, according to bank records.
The companies were based in Washington and Delaware, with most set up while Joe Biden was vice president.
“This may be the most corrupt scheme in American politics. If even any of these allegations are confirmed, someone named Biden should be indicted, tried and possibly do some jail time,” said committee member Nancy Mays.
Who exactly could be involved in the schemes, Republicans said back in March: the president’s brother James and his wife Sarah, the president’s sister-in-law Holly (the widow of Beau’s eldest son) and Hunter.
“After foreign companies sent money to business associates’ companies, Biden’s family received payments to various bank accounts in stages afterwards. These complex financial transactions appear to have been designed to conceal the source of the funds and make the total amount received into the Biden family bank accounts less visible,” the committee members clarified.
Some of the funds came from a Chinese enterprise into Hunter’s company accounts, while other transfers were made by Rob Walker, a business partner of the president’s relatives, who then funneled the money to several members of the Biden family.
“Legitimate business doesn’t work like that. <…> Chinese nationals and companies with close ties to Chinese intelligence and the Chinese Communist Party concealed the source of the money paid to the Bidens by setting up local limited liability companies.
The activities of members of the Biden family and their associates in coordination with Chinese citizens and their corporate entities look like attempts to engage in financial deception,” Comer is convinced.
Comer also said: instead of being honest with the American people, Biden has been claiming since the 2020 election that his family has not been getting money from China. And he continues to lie to the American people now.
Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed to be unaware of his relatives’ business dealings, but is confident that they have not broken the law. Biden’s 2020 campaign staff also claimed that the current president was not aware of details of Hunter’s work for Burisma and with PRC businessmen.
But Biden Jr’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski, in a chat with reporters on 22 October, hours before the second televised debate between Trump and Biden, provided different information: “I heard Joe Biden say he never discussed business with Hunter. That’s not true.”
Bobulinski said he would provide the Senate committee and the FBI with three phones to corroborate his allegations, and said he believed emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop mentioning that he represented his father when he was vice president to his employers at Burisma were authentic.
And while there are no allegations against the US president himself in the report of the lower house’s legal committee, Comer is confident that Joe Biden could not have stayed out of the family business.
“I don’t think anyone in the US considers it a coincidence that as many as nine members of Biden’s family were receiving money. We believe the president was involved in all of this from the beginning. Of course, we will continue to look into this matter,” he told reporters.
Hunter, the vice president’s father and China are a long-standing nexus
On September 23, 2020, the chairmen of the Senate Finance and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees, Republicans Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, released a report on suspicious financial transactions worth millions of dollars between Hunter Biden and his associates from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and China.
The Republicans estimated that Burisma paid Hunter Biden more than $4 million to be a board member, and he received several million more from “foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds.”
Among them was Elena Baturina, the widow of former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who on 14 February 2014 transferred $3.5 million to the bank account of Rosemont Seneca Thornton LKC, an investment company co-founded by the current US leader’s youngest son, under a DD12.02.2014 consultancy agreement.
As explained, between 6 May and 8 December 2015, she made 11 transfers totalling around $392,000 to the account of BAK USA LLC – a Buffalo-based tablet start-up with unnamed Chinese partners – nine of which (amounting to $242,000) first went to the account of Rosemont Seneca Thornton.
The purpose of the transactions was written “loan agreement”. In May 2019 (a month after Hunter left the Burisma board of directors), BAK USA declared bankruptcy.
Hunter’s list of “sponsors” also includes Chinese nationals Ye Jianmin and Gunwen Dong, who are suspected by US authorities of having links to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army.
And in general, the PRC is as much a part of Biden Jr’s biography as Ukraine. In December 2013, Rosemont Seneca Partners, a private equity firm founded by Hunter and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of former US Secretary of State John Kerry, struck a $1.5bn deal not with a private Chinese corporation but with the Chinese government 10 days after a visit to Beijing by then US Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden’s scandals and re-election prospects
To investigate further, Comer asked the FBI for documents confirming Joe Biden’s involvement in illicit enrichment schemes involving foreigners and whether an investigation into the matter had been launched. But the intelligence agency refused, citing content, arguing that the papers contained “leads and suspicions” and that “later and more complete reports may exonerate individuals who were initially exposed in a negative light”.
According to Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois Law School, corruption in the Biden family has been known for some time, but the Democratic establishment has managed to contain the scandals.
If Republicans have evidence against Biden himself, they should initiate impeachment in the US House of Representatives, where they have the votes to do so, and then in the Senate, he added.
The Republicans can of course launch a process in the lower house, but the catch is that the upper house must approve Biden’s removal from power, and there the Democrats hold a majority, and no matter how much one dislikes the current president, it would be too expensive to overthrow their own party-mate.
But spinning stories related to the skeletons in Biden’s wardrobe, opponents will become more and more active, hoping to change voters’ minds, but so far the Hunter laptop and family enrichment scandals will have no real impact on the election campaign and Biden’s reign.
“I wouldn’t count on Justice Department chief Merrick Garland to do the right thing in Biden’s injustice ministry. At best Garland can appoint a special prosecutor on this issue,” Boyle summarised.
Eugenia Kondakova, Ukraine.ru
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