With President Trump cleared of “colluding” with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton, perhaps it’s time to look at another corruption case — this one involving likely 2020 presidential contender Joe Biden.
Writing in The Hill, investigative reporter John Solomon reminded readers that Biden threatened to withhold loan guarantees from Ukraine if its government did not fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company connected to Biden’s son.
The rerun of that news comes on top of four allegations that Biden, known as Creepy Joe, has been way too friendly with way too many women. But the latest revelation involves more than unwanted back rubs and Eskimo kisses.
Collusion, the false charge against Trump, doesn’t quite describe Biden’s activities. Bribery and extortion sound more like it.
What Biden Did
Last year, Solomon wrote, Biden boasted that “he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.” And by “strong-armed,” Solomon doesn’t mean Biden gave the Ukrainians a squeeze on the shoulder:
Biden … threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.
“Well, son of a b***h, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.
The Ukrainians confirmed that account, but told Solomon the “pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016.” Either way, Shokin was fired.
But Biden didn’t tell the rapt audience that his speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick derring do wasn’t a disinterested move: “The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.”
U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.
In other words, prosecutor Shokin was about to open a can of worms named Biden. Before Shokin was pink-slipped, he planned a corruption probe into Busrima to include “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
Solomon pulled together the pieces of a complex puzzle, not least the younger Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board and what it meant vis-a-vis his father’s confessed push to get the prosecutor fired.
Citing conservative writer Peter Schweizer, Solomon wrote that Vice President Biden met with Devon Archer, the younger Biden’s partner in Rosemont Seneca, in April 2014, “right as Archer was named to the board at Burisma. A month later, Hunter Biden was named to the board, to oversee Burisma’s legal team.”
The Probe
“Most of the general prosecutor’s investigative work on Burisma focused on three separate cases, and most stopped abruptly once Shokin was fired,” Solomon wrote. But Shokin’s replacement, Yuriy Lutsenko, began nosing around. He told Solomon that “members of the Board obtained funds as well as another U.S.-based legal entity, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, for consulting services.”
As well, wrote Solomon, “Nazar Kholodnytskyi, the lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Lutsenko’s office, confirmed … that part of the Burisma investigation was reopened in 2018, after Joe Biden made his remarks” to the CFR.
“But what makes Lutsenko’s account compelling,” Solomon continued, “is that federal authorities in America, in an entirely different case, uncovered financial records showing just how much Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s company received from Burisma while Joe Biden acted as Obama’s point man on Ukraine.”
Rosemont Seneca, court records in that different case show, collected more than $3 million from Burisma between April 2014 and October 2015, Solomon reported.
And just when prosecutor Shokin began asking questions that would involve the vice president’s son, the prosecutor was fired — after the vice president threatened to wreck the country financially.
We’ll see whether the leftist Deep State media will accuse their man of impropriety as vigorously — and viciously — as they did Trump.
Image: Feodora Chiosea / iStock / Getty Images Plus
