THREAT TO AMERICA: THE LAWYER CLASS
BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN, BANKSTERS' RENT BOYS
On Contact: The legacy of corporate Democrats
A Party Without a President Goes to War
Biden’s weakness fuels a Democrat civil war.
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
While the White House functions as the most expensive nursing home in the world, Capitol Hill is in a state of war, not between Democrats and Republicans, but a Dem on Dem fiscal war.
Normally a majority party with its guy in the Oval Office would turn to the administration to broker a deal, but the word is that Biden is “keeping a careful distance” from the battle. That’s sensible since Biden just got rolled by the Taliban and the French: he’s not up for the only thing that any government official will fight to the death for, not honor or country, but money.
Biden is the weakest man in the White House in a century. It’s not just age, which makes him a longshot for a second term, and has led to former opponents, many of them in the Senate, acting like they might run again in 2024, or a diminished mental capacity which precludes him from having much to say on anything except his love of ice cream and young girls.
After two generations in politics, people have yet to take Joe Biden seriously. Even sitting in the Oval Office, he’s a Rodney Dangerfield punchline who still can’t get any respect. There were a number of things weighing Biden down even long before his brain turned to jelly. He came out of one of America’s smallest states acting like he was presidential timber and humiliatingly blew his big shot with a plagiarism scandal. His corruption was legendary and politicians who are transparently for sale, like the Clintons, are generally seen as weak and easy to manipulate.
Mostly though Joe Biden was dumb. He had no ideas and the few ideas he had were terrible. The Senate is full of hacks, but Biden still stood out for sheer cluelessness and vanity. Biden is the only man in Washington D.C. to take himself seriously. That’s a power base of one.
BLOG EDITOR: THE OBOMB PICKED BIDEN BECAUSE JOE HAD LONG BEEN UP THE ASSES OF OBAMA'S CRONY BANKKSTERS. EVERYONE IN THE BANKSTER REGIME OF LAWYER BARACK OBAMA, LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND THE BANKSTERS' RENT BOY LAWYER ERIC HOLDER HAD A PROVEN RECORD OF SERVING THE BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANKSTERS ON WALL STREET.
When Obama picked Biden, it wasn’t because he respected him. Just the opposite. Biden was the opponent whom he respected the least. Obama wanted the anti-Cheney, an idiot who would pose no threat, look good in photos, and whom no one could conceivably pick to replace him. (Biden, having learned that much from his old boss, used the same criteria to pick Kamala.)
Indeed, Obama respected Biden so much that he refused to back his incumbent VP for the top job in the Democrat primaries in 2016 and 2020, and ridiculed him in leaked media quotes.
What was the selling point for Biden’s presidential candidacy? We’re seeing it right now.
Untethered from the White House, Democrat factions backed by competing megadonors are fighting it out. The mice are playing because the cat’s not only away, he’s not really all there.
But it’s not just Biden.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has her job because she’s a pipeline to San Francisco’s donor class while Senator Schumer, her opposite number, is a pipeline to Wall Street. These aren’t legislative leaders, but two political hacks whose top skill is getting cash for their allies.
The trouble is that two can play at that game.
Lefty megadonors and business special interests are fighting over trillions in spending using the chess pieces they’ve funded over the years. And with narrow majorities, it doesn’t take much for the different factions, the radicals and the moderates, to take the entire process hostage.
On paper, the Democrats control the legislative and executive branches. In reality, they’re a house divided with no real leadership and no one able to have the final say. The real power has always belonged to staffers, but staffers work behind the scenes, they’re useless in a public power struggle. And the Democrats have no leadership and thus nothing but power struggles.
Legislative leaders like Pelosi and Schumer live in fear of lefties who control the culture. But their fear, of being primaried, of being drowned in cash from George Soros or Reed Hastings, is a non-issue to more moderate elected officials who operate out of red or purple states. And who have nothing but contempt for Pelosi and Schumer’s terror in the face of AOC’s Twitter account.
Weak leaders like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer can’t reliably run anything. And in the absence of leadership, the other organizing principles, ideology, media and social media consensus, have proven inadequate to actually get things done. Ideologues can’t tolerate dissent and have no idea how to cope with it except by trying to destroy the source. Unable to actually destroy Manchin, the lefties glower hatefully and mutter dire threats, but have no idea how to persuade.
The old club where deals were struck and trillions in tax dollars were traded depended on leaders who might be unspeakably corrupt, but whose word to other members was solid. Manchin has conclusively demonstrated that legislative Democrats lack such leaders and that instead of having a solid plan for moving forward, they’ve been trying to pass the buck.
Biden’s weakness has become an apt metaphor for the weakness of a Democrat leadership that consists of staffers and donors moving hollow pieces with titles around a chessboard. Biden was supposed to be the last of the old Democrat lions, but he proved to be an incontinent pussycat. And Schumer, who was billed as being canny, has come off as whiny and ineffectual, more eager to stave off primary challenges than make the big decisions. And that leaves Pelosi who combines the worst traits of Biden and Schumer with boundless arrogance and unlikability.
The Left planned out an agenda based on being an unstoppable force that would smash through all obstacles using political terror, media pressure campaigns, and gratuitous violations of political norms and laws. But the unstoppable force keeps running into obstacles, judicial decisions, moderate resistance, that don’t quite stop it, but do slow it down. And the Left’s conviction that it can go over or around any obstacle have left it unable to deal with reality.
Legislative bodies work on compromise and depend on leadership. The ability of radical staffers to engineer legislative coups is being challenged by the realities of procedure and process. A generation of radical staffers was able to set the agenda in the Obama and Biden administrations, but their congressional counterparts are being thwarted by the checks and balances of a legislative system that has far more restraints on its power than the White House.
And, unlike the White House, the Senate works around the privilege of individual members which made the Left’s plan to simply force its agenda through a self-destructive effort.
The Left hasn’t lost. It will, one way or another, get most of what it wants. But the inescapable lesson here is that lefties have plenty of donors and activists, but lack leaders. The Biden administration offers the perfect opportunity of a leaderless White House that can do anything, but lead on nothing. The more the chaos grows, the more Biden’s approval ratings fall.
And the more voters are likely to turn to strong leadership to replace Biden’s empty chair.
Joe Biden: Unfit for Office
Never in American history has a major political party nominated two candidates for president and vice-president who are so manifestly unfit for the elective offices they seek.
Joe Biden, the corrupt, unaccomplished 47-year career politician, with a reputation of having been a proud segregationist, an unabashed plagiarist and liar, a resolute tale-teller, and a serial flip-flopper, is pretending to head up a radical social-democratic ticket for President of the United States that includes as his running mate the ambitious, disagreeable junior senator from California: Kamala Harris.
There’s some ‘serious regret’ over the election of Joe Biden
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now. TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
With Biden in the White House, President Trump predicted, China would “own the United States.” There’s also something to Trump’s charge that the Bidens are an “organized crime family.”
LLOYD BILLIONGSLEY
IMAGES OF JOE BIDEN’S MANSIONS:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a33809100/joe-biden-real-estate-homes/
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)
America's Fate: Oligarchy or Autocracy.
The Pandora Papers: How the world of offshore finance is still flourishing | Four Corners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kPLpZN3I3A
'Pandora Papers' expose how world leaders and the ultra-rich move their money
LISTEN TO THIS WHITE HOUSE BULLSHIT THAT FAILS TO MENTION THE VAST FORTUNE JOE BIDEN HAS SALTED AWAY IN TRUSTS AND OTHER DEVICES ALL THROUGH PARASITE LAWYER SON HUNTER BIDEN'S DIRTY DEALS!!!
White House Reacts To Pandora Papers Exposing Secret Dealings Of Billionaires And World Leaders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjZawZCli-E
HOW MANY MUSLIM DICTATORS HAVE WE BANKROLLED
AND FOR HOW LONG?
THESE FUCKERS WOULD STAB US IN THE BACK IN A NANO SECOND GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY
DO A SEARCH FOR GEORGE W BUSH'S PAYMASTERS,
THE SAUDI INVADERS 9/11
THIS FUCKING DICTATOR OWNS $100 MILLION IN U.S. REAL ESTATE INCLUDING A $33 MILLION DOLLAR MALIBU MANSION
Pandora Papers Reveal Details Of Offshore Wealth Storage By World Leaders
The Jordanian Royal Palace responded to the report on Monday by stating there was nothing “unusual or improper” about King Abdullah’s real estate purchases, which it said were made with his own money, not funds from the government treasury......HeHeHe.... there is NO gov treasury except the money looted from the American people!!!
An early reaction from observers such as Oxfam International, a prominent charity organization, was that so many world leaders are busy making extravagant purchases and hiding vast troves of personal wealth while their countries are wrestling with underfunded social services or receiving international aid.
A REMINDER OF THE DANGERS OF LETTING A GAMING LAWYER IN THE WHITE HOUSE!
There it is. That's the issue. To begin, you have the corrupt family Biden. They've been scamming us and our system well for almost fifty years. The man is supposedly worth over 250 million dollars. How is this possible on his salary? It's not. So where did his wealth come from? Not from being a brilliant businessman. DAVID PRENTICE
LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS, PATHOLOGICAL LIAR AT LARGE
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/lawyer-kamala-harris-pathological-liar.html
Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything. DAVID KELTZ
He added, “When Hunter Biden is doing foreign deals, whether they are these deals in Beijing where he gets checks for $5 million and there’s no evidence he really did anything, or whether he’s putting together a painting and putting that up for sale, at the end of the day the way the business model works in the Biden family is that the finances are intertwined. Joe Biden will benefit one way or another from what they are doing. Let’s be clear, Hunter Biden’s friend, this gallery owner that is going to be selling his artwork, has spoken in the past about the desire to have ambitious plans to seek and find buyers in China.”
Kamala Harris Failed to Investigate Client of Husband’s Law Firm as California Attorney General
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-bribes-suckers-senator-dianne.html
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) failed as California’s attorney general declined to investigate faulty advertising claims against one of the nation’s leading nutritional supplement companies, which also happened to be a client of her husband’s law firm.
As California’s chief law enforcement officer between 2011 and 2017, Harris racked up a record as a tough on crime prosecutor. From cracking down on school truancy to opposing marijuana legalization—with more than 1900 people being prosecuted for possession of the drug under her tenure—Harris was California’s self-acknowledged “top cop.”
That record, however, did not extend to clients of Venable LLP, the law firm where Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, was a high-profile partner. Harris, in particular, failed on numerous occasions to investigate the nutritional supplement giant Herbalife. At the time, Herbalife was a high-profile client of Venable, paying the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars for its legal services every year.
Emails: Hunter Biden ‘Said He Has Access to Highest Level’ of Chinese Govt, According to Dem Donor
Hunter Biden’s newest purported Libya email dump on Thursday, unrelated to his reported laptop cache, reveals the Biden family’s connections to the “highest level” in Communist China.
The emails by Hunter’s business contact indicate Hunter, “#2 son,” demanded a $2 million dollar retainer plus “success fees” to unfreeze assets in Libya frozen by the Obama-Biden administration. They also noted Hunter’s business relationship with former Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, who founded with Hunter in 2009 Rosemont Seneca Partners, a billion-dollar private equity firm.
Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden (L), John Kerry and stepson Chris Heinz (R). (Charles Dharapak, Lawrence Jackson/AP Photo)
The first Libya email is reportedly dated January 28, 2015, nearly two years before the end of the Obama-Biden administration.
“Per phone conversation I met with #2 son. He wants $2 per year retainer +++ success fees. He wants to hire his own people – it can be close circle of people for confidentiality. His dad is deciding to run or not,” the email first read.
The email then described Hunter as an “alcoholic, drug addict” and “kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low-class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches.”
But Hunter’s business contact, Democrat donor Sam Jauhari, said Hunter’s redemptive qualities where his connection to Chris Heinz and his “access to [the] highest level” in Communist China:
His positives are he is Chairman of UN World Food Program, son of #2 who has Libya file, access to State, Treasury, business partner SofS [Secretary of State] J. [John] Forbes K [Kerry] son and since he travels with dad he is connected everywhere in Europe and Asia where M. Q. [Muammar Qaddafi] and LIA [Libya Investment Authority] had money frozen. He said he has access to highest level in PRC [China], he can help there.
Another email from Thursday’s report indicates the deal progressed into the following year.
“They are interested in the project,” a Washington lawyer John Sandweg wrote Jauhari, “but emphasized that for them to get involved, the team (lobbyists, lawyers and PR) would need to be a small group of folks they have a tight relationship with.”
The White House, Jauhari, and Hunter’s attorney declined to comment on the Libya emails to Business Insider.
Though the deal appears to not have come to fruition, the emails reveal the Biden’s close ties to China.
Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer told Fox News in 2019 that Hunter traveled to China with Joe Biden aboard Air Force Two. Ten days after the trip, Rosemont Seneca received a $1.5 billion deal, which Schweizer believes was funded by Communist China:
While his father is meeting with Chinese officials, Hunter Biden is doing we don’t know what. But the evidence becomes clear because ten days after they return to Washington, his small boutique investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, gets a $1 billion deal. That’s $1 billion with a “B,” later expanded to $1.5 billion. And that deal is with the Chinese government. It’s a deal that nobody else has in China. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, nobody.
Despite his lack of experience in financial matters, such as private equity or hedge funds, Hunter and Chris Heinz won the contract over the likes of the big banks.
“Any experience he [Hunter] has in private equity is certainly not the type that the Chinese would have interested in. And the bottom line here,” Schweizer continued, “is that in both the case of Ukraine and China, we have paper trails.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø
Report: Hunter Biden Demanded $2 Million Plus ‘Success Fees’ to Unfreeze Libyan Assets
159AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
23 Sep 20210
5:23
Hunter Biden reportedly demanded a $2 million retainer plus “success fees” to unlock Libyan assets frozen by the Obama-Biden administration, according to newly discovered emails obtained by Business Insider. Though President Joe Biden has claimed ignorance about Hunter’s family business schemes, the emails suggest otherwise.
“The first email, dated January 28, 2015, was sent from Sam Jauhari, a Democratic donor with businesses in the Persian Gulf, who was helping spearhead the Libya project,” Business Insider reported Thursday. “It was addressed to Sheikh Mohammed al-Rahbani, another Obama campaign donor involved in the proposal. In the email, Jauhari is frank about what Biden would bring to the table, and what he says Biden wanted in return”:
Per phone conversation I met with #2 son. He wants $2 per year retainer +++ success fees. He wants to hire his own people – it can be close circle of people for confidentiality. His dad is deciding to run or not.
His positives are he is Chairman of UN World Food Program, son of #2 who has Libya file, access to State, Treasury, business partner SofS [Secretary of State] J. [John] Forbes K [Kerry] son and since he travels with dad he is connected everywhere in Europe and Asia where M. Q. [Muammar Qaddafi] and LIA [Libya Investment Authority] had money frozen. He said he has access to highest level in PRC [China], he can help there.
His negatives are that he is alcoholic, drug addict – kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches.
We should meet in Gstraad or London to decide next steps.
As part of the deal, Jauhari and his partners were purportedly promised a five percent finder fee for unfreezing the Libyan funds, which could have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. It is unknown if Hunter’s “success fee” would have been carved out from the five percent finders fee.
It’s not the first time Hunter has been in contact with big-money individuals. According to Hunter’s own book, Hunter obtained a special meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II purportedly about Syrian refugees. The Los Angeles Times noted that the king took “the meeting only out of respect for Biden’s father, the American vice president.”
This picture, taken on March 15, 2014, shows a family at the sprawling desert Zaatari refugee camp in northern Jordan near the border with Syria which provides shelter to around 100,000 Syrian refugees. (Khalil Mazraawi/AFP via Getty Images)
“The only reason the king had agreed to meet,” Hunter wrote, “was out of respect for my dad. I guess you could chalk it up to nepotism, in the best possible way.”
In the second email, dated February 26, 2016, negotiations with Hunter apparently continued about unfreezing money in Libya.
According to Business Insider, “In it [the second email], Jauhari and al-Rahbani receive[d] a report by John Sandweg, a Washington lawyer who had served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Obama. Sandweg had reached out to Biden’s team about the Libya deal”:
I spoke with HB’s team yesterday. They are interested in the project, but emphasized that for them to get involved, the team (lobbyists, lawyers and PR) would need to be a small group of folks they have a tight relationship with. They do not want a large group involved and they only want people with whom they have a close relationship with due to the sensitivities surrounding their involvement.
Lawyer Sandweg confirmed to Business Insider he was communicating with the Biden team about unlocking assets in Libya. “They indicated they would consider it and I passed the message back,” Sandweg told the publication. “Jauhari wound up hiring a different law firm instead.”
Jauhari, the White House, and Hunter’s attorney declined to comment on the Libya emails.
It should be noted the Libya emails are not from Hunter’s laptop that the FBI is reportedly scouring for potential wrongdoing in which Hunter may have partaken.
Hunter’s Libya emails are the second bombshell to drop this week about Joe Biden’s family. According to Ben Schreckinger’s new book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power, Hunter’s laptop material is genuine.
The book details “evidence that Hunter did ‘receive a 2015 email’ from an executive of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, ‘thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden,'” highlighting Joe’s direct involvement with Hunter’s business schemes.
Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer told Fox News in December 2020, the laptop’s hard drive suggests just how Joe Biden’s family operates in corrupt activities.
“In the emails that have come out as well, Hunter Biden is quite explicit. In one particular communication with his daughter, he’s basically complaining that he pays half of the entire family’s bills,” Schweizer said. “And he includes his mother and father in that and makes reference to pops.”
“So, the point is,” Schweizer continued, “all this enrichment that has been taking place is also flowing to Joe Biden indirectly through his son, but the fact of the matter is, he’s still a beneficiary, a direct beneficiary, of these foreign deals.”
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø
Schweizer: Hunter Biden, Joe Biden Finances Are Illegally ‘Intertwined’
Government Accountability Institute President and host of The Drill Down podcast Peter Schweizer, on Wednesday’s edition Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle” said the finances of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter are “intertwined,” which is not legal.
Ingraham said, “One of the scandals the media laughs off is the secretive selling of Hunter Biden’s lousy artwork. We know at some point in the coming weeks, hundreds of thousands of dollars as written in The Atlantic will be funneled to the son of a sitting president, and none of us will know anything about who sent the money or where it originally came. From.”
She asked, “Peter, how likely is it that foreign buyers are going to be using this obvious opportunity to shove more money into Hunter’s pockets or other family members, mainly the president?”
Schweizer said, “I think it is very likely and if you go through the Hunter Biden emails, as I have been doing with the team for close to a year, scouring them. What you find out very quickly is that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s finances are intertwined. They are not separate entities. There are numerous examples of Hunter Biden is paying bills for his father. Which, by the way, is not legal. Politicians can get occasional gifts from family members, but you cannot subsidize the lifestyle of a politician. That is what Hunter Biden is doing.”
He added, “When Hunter Biden is doing foreign deals, whether they are these deals in Beijing where he gets checks for $5 million and there’s no evidence he really did anything, or whether he’s putting together a painting and putting that up for sale, at the end of the day the way the business model works in the Biden family is that the finances are intertwined. Joe Biden will benefit one way or another from what they are doing. Let’s be clear, Hunter Biden’s friend, this gallery owner that is going to be selling his artwork, has spoken in the past about the desire to have ambitious plans to seek and find buyers in China.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS, PATHOLOGICAL LIAR AT LARGE
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/lawyer-kamala-harris-pathological-liar.html
Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything. DAVID KELTZ
KAMALA HARRIS’ ASSAULT ON FREEDOM OF FAITH - WHAT WOULD SHE DO TO BELIEVERS AS PRESIDENT?
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/why-does-lawyer-kamala-harris-hate.html
Harris’s most important contribution to the Supreme Court debate thus far has been her controversial attempt to smear Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing in 2018.
She insinuated that Kavanaugh was linked to Russian collusion — a claim so absurd that she was mocked by both of the major newspapers in her home state, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. Harris also drew criticism for a deceptively-edited video in which she falsely suggested Kavanaugh opposed birth control.
The best-case scenario is that she’s a progressive who repeatedly violated her own principles so that she could promote her career. In the worst-case scenario, she’s just another corrupt, rotten, regressive prosecutor.
JESSER HOROWITZ
Kamala Harris Failed to Investigate Client of Husband’s Law Firm as California Attorney General
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-bribes-suckers-senator-dianne.html
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) failed as California’s attorney general declined to investigate faulty advertising claims against one of the nation’s leading nutritional supplement companies, which also happened to be a client of her husband’s law firm.
As California’s chief law enforcement officer between 2011 and 2017, Harris racked up a record as a tough on crime prosecutor. From cracking down on school truancy to opposing marijuana legalization—with more than 1900 people being prosecuted for possession of the drug under her tenure—Harris was California’s self-acknowledged “top cop.”
That record, however, did not extend to clients of Venable LLP, the law firm where Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, was a high-profile partner. Harris, in particular, failed on numerous occasions to investigate the nutritional supplement giant Herbalife. At the time, Herbalife was a high-profile client of Venable, paying the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars for its legal services every year.
THIS IS FOR REAL!
Kamala Harris: ‘Joe Biden Has Been Incredibly Transparent’ with His Money
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) claimed during Wednesday’s vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City, UT, that Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden has been “incredibly transparent” about his personal finances.
Harris described Biden as “forthright” with his finances in response to a question posed to her and Vice President Mike Pence about the health of Biden and President Donald Trump given their ages – 77 and 74, respectively.
Peter Schweizer, president of the Government accountability Institute and author Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, has reported on Biden’s family’s financial ties to foreign governments and
oligarchs. Weeks ago, he called for Senate
Republicans to subpoena Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s
second son, to investigate financial dealings with
foreign interests.
Schweizer has repeatedly outlined how the Biden family monetized the political influence of Joe Biden in his previous capacities as a senator and vice president.
Harris praised the New York Times‘s allegations that Trunp paid $750 in federal income taxes in both 2015 and 2016 as “great investigative journalism.” She specifically defined “in debt” as if the audience needed an explanation of indebtedness:
We now know, because of great investigative journalism, that Donald Trump paid $750 in taxes. When I first heard about it, I literally said, You mean $750,000?’, and it was like, ‘No, $750.’ We now know Donald Trump owes and is in debt for $400 million dollars, and just so everyone is clear when when we say in debt, it means you owe money to somebody.
And it’d be really good to know who the President of the United States — the commander-in-chief — owes money to, because the American people have a right to know what is influencing the president’s decisions, and is he making those decisions on the best interest of the American people — of you — or self-interest.
Harris stated, “So, Susan, I’m glad you asked about transparency, because it has to be across the board. Joe has been incredibly transparent over many, many years. The one thing we all know about Joe, he puts it all out there. He is honest, he is forthright, but Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been about covering up everything.”
Joe Biden: Unfit for Office
Never in American history has a major political party nominated two candidates for president and vice-president who are so manifestly unfit for the elective offices they seek.
Joe Biden, the corrupt, unaccomplished 47-year career politician, with a reputation of having been a proud segregationist, an unabashed plagiarist and liar, a resolute tale-teller, and a serial flip-flopper, is pretending to head up a radical social-democratic ticket for President of the United States that includes as his running mate the ambitious, disagreeable junior senator from California: Kamala Harris.
Biden, Obama’s vice-presidential lackey for eight years (a period of unprecedented corruption and personal enrichment for both men), has always craved power and attention. But unfortunately for Joe, his mouth, hands, and nose have consistently undermined his presidential ambitions.
This year, courtesy of an international pandemic, unprecedented social unrest, an obsequious leftist media, and the customary DNC shenanigans, Biden miraculously emerged from the basement as the last Democrat candidate standing -- figuratively speaking, of course.
Touted as the most acceptable contender in a general election, the ever-manipulative DNC, with assists from Majority Whip James Clyburn, foisted the 77-year old empty suit on the Democrat voters, despite an interminable career of incompetence and uncontrollable pervy conduct around women and young girls, including a credible allegation of sexual assault.
Joe Biden is the DNC’s so-called “empathy candidate,” and “restorer of America’s soul.” Uncle Joe -- the perpetual advocate of blue-collar, lunch-bucket workers, friend of the common man, and supposed champion of every solution destined to restore calm to the country and dignity to the White House -- is the candidate that cares about you. Not like the brash, egotistical, illegitimate, and unrefined President Trump.
And yet, despite a lethargic, uninspiring campaign, and a shocking dearth of mental competence and physical vivacity on Joe’s part, Biden stands incredibly today, at the pinnacle of his political career; anointed as the Democrat Party’s nominee for president, despite two prior, failed attempts, including one in the last century.
Joe’s good fortune, however, is based on a lie; a political mythology, as it were, deviously by the elite power brokers, that Joe was, and still is, a moderate and is therefore, the most electable Democrat out there. It cannot be based on the candidate’s unifying, optimistic, and patriotic vision for the future, because there is none. There are no reasonable, practical, and substantive ideas being proffered regarding freedom, liberty, prosperity, and security for the American people. On the contrary, the Harris-Biden candidacy is distinguished by a dark, overtly divisive, and destructive agenda, masked most days by shameless untruths and unrelenting criticism of President Trump. So much for empathy and unity.
Once the nomination was secured, Biden promptly sold his soul to the radical left wing of the Democrat Party for the purpose of appeasing the puppet masters and fulfilling his lifelong dream. Biden, the overrated, aging, and broken-down pol just wants to be president. And perhaps even more so, “Dr. Jill” wants to be First Lady. If Joe needs to be scripted, guided, and controlled by radical left-wing power brokers and his stonyhearted wife, so be it. Integrity, honesty, and principled positions are not essential elements of the Biden’s quest for power, perks, and prestige. Come On, Man!
In his effort to bamboozle the American voter, Biden has effectively embraced the anti-American, Marxist policies of Obama, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez while still pretending to be a moderate. The treasonous fake news media and propaganda arm of the DNC have enthusiastically aided and abetted Biden as they shamelessly promote the centrist lie.
Sadly, this dishonest and extremely corrosive strategy, if successful, will only serve to hasten the destruction of the America as we know it. Socialist-Marxist policies implemented by a radical Harris-Biden administration will undoubtedly diminish our freedoms, our liberty, threaten our security, and severely impact our daily pursuit of happiness and prosperity. We would be on the fast-track to Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America.
It’s not the radical, anti-American policies that make Joe Biden unfit for office, however. Rather it is the indisputable fact that Joe is not all there. Joe Biden is a hollow man. He is incredibly low energy, with obviously declining faculties. Joe Biden is physically and mentally incapable of performing the duties and responsibilities of the most difficult job in the world. Joe Biden does not have the cognitive abilities to string coherent sentences together without the use of notes or teleprompter, let alone make critical decisions. Physically and mentally, Biden is a shell of his former self.
The prospect of a 78-year-old man of such diminished capacities in the White House is terrifying, to say the least. Coupled with his unprincipled embrace of hard-left policies, a Biden presidency would pose an unprecedented danger to the country. A President Biden on the national and international stage would be an embarrassment to America and would confer way too much power and influence on Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett (Obama’s brain), and the ambitious, “harpy in waiting,” Kamala Harris.
There can be no doubt, that a President Joe Biden would merely be a figurehead. A dithering and doddering Biden will be allowed to masquerade as POTUS until such time as the puppeteers find it expedient to wheel Joe and his security blanket out the White House door, replaced by Kamala Harris. Harris in fact, has publicly and accurately stated that the correct designation, is in fact, the “Harris-Biden ticket.” Kamala knows the plan, and apparently Joe is okay with his “second fiddle” status as he has recently confirmed the reality of a Harris-Biden ticket. The truth is that the Harris -Biden campaign is nothing more than a cynical manipulation of public opinion, with Biden being the empty vessel by which power is attained.
Joe Biden, the corrupt, unaccomplished 47-year career politician, with a reputation of having been a proud segregationist, an unabashed plagiarist and liar, a resolute tale-teller, and a serial flip-flopper, is pretending to head up a radical social-democratic ticket for President of the United States that includes as his running mate the ambitious, disagreeable junior senator from California: Kamala Harris.
Exclusive — Donald Trump on the Bidens: ‘It’s a Corrupt Family’
20 Aug 2020Washington, DC1,427
4:41
President Donald Trump told Breitbart News exclusively in the Oval Office last week that his general election opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his entire family are “corrupt.”
Trump, the incumbent Republican, will face off against Democrat Biden in November. Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee, will formally accept the Democrat nomination for president, thereby officially becoming the party’s presidential nominee at the Democrat National Convention on Thursday night.
In his Oval Office interview with Breitbart News last Monday, the president made clear that his opponent and his whole family are “corrupt,” as evidenced by not just Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s business dealings with the Chinese Communist Party and Ukrainian oligarchs, but also other Biden family members, such as Biden’s brothers, James and Frank Biden and more.
Trump started by ripping into Hunter Biden for the $1.5 billion deal he cut with the Chinese. Hunter Biden accompanied his father, then the sitting vice president, to China on Air Force Two. Then just weeks later, he secured a $1.5 billion deal from the Bank of China, as Peter Schweizer—Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute president—has exposed. Hunter Biden also had a deal through Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company, through which he made tens of thousands of dollars a month—even though he had never been to Ukraine before accepting the position. Joe Biden, as vice president, pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma while his son Hunter worked for the firm.
“Hunter Biden came away with $1.5 billion, of which he gets big fees on. It’s not a possible thing to do,” Trump told Breitbart News in the Oval Office. “You can’t do that. It doesn’t—nobody has done that. Nobody has done that. China doesn’t do that. But he walked away in ten minutes with one-and-a-half-billion dollars. He gets fees on it. Ukraine, the same thing.”
But Hunter Biden’s questionable international dealings were not limited to China and Ukraine. As Schweizer’s most recent book, Profiles in Corruption, released earlier this year exposed, Hunter Biden’s firms had deals that secured hundreds of millions of dollars in other deals with the Chinese and with the Russians and Kazakhs as well.
“Other countries,” Trump said, noting next that the whole Biden family has been in on the graft: “The same thing for the family.”
Trump is correct about that. Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption exposed Biden’s two brothers, Frank and James, for various questionable deals in which they each engaged.
Despite having no experience whatsoever, Schweizer revealed this year that Frank was linked to $54 million in taxpayer loans from the Obama administration provided to help with U.S. relations in the Caribbean. Schweizer also revealed that Biden’s other brother, James, was employed at a firm to which the Obama administration funneled more than $1.5 billion in contracts over the course of Biden’s time in the nation’s second-highest office.
“It’s a corrupt family,” Trump told Breitbart News of the Bidens. “It’s a corrupt family, okay?”
In addition to Frank, James, and Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, is exposed in Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption as steering millions of dollars to a consulting firm she owned during her stints in her brother’s two previous presidential bids as his campaign manager. What’s more, Biden’s son-in-law, Howard Krein, who is married to Biden’s daughter Ashley, launched a firm from the Oval Office and repeatedly briefed investors privately, as Schweizer exposed in the book.
The president’s comments came in response to Breitbart News asking him about Biden’s attempts to frame him as weak on China, something that is hard to argue given the president’s and his administration’s work on the issue. Nonetheless, Biden’s team has tried to flip the script against Trump on China, something the president laughed at during his Oval Office interview as he laid out his successes in holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable.
“Weak on China? He’s weak period,” Trump told Breitbart News. “Weak on China? China has never—they’ve paid us billions and billions of dollars. They were having the worst year ever that they’ve had in 67 years. Weak on China? Those guys were pathetic. If Biden got elected, they’d own the United States within a very short period of time. China would own the United States.”
Profile in Corruption outlines how Biden’s children and other members of his family did just that while he was in political office.
Joe Biden Helped Launch Business for Son-in-Law from the Oval Office, Repeatedly Briefed Investors Privately
Former Vice President Joe Biden went to great lengths to boost his son-in-law’s health care company while in the White House, briefing investors on the firm’s merits and even arranging access to the Oval Office. The bombshell revelations are detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite — a new book by Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute.
In June 2011, Biden arranged a private meeting for two StartUp Health executives with then-President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. At the time of the meeting, the company had been around for only a few weeks. It had yet to finalize its business plan, let alone develop a website.
The meeting was all the more surprising since StartUp Health was not proposing any new or radical ideas for health care, at least not to the degree of warranting a meeting with the nation’s commander-in-chief.
“Their status as a health care incubator was hardly unique,” Schweizer writes in Profiles in Corruption. “In fact, there were thirty-one similar companies operating in the state of California alone, and another eleven in the state of New York.”
As Schweizer outlines, the only significant factor that set StartUp Health apart from others in its field was that its chief medical officer, Howard Krein, was engaged to Biden’s daughter, Ashley. Krein, a head and neck doctor by training, seemed to have become an integral part of Biden’s inner-circle even before he officially wed into the family in June 2012.
One day after StartUp Health’s executives met with Obama in the Oval Office, the company got a bigger boost from the administration when it was featured at a health care tech conference put on by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). How the company managed to score HHS attention, while still in the stages of infancy, remains unclear, but it is likely Biden played a role.
Regardless, the back-to-back events gave StartUp Health a launch trajectory unavailable to other companies in the health care field, let alone other industries. Biden’s influence ensured that StartUp Health set out with “the winds to our backs,” as one of the company’s co-founders succinctly put it.
The former vice president’s efforts on his son-in-law’s behalf were not just confined to the company’s launch. As Profiles in Corruption details, Biden went out of his way to ensure StartUp Health executives were given unparalleled access to the White House during the Obama presidency. The company’s leadership, which mostly consisted of Krein’s family and friends, frequently met with administration officials not only in private but also in public.
“According to 2011 White House visitors’ logs, Howard Krein attended the China State Dinner, a White House Staff barbecue, and President Obama’s Motown event,” Schweizer writes. “His brother, Steven, had half a dozen other meetings with White House officials.”
Biden’s efforts on behalf of the company expansively increased during his final year in office, both internationally and at home.
First, the vice president took Krein with him on Air Force Two to a conference on regenerative health hosted by Pope Francis at the Vatican in April 2016.
“Conference attendees included a who’s who of scientific researchers in medicine from around the world,” Schweizer notes.
Then in May, Krein was tasked with introducing his father-in-law at a major health industry data conference hosted by the Obama administration. The opportunity provided free publicity to the company as it planned to expand its portfolio.
In October 2016, Biden appeared alongside StartUp Health’s CEO at the Cleveland Clinic’s Medical Innovation Summit. During his remarks, Biden praised StartUp Health as an innovator in the health care market and claimed companies like it would be essential to winning the battle against cancer.
Apart from arranging access and touting the company in public, Biden also took steps in the waning days of the Obama administration to boost investment in StartUp Health. In January 2017, Biden made one of his final appearances as vice president at a festival hosted by the company in San Francisco, California. At the event, Biden lauded StartUp Health’s success to 250 attendees, including members and prospective donors.
Ironically, at the same time he was working to promote his son-in-law’s business, Biden was also claiming his children had chosen careers unlikely to make them rich.
“I wish my kids would become wealthy,” Biden told the International Association of Fire Fighters in July 2012 while lambasting the economic policies of then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Profile in Corruption outlines how Biden’s children and other members of his family did just that while he was in political office.
Profile in Corruption outlines how Biden’s children and other members of his family did just that while he was in political office.
Rep. Jim Banks Accuses Biden of Tax Avoidance ‘Hypocrisy’
In a March 25 letter to the president, Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks called out Joe Biden’s tax avoidance “hypocrisy.”
Republican Study Committee Chairman Representative Jim Banks asked President Joe Biden whether he would put his proverbial money where his mouth is in regard to the tax avoidance Biden himself publicly criticized.
During remarks on Biden’s infrastructure plan, the president complained “millions of Americans lost their jobs last year while the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their net worth increase by $4 trillion,” saying “it just goes to show you how distorted and unfair our economy has become.”
In the March 25 letter, Banks asked Biden whether he would address the “legally dubious tax strategy” he said the president and his wife used to skirt roughly $500,000 in payroll taxes. Banks pointed out “S-corporations” used on Biden’s 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns, in which “[Biden] and the First Lady sheltered over $13 million” from taxes designed to support Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Banks wrote:
Press reports indicate that you both directed revenue from book royalties and speaking appearance fees into these two corporations avoiding self-employment payroll tax liabilities that would have flowed to America’s Medicare program that provides care to over 60 million seniors.
He then referenced a July 2019 article in the Wall Street Journal in which a Tax Policy Center analyst observed claimed: “there’s no reason for these [earnings] to be in an S-Corp — none, other than to save on self-employment tax.”
Breitbart News previously reported “on much of the income Joe and Jill Biden generated through the corporations they established to pay themselves—CelticCapri and Giacoppa are the names of the two so-called S-Corporations—they did not have to pay payroll taxes collected to fund Social Security and Medicare.”
Speaking to Fox News, Banks said “House Democrats used their oversight power to subpoena Trump for his tax returns, but they’ve completely ignored Joe Biden’s abuse of our tax code,” promising changes next year.
“When we take back the House in 2022,” Banks said, “Oversight [Committee] Republicans won’t forget about Biden’s legally dubious tax avoidance schemes.”
Banks said the issue shows that “Democrat hypocrisy is limitless” and their widely-publicized rhetoric on closing tax loopholes might not apply to everyone. “The ACA imposed higher taxes on millions of Americans, but not Joe Biden. He paid $121,000 less in ObamaCare taxes thanks to an obscure tax loophole. Talk about inside baseball,” Banks told the outlet.
“Joe Biden advocated for expanding Medicare, and is pushing to close tax loopholes and for a $3 trillion tax hike,” Banks continued. “At the same time, ‘Amtrak Joe’ made $13 million through speaking fees in just three years, then skimped over $500,000 from Medicare recipients through tax loopholes.”
In his letter, Banks closed with a pointed question for the president: “Do you intend to undo your hypocrisy and pay these taxes back to the American people?”
There’s some ‘serious regret’ over the election of Joe Biden
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now. TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
With Biden in the White House, President Trump predicted, China would “own the United States.” There’s also something to Trump’s charge that the Bidens are an “organized crime family.”
LLOYD BILLIONGSLEY
IMAGES OF JOE BIDEN’S MANSIONS:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a33809100/joe-biden-real-estate-homes/
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)
America's Fate: Oligarchy or Autocracy.
The Pandora Papers: How the world of offshore finance is still flourishing | Four Corners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kPLpZN3I3A
'Pandora Papers' expose how world leaders and the ultra-rich move their money
LISTEN TO THIS WHITE HOUSE BULLSHIT THAT FAILS TO MENTION THE VAST FORTUNE JOE BIDEN HAS SALTED AWAY IN TRUSTS AND OTHER DEVICES ALL THROUGH PARASITE LAWYER SON HUNTER BIDEN'S DIRTY DEALS!!!
White House Reacts To Pandora Papers Exposing Secret Dealings Of Billionaires And World Leaders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjZawZCli-E
HOW MANY MUSLIM DICTATORS HAVE WE BANKROLLED
AND FOR HOW LONG?
THESE FUCKERS WOULD STAB US IN THE BACK IN A NANO SECOND GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY
DO A SEARCH FOR GEORGE W BUSH'S PAYMASTERS,
THE SAUDI INVADERS 9/11
THIS FUCKING DICTATOR OWNS $100 MILLION IN U.S. REAL ESTATE INCLUDING A $33 MILLION DOLLAR MALIBU MANSION
Pandora Papers Reveal Details Of Offshore Wealth Storage By World Leaders
The Jordanian Royal Palace responded to the report on Monday by stating there was nothing “unusual or improper” about King Abdullah’s real estate purchases, which it said were made with his own money, not funds from the government treasury......HeHeHe.... there is NO gov treasury except the money looted from the American people!!!
An early reaction from observers such as Oxfam International, a prominent charity organization, was that so many world leaders are busy making extravagant purchases and hiding vast troves of personal wealth while their countries are wrestling with underfunded social services or receiving international aid.
Putin's Palace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2P154dMR_c
Navalny reveals investigation into ‘Putin's Palace’ | DW News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8J2dW-QYQY
Putin's palace. History of world's largest bribe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipAnwilMncI
Inside Putin's Secret $1 Billion Mansion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alusg5KG714&list=WL&index=8
‘Pandora Papers’ Expose Secret Investments and Luxury Purchases of World Leaders
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the group behind the “Panama Papers” leak of financial data five years ago, released a sequel of sorts on Sunday. Dubbed the “Pandora Papers,” the new trove of leaked confidential financial documents suggests dozens of world leaders and hundreds of public officials are stashing large sums of money in hidden bank accounts and secret investment projects.
The Pandora Papers leak includes almost 12 million documents, weighing in at 2.94 terabytes of data, harvested through undisclosed methods from 14 financial services providers. Most of the information was dated between 1996 and 2020, although some older records dating back to the 1970s were included as well.
ICIJ noted that by contrast, the Panama Papers came from a single provider, the Mossack Fonseca law firm, and was only about half as big as the Pandora trove. Some of the same corporate entities exposed in the Panama Papers leak also appear in the Pandora Papers, some of them using new identities or registrations.
The documents “cover a wide range of matters,” from establishing shell companies and trusts to buying luxury goods and planning estates. ICIJ claimed some of the documents are “tied to financial crimes, including money laundering.”
ICIJ said over 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries participated in analyzing the leaked documents, making it the largest journalistic collaboration in history.
The papers name over 330 politicians, plus “celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members and leaders of religious groups around the world.”
The authors said smaller individuals and entities exposed by the leak, including “small business owners, doctors and other, usually affluent, individuals away from the public spotlight,” were excised from the report to preserve their confidentiality because they “don’t represent a public interest.”
“ICIJ matched Forbes’s billionaires lists against the Pandora Papers to find more than 130 who had entities in secrecy jurisdictions. More than 100 of them had a combined fortune valued at more than $600 billion in 2021,” the report said.
International media organizations reporting on the Pandora Papers leak, such as Reuters on Monday, noted they could not “independently verify the reports or the documents detailed by the consortium.”
“The use of off-shore companies is not illegal or by itself evidence of wrongdoing, but news organizations in the consortium said such transactions could be used to hide wealth from tax collectors and other authorities,” Reuters observed.
One of the marquee names appearing in the initial Pandora Papers leak is King Abdullah of Jordan. The papers showed the king spending some $106 million to buy luxury homes on the Pacific Coast of the United States.
The Jordanian Royal Palace responded to the report on Monday by stating there was nothing “unusual or improper” about King Abdullah’s real estate purchases, which it said were made with his own money, not funds from the government treasury.
“These properties are not publicized out of security and privacy concerns, and not out of secrecy or an attempt to hide them, as these reports have claimed,” the Royal Palace stated.
“Many Jordanians were quick to defend the king, calling the accusations defamation of the monarch. Others derided him over reports that he spent more than $100 million on properties through offshore companies at a time when aid was flowing into his country,” observed the Washington Post, which participated in the Pandora project.
Jordanian nerves may also be a little raw after the unusual palace drama of April 2021, when the king’s half-brother, Crown Prince Hamza bin Hussein, was accused of conspiring with “foreign parties” to destabilize the government. Some of Hamza’s complaints against the monarchy involved corruption.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Crown Prince Hussein (R) arrive for the opening session of the fourth ordinary parliamentary session in the capital Amman on November 10, 2019. (Photo by KHALIL MAZRAAWI/AFP via Getty Images)
Another notable name was Uhuru Kenyatta, the president of Kenya. According to the Pandora Papers, Kenyatta’s family has half a billion dollars tucked away in offshore foundations, shell companies, and tax havens, administered by Swiss bankers.
Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta gives an address on November 27, 2019, during the launch of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) report in Nairobi. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA/AFP via Getty Images)
Kenyatta billed himself as an anti-corruption crusader during his 2013 presidential election campaign, and as ICIJ sourly noted, he used his last State of the Nation address to “acknowledge that too many Kenyans live in poverty and too many officials loot the country’s public resources.”
The BBC quoted Kenyatta claiming in 2018 that all of his family’s holdings were “open to the public” and duly declared to the proper Kenyan regulatory authorities. According to the BBC, Kenyatta is currently traveling abroad on state business, and plans to “respond comprehensively” to the Pandora Papers when he returns.
The report accused a number of individuals linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin of concealing their wealth, at the lower end including a woman named Svetlana Krivonogikh who acquired an apartment in Monaco through a Caribbean company in 2003. The Pandora Papers strongly implied Krivonogikh was Putin’s mistress and the child born shortly after the purchase of the apartment was Putin’s daughter.
The Kremlin dismissed all of the ICIJ’s implications and allegations on Monday, describing the information as unverified and demanding more concrete evidence of wrongdoing before any action could be taken.
“For now it is just not clear what this information is and what it is about. If there are serious publications that are based on something concrete and refer to something specific, then we will read them with interest,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
“Honestly speaking, we didn’t see any hidden wealth of Putin’s inner circle in there,” Peskov added.
Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking at the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club via video conference at the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
On the other hand, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan “welcomed” the revelations and vowed on Monday to investigate all of the dubious financial arrangements exposed by the Pandora Papers and take action if illegal activity was confirmed.
Over 700 Pakistanis were named in the leaked documents, including finance minister Shaukat Tarin, whose family apparently owns four offshore companies, and water minister Chaudhry Moonis Elahi, who allegedly “pulled out of making planned investments through offshore tax havens after he was warned the investment would be reported to the country’s tax authorities.”
Prime Minister Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic was accused in the report of using shell companies to buy a $22 million chateau near Cannes, France in 2009.
Czech police immediately stated they would take the allegations seriously and fully investigate “all citizens of the Czech Republic who are mentioned” in the papers.
Babis, in turn, claimed the document dump was a scurrilous effort to “influence the Czech election,” which will be held this week, and insisted he has done nothing “illegal or wrong.”
“I paid all the taxes. This is completely absurd. The money was sent from a Czech bank; it was my money, it was taxed, and then it came back to a Czech bank,” Babis complained in a TV interview on Sunday.
The UK Guardian noted Babis already faces a “mounting list of controversies” going into the election, including allegations of fraudulently obtaining millions of dollars in European Union funds to construct a hotel. These scandals were serious enough to make the EU threaten to suspend subsidy payments to the Czech Republic.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie appear in the Pandora Papers, having allegedly used an offshore company to avoid paying about $425,000 in taxes on an expensive London townhouse in 2017. The Blairs rejected the allegations on Monday and insisted they have “never used offshore schemes either to hide transactions or avoid tax.”
NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 11: Tony Blair attends the Annual Charity Day hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald, BGC and GFI at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 11, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Cantor Fitzgerald)
The ICIJ criticized financial providers for turning blind eyes to suspicious transactions from powerful politicians and billionaires – including U.S. companies that did business with foreign nationals exposed in the Pandora leak, although none of the purportedly corrupt politicians and oligarchs exposed by the leak were themselves Americans.
An early reaction from observers such as Oxfam International, a prominent charity organization, was that so many world leaders are busy making extravagant purchases and hiding vast troves of personal wealth while their countries are wrestling with underfunded social services or receiving international aid.
“This is where our missing hospitals are. This is where the pay-packets sit of all the extra teachers and firefighters and public servants we need. Whenever a politician or business leader claims there is ‘no money’ to pay for climate damage and innovation, for more and better jobs, for a fair post-COVID recovery, for more overseas aid, they know where to look,” Oxfam complained.
“Tax havens cost governments around the world $427 billion each year. That is the equivalent of a nurse’s yearly salary every second of every hour, every day. Ordinary taxpayers have to pick up the pieces. Developing countries are being hardest hit, proportionately. Corporations and the wealthiest individuals that use tax havens are outcompeting those who don’t. Tax havens also help crime and corruption to flourish,” Oxfam said.
