Published under: Biden Administration , Climate Change , Gas Prices , Oil , OPEC , Saudi Arabia
Saudis Crow Over Biden Coming Hat-In-Hand to Riyadh The man who promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” now begs them for oil. Hugh Fitzgerald
Posted By Ruth King on June 22nd, 2022
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/saudis-crow-over-biden-coming-hat-hand-riyadh-hugh-fitzgerald/
What was once planned as a quick visit to Israel-and-the-Palestinians by President Biden has become a three-way affair, with Saudi Arabia not only added to the itinerary, but has become the main event, the meeting in Riyadh with the Saudi Crown Prince will overshadow his lightning visits to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In Israel, Biden will attend the Maccabiah Games and no doubt discuss with Prime Minister Bennett ways for Israel to tamp down “tension” in the area – even though all such tension is provoked by the Palestinians – and he will repeat, in his conversations with both Israel and the Palestinians, the latest mantra of the Bidenites, that he “looks forward to reaffirming his lifelong commitment to a two-state solution and to discuss the ways in which we might rekindle a new political horizon that can ensure equal measures of freedom, security, prosperity, and dignity to Israelis and Palestinians alike.“
I’m not sure Israel and the Palestinians can have “equal measures of freedom, security, prosperity, and dignity,” given the failure of the Palestinians to create a free and democratic society – a failure that we see in all 22 states of the Arab League, where either despots or monarchs rule, but nowhere is there a true democracy, of citizens rather than subjects. Nor can the Palestinians, with Islam stunting their mental growth, ever hope to rival the advanced state of Israel, with the astonishing inventiveness of its people. In Israel innovation is welcome; Muslim Arabs regard innovation, or bida, with deep suspicion. As for “equal measures of…..dignity,” both Hamas and the PA have shown how little they care for the “dignity” of those they rule over, people who are not permitted to choose their rulers by elections, and who are arrested or even executed for daring to criticize those rulers. Why would the people in a “Palestinian state” fare any better than they do now under Hamas in Gaza, or under the PA in the West Bank? It will be amusing, however, to hear Biden repeat that mantra to Mahmoud Abbas – all that guff about “equal measures of freedom, security, prosperity and dignity” – that is, to the very man who is now in the 17th year of his four-year term, who had his harshest critic, Nizar Banat, beaten to death, and who has amassed a fortune of $400 million consisting mostly of aid money he stole.
But then, with Israel-cum-Palestinians given their quick due, for Biden it’s on to the real object of this trip, which is to make up, in properly obsequious fashion, with Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, so that the Saudis will turn on the oil tap wide enough to bring down the price of gas for consumers, and thereby, the Bidenites calculate, give Biden a shot at being be reelected.
The Saudis are delighted to see President Biden having to eat crow. They don’t like him. They resented his refusal to respond forcefully to Houthi attacks on their country. They have been mightily displeased with his attempt to appease the Iranians in Vienna. But most infuriating, to MbS, has been Biden’s anger over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. During the campaign for president, Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” Now Biden is going to have to go, hat in hand, to the man he knows ordered Khashoggi’s murder and continues to deny it, and to behave as if he believed him.
A report on how the Saudi commentators are gloating over US President Joe Biden’s planned visit next month, claiming that the US leader’s about-turn on his vow to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” reflected the kingdom’s importance in global affairs, is here: “Biden to meet with Saudi crown prince despite ‘pariah’ pledge,” Reuters, June 14, 2022:
After the White House confirmed on Tuesday that Biden would meet de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on a trip to the region, the Saudi commentators took to social media to praise the prince for his handling of the crisis in US-Saudi ties.
“We said it before and we did not exaggerate, they [Western leaders] will all come successively to Riyadh,” tweeted Faisal AlShammeri, a reporter at Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV.
“Realpolitik changed the administration’s convictions,” he added.
Rights groups, in contrast, said the visit risks “fostering repression” inside the kingdom, the world’s largest oil exporter.
Everyone understands that Biden’s visit has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with the Saudis increasing their oil production, to make up for Russian oil that been taken off the market. I doubt that Biden’s appearance – his smile and handshake with a man he considers to be a murderer — will have any effect on increasing “repression” in the Kingdom. The Saudis are largely impervious to outside pressure to improve their record on human rights, and MbS will not be any more repressive because of Biden’s visit. Besides, the Bidenites must be thinking, better repression in Saudi Arabia than a recession in the United States.
US relations with Saudi Arabia have been under strain since the 2018 murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a team of Saudi operatives in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.
Biden had refused to deal directly with Prince Mohammed following a US intelligence report implicating him in the killing. The Saudi government denied any involvement by the prince, saying the murder was a heinous crime by a rogue group.
The Saudi denial is nonsense, of course. MbS ordered the killing of Khashoggi, and now he has his severest American critic coming to Riyadh, prepared to ignore the Khashoggi affair. Upon Biden’s return to Washington, he will no doubt give a press conference on his trip, and when he is asked “did you discuss with the Crown Prince the killing of Jamal Khashoggi?” will blandly answer that “I promised to keep my conversation with the Crown Prince about the helpful role Saudi Arabia can play in calming the world’s oil markets and that’s exactly what I did.”
Comment:
But Washington’s desire to improve ties with Gulf monarchies has become more urgent following Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, which highlighted the relevance of Gulf oil producers as Europe looks to cut its energy dependence on Russia.
Biden’s July 15-16 visit to the kingdom, where he is also due to attend a summit of Arab leaders, ends his campaign pledge to make the kingdom a pariah as he struggles to combat high US gasoline prices and build a united international front to isolate Russia.
Former Saudi intelligence chief and senior royal Prince Turki al-Faisal blasted critical remarks, carried in US media, about the prince and the kingdom’s human rights record and suggested Biden was trying to save his presidency.
“It is the tanking popularity of the president that brings him to us. It is his legitimacy that he hopes to bolster by meeting with our crown prince,” Prince Turki wrote in an op-ed published in the Saudi newspaper Arab News on Saturday.
Yes and no, Prince Turki. Yes, of course Biden is coming to Saudi Arabia to “save his presidency.” But no, it’s not his “legitimacy that he hopes to bolster” by meeting with the Crown Prince. In fact, the photograph of a smiling Joe Biden shaking hands with MbS will likely lead only to ridicule at home. What he wants is not “legitimacy,” but lower prices at the pump; it’s the economy, stupid. Biden figures that if gasoline is still above $5 a gallon this November, his party could lose both houses of Congress, ending his hopes to pass his agenda and making much less likely his reelection in 2024. If the Saudis do as he wishes, and increase their production sufficiently to bring down that price to below $4 a gallon and keep it there, Biden thinks he has a fighting chance to be reelected.
Prince Turki and other commentators highlighted Saudi Arabia’s importance, whether for regional and energy security or global politic
Saudi political scientist Hesham Alghannam tweeted that the visit was taking place with “our conditions and interests.”
Rights advocates said Biden’s visit risks “encouraging new abuses and further entrenching impunity” in the kingdom where the prince, widely known by the initials MbS, has cracked down on dissidents and opponents during his swift rise to power.
The Crown Prince doesn’t need Biden’s appearance to give him the go-ahead to crush his domestic opponents. He is the man, remember, who in November 2017 imprisoned more than 400 of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful people, among them Saudi royals, tycoons, and generals, and held them hostage in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton until they promised to disgorge some of what the Crown Prince claimed were their ill-gotten gains. With this display of his power, the Crown Prince managed to claw back more than $106 billion for the Saudi Treasury.
Thirteen human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and London-based Saudi group ALQST, last week issued a joint letter urging Biden to secure the release of detained dissidents and remove travel bans on others, including US citizens, before he visits Saudi Arabia.
Biden is not going to raise the issue of human rights. That would fatally vitiate his mission, by angering the Crown Prince. Bringing up human rights will simply remind the Crown Prince of all the unfavorable things Biden has said about him in the past, in connection with the murder of Khashoggi. Biden, though his mind wanders, will have practiced enough with his advisers to stick to the script in Riyadh. Increased production of oil by the Saudis, will be his most important order of business. He will also repeat to MbS his previous pledge to the world that “Iran will NEVER get a nuclear weapon on my watch.” Some may snicker that Biden can promise, but in the end it will not be America but Israel that will make sure that pledge is kept.
From Biden’s point of view, his contrite appearance in Riyadh, and his assurance that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon should be enough to win over the Crown Prince. Another million or two barrels of Saudi crude daily could do wonders for Biden’s presidential prospects. Isn’t that, for Joe Biden and the Bidenites, all that really matters?
James Biden May Be More
Dangerous to Joe Than Hunter
After they sued Biden, they received an envelope filled with “blood-stained currency from a Middle Eastern country”
February 15, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield 10 Comments
Republicans have focused on Hunter Biden, largely because of the laptops, the flagrant activities in Ukraine and China, the obscene criminality of his rampages, and the sheer amount of information, but the linkage between Hunter’s business affairs and his father remains much less documented than the more extended ties between Joe’s brother, James.
There’s been a long history of James’ business affairs and this is only the latest episode.
According to the documents, Jim told a former senior US Treasury official working as a private investigator that he was hired to negotiate with the Saudis ‘because of his position and relationship’ to VP Joe Biden – who led delegations to Saudi Arabia at the time.
‘[Biden] stated that he was often sent to meetings to represent Hill because ‘of course, the name didn’t hurt,’ and he was the former Vice-President’s brother, or words to that effect. He repeated this statement at least twice during the interview.
‘I asked specifically if he had attended a meeting with the Saudi Ministry of Trade in mid-February 2012 to receive the final payment for the work Hill had performed. He answered that, to the best of his memory, he had been at such a meeting, and that the reason he had attended was “because of his position and relationship” with his brother.’
In a May 2022 affidavit, Lankford & Reed partner V. Thomas Lankford described the alleged double-cross.
‘After many delays, a meeting was finally scheduled for mid-February, 2012, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,’ he wrote. ‘The Professional Firms were excluded from this meeting. Hill, acting through [its CEO, Irvin] Richter, sent Jim Biden – the then sitting Vice President’s brother.
‘Richter confided that he selected Biden because KSA [the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] would not dare stiff the brother of the Vice-President who would be instrumental to the deal.
It gets creepier from there.
Sullivan added that he had a brief exchange with Jim’s attorney wife Sara, who told him ‘he doesn’t like us talking to people’.
The affidavit does not specify who ‘he’ refers to, but a source briefed on the case told DailyMail.com that it was Joe Biden.
‘I didn’t ask for a further explanation since I was looking at two large men in dark suits, in a big black sedan parked on a side street looking directly into their house down the walkway I had just exited,’ Sullivan wrote. ‘I thought they were some type of security, probably Secret Service.’
Joe Biden’s family were not entitled to Secret Service protection at the time, as he had ended his term as Vice President.
‘Sara and I walked to my car. She told me that her husband and his brother were very close, and that they told each other everything. I reached inside to give her a card, and just as I did, a blue sedan, with a single male driving, pulled quickly into their driveway. She said ‘See what I mean?’
All of this gets a good deal creepier if we revisit a story that I had reported on back in October 2020.
“James Biden mentioned that his brother’s connections to labor unions and the Department of Veterans Affairs would help DMM expand its model nationwide,” a lawsuit filed by one company claims.
Mayor Anthony Court, a Democrat, recalls White constantly dropping Biden’s name.
White would later claim that Biden told him, “there’s not a single door in the country that we can’t open.”
Another partner was promised that their “model would be used by Joe Biden as part of his campaign.”
“We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden,” James Biden had once boasted. There’s no denying that. How else could a college dropout and failed nightclub owner be in demand around the world, or help score a billion dollar contract to build homes in Iraq?
After they sued Biden and his partners, they received an envelope filled with “blood-stained currency from a Middle Eastern country” linked to terrorists and a “torture ticket” resulting in an FBI investigation.
There was a federal probe back in 2020 that we haven’t heard from since.
James Biden has been a lot bolder in cashing in on Joe’s name and saying so. Hunter, if anything, was actually a good deal more discreet, even in the throes of his drugs and prostitution escapades leaving behind less of a trail tying in Joe than James did. And it’s James who may ultimately prove more dangerous to Joe.
Bidens’ people have framed his relationship with Hunter as a loving father trying to help his self-destructive son. All the laptop materials that were released only play into that narrative. But that same gameplan won’t work with James Biden. He’s not a desperate drug addict with kids. He’s a guy who got very rich because of his brother.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Court Docs: James Biden Secretly Negotiated $140M Deal with Saudis Due to Relationship with Joe Biden
WENDELL HUSEBØ
James Biden secretly negotiated a $140 million settlement
deal in 2012 between a U.S. company and the Saudi Arabian
government due to his relationship with then-Vice President
Joe Biden, court documents reveal.
The revelation represents one more instance of the Biden family business peddling influence while President Joe Biden was an elected official. House Oversight Committee James Comer (R-KY) reportedly already has copies of the court documents and is investigating the scandal as a part of his probe into the Biden family for nine violations, including wire fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering.
In 2011, upon the Saudi’s refusal to pay $140 million to a U.S. construction company Hill International, James Biden was brought in to negotiate the settlement deal between the U.S. company and the Saudi government because the Saudis “would not dare stiff the brother of the Vice-President who would be instrumental to the deal,” affidavits reported by the Daily Mail show.
Notably, James Biden had a prior business relationship with the U.S. company’s subsidiary as executive vice president with a minority stake.
Former U.S. Treasury official Thomas Sullivan, who was working to settle the deal as a private consultant, twice stated in an affidavit that James Biden was hired to negotiate with the Saudis “because of his position and relationship” with then-Vice President Biden. The business negotiation ultimately resulted in a $132 million settlement, court documents reveal.
“[James Biden] stated that he was often sent to meetings to represent Hill because ‘of course, the name didn’t hurt,'” court documents recount Sullivan’s written statement about a sit-down interview with James Biden.
“I asked specifically if he [James Biden] had attended a meeting with the Saudi Ministry of Trade in mid-February 2012 to receive the final payment for the work Hill had performed,” court documents recount Sullivan’s explanation. “He answered that, to the best of his memory, he had been at such a meeting, and that the reason he had attended was ‘because of his position and relationship’ with his brother.”
James Biden began working on the settlement deal in 2011 when the U.S. company asked him to work with its law firm, Lankford & Reed, on the settlement. The U.S. company allegedly asked James Biden to broker the deal with the Saudi government that was failing to pay $140 million.
According to Lankford & Reed partner’s affidavit in May 2022, partner Thomas Lankford confirmed the U.S. company “used [James] Biden as a settlement intermediary in order to capitalize on the influence and orchestration of the settlement by the then Vice-President.”
Due to the U.S. company’s decision to go behind the back of the law firm to collect its money via James Biden, the lawyers hired an investigator to question James Biden and his wife, Sara, about the back-door deal.That interview occurred on July 16, 2017, an affidavit shows.
During the interview, James Biden allegedly confessed that “Of course, the [James Biden] name didn’t hurt” to get the deal done. Sara allegedly said that Joe and James Biden “told each other everything.”
Sara’s statement contradicts Joe Biden’s claims he has never spoken about the Biden family business deals.
In 2020, the new CEO of the U.S. company, the son of the former CEO, denied having any ties to James or Joe Biden. “I have no ties to the Bidens. Jim Biden worked at a Hill subsidiary for a couple of years. That subsidiary did not report to me. I was not in favor of investing in that company,” David Richter told the New Jersey Globe.
“After several years of failure, it was shut down at my insistence, and I’ve never seen or heard from Jim Biden since,” he added.
However, Fox News reported in 2015 that David Richter admitted James Biden was helpful in the deal.
David Richter’s father has denied James Biden’s relationship with Joe Biden played a role in the settlement deal.
It should be noted that before the Saudi deal, James Biden had a previous history with the U.S. company’s subsidiary, HillStone International. The subsidiary hired James Biden in 2010 as executive vice president and gave him a minority stake in the company.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
In any event, the documents were in the house. And then we
learned that also in the house at times over the years was Hunter
Biden, the president’s formerly drug-addicted son. And of course
we know that Hunter Biden spent years cultivating relationships
with shady foreign actors. Plus, he was at times addicted to crack
and was, to say the least, unreliable when it came to information
security. You might recall that he forgot about a whole laptop he
once left for repair. BYRON YORK
The Joe Biden-Hunter Biden Scandal Convergence
Classified information - and advancing foreign business interests.
February 6, 2023 by Byron York 2 Comments
Republicans have long said the Hunter Biden laptop scandal is really a Joe Biden story. Now, it looks like the Joe Biden classified documents scandal is also a Hunter Biden story. Two Biden scandals are merging into one.
The convergence point is President Biden’s house in Wilmington, Delaware. The public learned in the last few weeks that Biden stored a number of classified documents there, both in his garage — famously next to his vintage Corvette — and in his personal library.
How many documents? Biden will not say. His personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, released a statement saying that after a search of the house, Justice Department lawyers took “six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials.” The problem is, no one knows what an “item” is. Is it a single piece of paper with classification markings? Or is it a box of papers, perhaps hundreds of pages, some of which are marked classified? If you look at how DOJ described the results of the Trump Mar-a-Lago search, you’ll see it used the word “item” to describe boxes of documents. So there’s no way to be certain how many documents Biden allegedly mishandled.
In any event, the documents were in the house. And then we learned that also in the house at times over the years was Hunter Biden, the president’s formerly drug-addicted son. And of course we know that Hunter Biden spent years cultivating relationships with shady foreign actors. Plus, he was at times addicted to crack and was, to say the least, unreliable when it came to information security. You might recall that he forgot about a whole laptop he once left for repair.
That is reason enough for further investigation, given the undisputed presence of classified documents in the Wilmington house. But now some Republicans worry that Hunter Biden might have been the recipient of classified information, which he then used to advance his foreign business interests while his father was vice president.
At the center of the new questions is an April 13, 2014, email — found on the laptop, of course — from Hunter Biden to business partner (and later convicted fraudster) Devon Archer. The email was sent a few months after Hunter Biden was discharged from the Naval Reserve for cocaine use. It was an analysis of the political and business outlook in Ukraine, where both Biden and Archer were trying to secure cushy positions, for at least $50,000 per month, on the board of the corruption-plagued energy company Burisma. The email was unusually long and unusually detailed for a Hunter Biden missive. It showed a depth of knowledge and inside information about Ukraine that seems unlikely Hunter Biden would possess.
Miranda Devine, author of the book “Laptop From Hell,” has posted screenshots of the email. Biden began by saying he had done “some research.” He went into the Ukrainian presidential race, Russian activities and intentions, the future of Ukrainian energy exploration, IMF loan guarantees, the possible role of Kazakhstan, the future of pipelines, European Union policy, the activities of various oligarchs, corporate structure and much, much more. Biden also mentioned his father’s then-upcoming visit to Ukraine: “The announcement of my guy’s upcoming travels should be characterized as part of our advice and thinking, but what he will say and do is out of our hands,” Biden wrote. “In other words, it could be a really good thing or it could end up creating too great an expectation. We need to temper expectations regarding that visit.”
Those sentences alone showed that Hunter Biden’s business was all about Joe Biden. But Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is concerned that it showed more than that. “I’ve traveled overseas, and you get what they call scene setters from the State Department,” Johnson told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo. “It reads like one of those scene setters, a highly detailed information in terms of Ukraine.”
Putting the memo in the context of what Hunter Biden was doing at the time, Johnson said, “It’s obvious that Hunter Biden is selling access to information. And does that have anything to do with some of the classified documents that then-Vice President Biden was squirreling away in his residence? I don’t know, but it looks incredibly suspicious.”
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz is also concerned. “Hunter Biden is not an expert on Ukraine,” he told Bartiromo. “He’s not an expert on Eastern Europe. He’s not an expert on Russia. But that email did help him get on the board of Burisma. … It showed a level of expertise, not coming from him, but he was getting it from somewhere. That’s clearly from some sort of briefing. We don’t know whether it was a classified briefing or not. … This email is unusual in the Hunter Biden emails. There’s a level of scholarship and erudition that … doesn’t appear in the other emails he’s sending. The obvious question is, what was he cutting and pasting from? What was his source? And it raises the natural inference that Hunter Biden had direct access to these classified documents.”
A few years after the 2014 email, of course, Hunter Biden hit a low point, becoming addicted to crack, consorting with a parade of prostitutes, throwing money away, and desperately looking for ways to get more cash. Many of those ways, of course, involved trading on his father’s name with disreputable foreign contacts. Some of that time, Hunter Biden was living in the Wilmington house with the classified documents.
It should be said that Johnson and Cruz are engaging in some conjecture about what might have happened with Hunter Biden and classified information. But there is certainly reason to investigate the convergence of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and the Joe Biden classified documents scandal. And if the Justice Department does not do it, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will.
ALL THEY NEEDED WAS A SOCIOPATH GAMER LAWYER AND BIDEN WAS STANDING NEXT IN LINE!
Biden was the Democrat left's version of the Trojan horse. Get the 78-year-old inside the White House pretending to be a gift to the American people, and then let the real puppet masters emerge and change the nation's demographics, destroy the economy, and transform every social norm.
So Hunter Biden's 'masterpieces' aren't quite selling like hotcakes for top dollar
By Monica Showalter
Is the Biden money-making machine gig up?
Sure looks like it, given the situation with artistic genius, Hunter Biden.
According to the Washington Free Beacon's Alana Goodman:
Hunter Biden is in financial turmoil after his paintings sold for less than the six-figure price tags estimated by his gallerist ...
The underwhelming sales have led Biden to consider launching a legal defense fund to help pay his mounting attorney bills stemming from a federal tax crime investigation and congressional inquiries into his foreign business dealings, the Washington Post reported.
Biden has sold around a dozen paintings "for a fraction of the $500,000 price tag once estimated" by his Manhattan gallerist Georges Berges, according to the Post. The congressional investigations into Biden have also spooked some prospective buyers, a source told the newspaper.
Leaving aside the issue of a legal defense fund and taking one step back, it appears that the art world wasn't exactly fooled by the hype and publicity about Hunter Biden's amazing and newly discovered art talent, with newbie paintings supposedly being ready to sell for $500,000 a pop and he never did become the hottest thing around at the galleries.
After all, that was the plan, wasn't it? The celebs showed up at his gallery opening, and the $500,000 sales estimates for his blow-pipe paintings suggested on paper at least that Hunter had some extraordinary talent, and collectors were just itching to get their hands on his glorious oeuvres. For a new artist to start selling paintings at $500,000, it would have to be someone from whom the demand was extraordinarily strong.
But that was the line fed to the public and oh, how certain art "experts" praised the hot new talent.
Here is what the New York Post reported in 2021:
Scandal-tarnished first son Hunter Biden’s newfound career as a painter may actually prove to be a success — as experts say his artwork is impressive and will fetch big bucks.
“I think it’s pretty strong — I like it,’’ Mark Tribe, chairman of the MFA Fine Arts Department at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, told The Post.
“The colors and compelling organic forms — it’s the kind of organic abstraction that I find easy on the eyes and provokes your curiosity,’’ Tribe said of the mixed-media paintings and drawings by President Biden’s son.
...and...
“I’ve been in the art business since 1956,’’ Alex Acevedo, 75, who owns the Alexander Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, told The Post.
“I’m not impressed with modern art at all. But I was floored by that guy,’’ he said of Hunter’s artwork.
“The palette was wonderful. The space was well-organized. I would buy a couple of them.
“And anybody who buys it would be guaranteed instant profit,” Acevedo added. “He’s the president’s son. Everybody would want a piece of that. The provenance is impeccable.’’
He also drew gushing profiles in the press about all his 'talent' from formidable sources, such as ArtNetNews and 60 Minutes, where he talked about all his "deep" thoughts.
And as for the gallery owner who's promoting this gig, Georges Bergès, the New York Times had doozy from him:
Mr. Biden’s art carries value because he is, by Mr. Bergès’s accounting, someone whose art will be remembered for a long, long time. He refers to a Biden painting as a “totem of reflection,” and with no hint of irony, he said: “Hunter will go down as a great artist for this century. If anything, his father will be known as the father of a great artist.”
Sounds legit.
Oh how he fooled them. Except that they weren't fooled. Nobody's giving him $500,000 for his paintings because they aren't worth $500,000, and not just that, if they did, everyone would know that paying that kind of cash to a guy whose entire career is based on influence-peddling and is now well-known to the public, would probably leave them exposed to congressional investigations or maybe even lawmen for bribery, which is what this entire operation looks like.
It also would diminish their prestige in the art world, telling everyone else in tout le monde of arts that they don't know much about how to find value in art after all. Those remarks cited by those supposed arts experts, quoted by the Post, are running liabilities now, given that the art world wasn't fooled by their toutings. They knew what was going on.
Here's the reaction of one heavyweight art critic who wasn't fooled, even before he heard any of the hype about Hunter or even knew anything about him, the estimable Jerry Saltz of New York magazine:
Saltz knows what art is and understands the art market as well.
Knowing what he is talking about, he read the scam correctly from the very beginning, as did actual artists, such as Rod Webber, whom I wrote about here.
Now with the sales flop, Hunter and his flatterers stand exposed for everyone else, the naked emperor with no clothes on in his court, which is kind of Hunter's taste anyway.
Image: Screen shot from Fox News video, via YouTube
Democrats' Trojan horse is taking on a life of its own
By Rick Hayes
A silly older man sniffing women was sold to the American people as the safe alternative to President Donald Trump. Joe Biden's assignment was to wear a suit, read words on a teleprompter, and quip.
Biden was the Democrat left's version of the Trojan horse. Get the 78-year-old inside the White House pretending to be a gift to the American people, and then let the real puppet masters emerge and change the nation's demographics, destroy the economy, and transform every social norm.
For two years, Biden did precisely what the Democrat socialists wanted him to do: run to podiums, mumble, and then wander away. Smile, wave, and lie. And in the process, the southern border became an open floodgate for illegal aliens and deadly drugs. Inflation halted the buying power of most Americans, and American streets became crime-infested homeless camps. Uncle Joe: the gift that kept on giving.
The propaganda media, working with the Department of Justice, to obscure the Biden family's long history of corruption was remarkable. The tell-all interview regarding the long partnership between a Chinese energy firm and the Biden family by Hunter Biden's partner, Tony Bobulinski, on the Tucker Carlson show was squashed. The FBI did a marvelously malevolent job lying to the American people regarding the content and even the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop.
So the Trojan horse flawlessly performed the task it was designed to perform. But now comes the glitch: lo and behold, the fake leader of the free world wants to stay. Somehow, in all the confusion of corruption and millions of dollars flowing from China into the Biden coffers, Joe didn't read the memo that the charade is finished after one term.
The swamp has realized that the Trojan horse is no longer needed and has become a liability. There are new Democrat communist plans for 2024, and they don't include uncle Joe.
The left will do what it always does when its power is in jeopardy: turn on itself. And it looks as if Biden is holding the short end of the stick in the power struggle: the mishandling of top-secret documents that have always been handled as a nothingburger for guilty Democrats like Hillary Clinton will now somehow matter for Biden.
What happened in 2020 will be considered one of the darkest points in American politics and its history. But this chapter does not close without benefits. Hopefully, the American people, especially the youth, will realize that conservatives are not perfect, but they do love this country and individual freedom. On the other hand, as far as the Democrat left is concerned, you are valuable only as long as you are helpful to the communist cause.
Image: 10 Tampa Bay via YouTube, CC BY 3.0 (cropped).
There’s more evidence that Hunter might have been selling state secrets
By Andrea Widburg
Late last night, Miranda Devine wrote an essay that’s ostensibly about a poll showing that Americans think that Biden was wrong to brush off the news about his squirreling classified documents as “nothing.” In fact, most Americans, including Democrats, think what happened is “something.” But buried in Devine’s article was well-grounded speculation more interesting than poll results: She believes there’s inferential evidence that Hunter Biden was openly selling national security information to foreign governments and corporations.
Devine opens her article, “Majority of voters, including Democrats, believe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents is a scandal,” by discussing a Rasmussen poll asking voters whether they believe that the way in which Biden handled classified documents is a “scandal.” As you may recall, Biden’s only take on the increasing number of classified document finds was that “there’s no there there” and that “there’s nothing there.”
Au contraire said the voters that Rasmussen polled. Those poll results show that 72% of voters, including 55% of Democrat voters, think that Biden’s conduct constitutes a “scandal.” Indeed, 48% believe that it’s a “major scandal.”
Hunter Biden turns out to be part of what voters consider so scandalous. Of those polled, 60% believe that Hunter used classified documents in his business deals.
Image: Hunter Biden. YouTube screen grab.
So, did he? It’s entirely possible that Hunter did indeed borrow information from Daddy to get money from foreign businesses.
Devine has already speculated, based on her intimate knowledge of Hunter’s laptop, that one of Hunter’s emails is so unlike his usual style—polished, comprehensive, and informed versus semi-literate and with minimal information—that it’s probable he copied it right off a classified briefing. What I can throw into the mix is that the language from that particular email, when run through Grammarly’s plagiarism checker, does not return any other document on the internet, suggesting that Hunter was copying a document that never saw the light of day.
It turns out, though, that you don’t just need to speculate about Hunter’s sudden high-level research and linguistic skills to be suspicious. Hunter was openly offering foreign oligarchs information that promised was unavailable elsewhere. Writes Devine:
The classified files Hur is investigating cover Biden’s vice presidential years, when Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden were actively monetizing the family name overseas. Some documents reportedly date back to the president’s time in the Senate.
[snip]
For instance, documents on the laptop from 2011 show that Hunter offered to sell intelligence on Russian oligarchs to the US aluminum firm Alcoa Inc. for $55,000.
In internal discussions over Hunter’s proposal, a senior executive at Alcoa suggested the information was valuable because it “would not otherwise be on Government Affairs team’s radar.”
As I previously reported, Hunter offered to “provide Alcoa with statistical analysis of political and corporate risks, elite networks associated with Oleg Deripaska (OD), Russian CEO of Basic Element company and United company RUSAL.”
Alcoa had just signed a metal supply agreement with RUSAL.
Hunter promised to provide a “list of elites of similar rank in Russia, map of OD’s [Deripaska’s] networks based on frequency of interaction with selected elites and countries.”
Devine has even more information about pricy offers Hunter was making to Russian oligarchs, promising to give them “raw data” from an “elite mapping procedure.” As Devine says, “How Hunter, 52, a raging drug addict with a voracious appetite for cash during much of his father’s vice presidency, got access to classified information is a matter of national concern.”
It’s not necessarily beneficial if Biden gets impeached because that allows Democrats to put their chosen 2024 candidate in the White House, first as Kamala’s Veep and then, when she’s driven out, as President. There is a real incumbent advantage. With the media rhapsodizing about the chosen one, there’s a strong likelihood that a credulous public, with help from a gamed election, will keep that Democrat in the White House. Better a lame duck Biden than an ascendent Michelle or Gavin Newsom.
Ultimately, though, assuming a clean 2024 election, it would be a wonderful thing if Biden and his son Hunter were definitively proven (at an honestly conducted trial, of course) to have engaged in criminal conduct and were then sent for a long stay in one of the less nice federal prisons.
Elon Musk Gets Up and Ends Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Obama’s Career to Jail 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaLHhRU1WUA
THE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY
Jesse Watters Primetime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8XJzeGnU2Q
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) (WHAT ABOUT THE BIDEN PENN CENTER?) and the Obama (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family (THREE GAMER LAWYERS) corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren (GAMER LAWYER) and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY, LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER). BRIAN C JOONDEPH
Since Biden’s inauguration, the University of Pennsylvania has disclosed at least $14 million in donations from China or Hong Kong, the Free Beacon reported last week. The names of these donors have yet to be disclosed by the Department of Education, breaking the precedent of prior administrations which published foreign donor names in a public database.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania. JOHN BINDER
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street JOHN BIDNER
The Biden family is notorious for being the crookedest clan not only in Delaware, but in D.C. And yet the Biden family stood out even there. To be born a Biden in the era after Joe switched his party affiliation, plagiarized his speeches, and inappropriately touched every woman or girl he could get his hands on in the state and the nation, was to be bred into dirty money. DANIEL GREENFIELD
The email, sent to SinoHawk Holdings CEO Tony Bobulinski, shows how a top official with CEFC Energy — a now bankrupt and defunct energy company based in China — offered to wire $10 million into an account to begin operations, $5 million worth of which would be a non-secured forgivable loan to the “BD Family,” which means the Biden family. MATTHEW BOYLE
Corruption is nothing new in D.C., but what the laptop reveals about Hunter Biden and his father is that, like the Clintons, they have no self-control. And the only thing more dangerous than cunning crooks at the head of a nation are inept kleptocrats who would leave evidence of their financial and sexual corruption on a laptop abandoned in a Delaware repair shop. DANIEL GREENFIELD
I’d be inclined to disagree with Don except for one thing: Biden has proven to be a very adept criminal mastermind. For decades, he has funneled millions of dollars to his children and siblings and, especially, to his debauched, deviant son, Hunter.
ANDREA WIDBURG
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
"And it's curious that Joe Biden, you know, is the one that everybody jumped out of the race -- you know, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar all, like, tearfully backed out of the presidential race, all to back Joe Biden because they have this false narrative that Joe Biden was a regular guy that rode Amtrak, living in $10 million homes, having the lifestyle -- not just Joe, but his family.
SUSAN JONES
In 2018 and 2020, Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter and his father flew to China aboard Air Force Two in 2013 before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China, which transpired less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
A lawsuit filed in federal court late last month alleges James Biden, who has a history of murky financial dealings, and his associates deceived and defrauded two Tennessee businessmen.
Michael Frey and his business partner, Dr. Mohannad Azzam, brought the suit claiming James Biden and his associates promised and failed to line up investors for their rural healthcare enterprise. Instead, the suit alleges, James Biden urged the two men to borrow $10 million from a hedge fund manager involved in the deal and then proceeded to pass their idea off as his own to a conglomerate of Turkish investors. HARIS ALIC
What we learn from the laptop is that Joe (referred to as “the big guy”) was to get a 10% cut of the loot from a deal with a now defunct Chinese energy company with strong ties to the Chinese government (the email outlines an equity split including “20 for H” and “10 held by H for the big guy.” That makes “10% Joe” analogous to the Godfather, the capo dei capi, the boss due his share of the family’s enterprises.
DAVID ISAAC
Biden Family Values: They like to live large
By Monica Showalter
Joe Biden likes to advertise himself as ordinary 'Scranton Joe' who's a family man and "devout" Catholic to the public.
A look at news rolling out about Biden's extended family in the wake of recent scandals suggests a different story. Far from being Lunchbucket Joe, House Biden is more like Venezuela's Maduro family, or Chavez family, or Cuba's Castro oligarchs. Cut to the chase and throw in Beijing's princelings or Russia's oligarchs, who frequently make cameo appearances. Not surprisingly, most claim to have a soft spot for "the common man."
Some photos of "the life" can be viewed here, here, here, here, and here.
Some headlines to give you the flavor:
Being the ex-President's daughter pays off: Hugo Chavez's ambassador daughter is Venezuela's richest woman
Children of Venezuela’s elite including ex-leader Hugo Chavez’s daughter flaunt wealth
Fidel Castro’s son enjoying a millionaire vacation, while Cubans are starving
RICH KIDS OF INSTAGRAM IS INSPIRING A REALITY TV SERIES
Sound like the Bidens?
All we have to do is look at the latest story from the Daily Mail about how Joe used his "pull" to get his ne'er-do-well niece Caroline a fancy new job she'd never have otherwise gotten as a convicted criminal on probation for a $100,000 credit card theft.
President Biden helped his convict 31-year-old niece Caroline Biden land an interview for a job at Masimo Corporation, whose owner is one of his biggest donors, but she balked at the $85,000-a-year salary, records from Hunter Biden's laptop show.
Caroline, the daughter of Joe Biden's brother Jim and his wife Sara, in 2017 pled guilty to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup on a stolen credit card.
She managed to get out of a grand larceny charge and the two-year prison sentence that carried, but was sentenced to two years' probation, which she wanted to serve in Los Angeles to be near her cousin Hunter Biden.
How the hell she managed to avoid prison for that is as mysterious as how Hunter Biden got into Yale. That kind of stuff happens When You're A Biden, which almost sounds like a Broadway song. What other Scranton Joe family has a "big guy" who can get every relative, down to nieces and nephews, out of any jam they get themselves into.
It wasn't just her. Hunter Biden was time and time again spared charges and jail time over his tax evasion, his falsification of his gun permit application, evidence of bribery and influence peddling, and his numerous drug incidents. He lived a wild and free-spending life at Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood as recently as 2018, around the time when he was occasionally driving old dad's Corvette from the Biden family garage where the misplaced classified documents were held. He seemed to have gotten a sweet deal in his string of homes around the Venice, California area.
Donations, it should be noted, tended to follow from these various "saves," as the Daily Mail noted in its report.
The entitlement mentality of this Biden scion of political privilege was stratospheric. The Mail continued:
Records show Jim Biden had asked Hunter to convince his cousin Caroline to accept a job, after a lifetime of only holding cushy jobs she had secured through her family name, according to the Free Beacon.
Emails show the job she was interviewing for in July 2018 at Masimo promised $85,000 per year plus a guaranteed 10 percent bonus plus stock options.
'That's below minimum wage in California after taxes,' Caroline wrote in an email to her father. 'I cannot take this job. I have never made this little money in my life.'
Caroline said she could not accept a job that would pay her 'less than $180,000.'
She then appeared to 'bomb' the interview, get passed up for the job, but was offered an internship at the company as a favor to her uncle Joe.
'I didn't get the job,' Caroline texted her cousin Hunter. 'I was given an intern job at 31 years old because of your dad asking him to give me something even though I bombed it.'
By July 28, Caroline texted Hunter that his father Joe was 'done' with her.
That suggests that a family culture of entitlement has been festering for a long time at House Biden. There was no sense of gratitude, let alone expectations of having to strike out on one's own. The Big Guy was always there for them -- yet at the same time, curiously absent as a parent who could teach his offspring and other relatives any sense of right and wrong. They didn't have that at all in that family.
More evidence of the entitlement mentality of the Biden princelings could be seen in the Vogue writeup of Naomi Biden's wedding. Naomi is the daughter of Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden's granddaughter. She fully expected to hold her wedding at the White House even though that had never been done beyond immediate family in the past. She even used the White House as a convenient crash pad, with Joe's consent:
When the couple’s lease ran out on their DC apartment, they asked Nana and the president if they could move in for a few months while wedding planning, along with their mini Australian shepherd, Charlie, who can often be seen gamboling on the South Lawn with the Bidens’ German shepherd, Commander. “I try to remind myself it’s the White House, but it also gets normalized over time,” says Naomi.
Naturally, Naomi and the rest of House Biden have their upscaling of standards and expectations.
Here's how she saw her White House wedding:
Naomi enters the Green Room inside a beehive of giddy activity: hairdresser, make-up artist, stylist Bailey Moon and two Ralph Lauren designers, Andrea and Lorenzo, who have come as keepers of the custom gown, quick to jump into the frame and help fluff and smooth the mille-feuille organza, charmeuse, and crinoline skirt.
“Like every little girl, I had a vision in my head—it was Grace Kelly’s dress I loved,” admits Naomi, who with her Audrey Hepburn brows and honey-colored hair is not a far cry from the Princess of Monaco (after all, a White House wedding is our country’s version of a royal one).
Ahhh, a royal wedding. Because she's a royal and has her privileges. It figures.
It gets worse when we get down to brand names here:
The bride and groom climbed a ladder to cut a seven-foot-tall, eight-tier lemon cake with buttercream frosting, while nearby, a dessert bar included everything from 20-inch apple pie (the groom’s cake) to the president’s favorite Graeter’s chocolate chip ice cream. “He used to be a Breyers guy all the way but we’ve gotten him to upgrade to Graeter's,” Naomi says.
Breyer's? Eeeew.
That wasn't all of it, either.
“I do know [Jill Biden] lost sleep over the fact that I was planning to serve turkey sandwiches at the lunch,” Naomi adds. (They amended the menu to chicken pot pie, as a surprise for the father of the bride, as it is Hunter’s favorite and the dish Dr. Biden cooks for him every year on his birthday.)
Turkey sandwiches to wedding guests? How dreadful. How very lunchbucket.
Obviously, this is a hell of a princeling class of privilege encircling the House of Joe Biden. Like all of these princelings cited, including the trashy Latin American ones, they are virtually all socialists who declare themselves to be looking out for the common man. Yet as their regimes of total power settle in, the nomenklatura activity begins, with every unworthy and tainted relative holding their hand out and being treated with deference even in the middle of crime sprees by the powers that be. We saw that with the Castros, the Chavezes, the Maduros, the oligarchs of Russia, the princelings of China and now we see it with House Biden.
What kind of trash is this? It's influence, it's entitlement, and its ill-gotten gains to the most unworthy people on earth. That's Lunchbucket Joe's real game and it's a disgusting one, no different from Maduro's.
Image: Anthony Quintano, via Wikimedia Commons (extracted image) // CC BY-SA 2.0
IMAGES OF JOE BIDEN’S MANSIONS:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a33809100/joe-biden-real-estate-homes/
· Hides in his basement because his handlers fear that if he spends too much time on the campaign trail he’ll say something to let voters know how monumentally dumb he actually is.
· Has a family that received an estimated $30 million to $40 million in bribes from countries like China and the Ukraine.
Reflections on Sleepy Joe
Exactly how and where will he lead us?
Don Feder
The most important election of our lifetime – perhaps in all U.S. history -- is upon us.
Here are some thoughts on the Democrat presidential candidate:
· Spent 47 years in office without accomplishing anything noteworthy -- who was ever and always a willing tool for the leadership of the Democrat Party.
· Has become a bobble-head for the socialists who now run his party.
· Took three months to issue a limp-wristed disavowal of the riots which are rocking our republic.
· Equates occasional police misconduct with business districts in flames, nightly looting, the murder of cops, and assaults on innocent bystanders.
· Thinks white supremacists pose a greater threat to America than Antifa, which he says is “an idea” not an organization. With Joe, you never know if he’s simply parroting progressive propaganda or really is that stupid.
· Wants to demolish the border wall and defund ICE, and once called illegal immigration “a gift” – that keeps on giving for the left.
· Said 150 million Americans died from “gun violence” since 2007 and 120 million of us died from COVID-19. There goes 80% of the population.
· Does press availabilities where he takes two questions – from reporters he knows are friendly.
· Has rallies which could be held in a broom closet.
· Thinks the president doesn’t have the authority to fill Supreme Court vacancies close to an election.
· Can’t quote the best-known phrase in the Declaration of Independence. (Joe: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created. by the, you know, you know the thing.”) Did he ever read the document? How about the Constitution?
· Hides in his basement because his handlers fear that if he spends too much time on the campaign trail he’ll say something to let voters know how monumentally dumb he actually is.
· Has a family that received an estimated $30 million to $40 million in bribes from countries like China and the Ukraine.
· Made his fortune in politics. Harry Truman used to say you can always tell the crooked politician. He’s the one who started poor and ended rich.
· Chose a running mate who’s ranked the furthest left member of the Senate and made her bones smearing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.
· Refuses to denounce anti-Semitism in his party.
· Says America is an “idea” that was “never lived up to.” Funny, with the greatest democracy in the world – that pioneered civil liberties and saved humanity from Nazism and communism -- I thought we were doing pretty well.
· Thinks that taxes are a way to jump-start the economy and wants a $15-an-hour minimum wage to help small businesses that have been hit so hard.
· Changes his position on fracking every 15 minutes or so, depending on focus groups.
· Says we can “change America for generations to come.” Visions of Venezuela dance in my head.
· Is the leader of a party that wants to end free elections by abolishing the Electoral College, making Puerto Rico and D.C. states, and packing the Supreme Court.
· Has the absolute loyalty of The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and the rest of the mainstream media that’s been lying to you for decades.
· Whose supporters include Hollywood, Big Tech and academia – who’ve spent years stifling free speech, indoctrinating our children, and hating America.
· Was endorsed by the Revolutionary Communist Party.
· Can’t wait to destroy the economic recovery now underway with another lockdown, so he can “build it back better” – with Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren as the architects.
· Wants a national mandate for face masks – which the CDC says are worthless unless they’re hospital-grade.
· Spent the entire campaign whining about Trump’s Supreme Court nominations but refuses to give us a hint of whom he’d put on the high court.
· Whose mental deterioration is more painfully apparent with each passing day, reflected in an inability to speak coherently, gaffes galore, and embarrassing memory lapses, as when he recently said, “We need to stop four more years of George.” If he can’t remember the name of the incumbent he’s running against, how would he perform as president?
· Has a shocking inability to control his temper, reflected in such bizarre outbursts as telling an African American interviewer that he “ain’t black” if he’d even think about voting for anyone else.
Is this the man Americans want to lead the country and the free world (out of the Covid crisis, against our foreign foes and the anarchists who are trying to tear America apart) for as long as he can remain upright?
Exclusive — ‘This is China, Inc.’: Emails Reveal Hunter Biden’s Associates Helped Communist-Aligned Chinese Elites Secure White House Meetings
PETER SCHWEIZER and SEAMUS BRUNER
Newly obtained emails from a Hunter Biden business partner lay out in detail how the Vice President’s son and his colleagues used their access to the Obama-Biden administration to arrange private meetings for potential foreign clients and investors at the highest levels in the White House. These never-before-revealed emails outline how a delegation of Chinese investors and Communist Party officials managed to secure a private, off-the-books meeting with then-Vice President Joe Biden.
In a 2011 email, Hunter Biden’s business associates also discussed developing relations with what one called “China Inc.” as part of a “new push on soft diplomacy for the Chinese.” These emails are completely unconnected to the Hunter Biden emails being released by the New York Post.
These and more explosive never-before-revealed emails were provided to Schweizer by Bevan Cooney, a one-time Hunter Biden and Devon Archer business associate. Cooney is currently in prison serving a sentence for his involvement in a 2016 bond fraud investment scheme.
In 2019, Cooney reached out to Schweizer after becoming familiar with the revelations in his 2018 book Secret Empires. Cooney explained that he believes he was the “fall guy” for the fraud scheme and that Archer and Hunter Biden had avoided responsibility.
Archer, who was also convicted in the case, saw a federal judge vacate his conviction. But an appellate court overturned the lower court judge’s ruling, reinstating Archer’s conviction in the case. Archer, Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, awaits sentencing.
Cooney, their associate who is currently serving a prison sentence on his conviction in the matter, later reestablished contact with Schweizer through investigative journalist Matthew Tyrmand. From prison, Cooney provided Schweizer with written authorization, his email account name, and password to his Gmail account to retrieve these emails. He authorized, in writing, the publication of these emails— notable because it is the first time a close associate has publicly confirmed Hunter’s trading on his father’s influence.
The emails offer a unique window into just how the Biden universe conducted business during the Obama-Biden Administration. These associates sought to trade on Hunter Biden’s relationship with, and access to, his father and the Obama-Biden White House in order to generate business.
For instance, on November 5, 2011, one of Archer’s business contacts forwarded him an email teasing an opportunity to gain “potentially outstanding new clients” by helping to arrange White House meetings for a group of Chinese executives and government officials. The group was the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the delegation included Chinese billionaires, Chinese Communist Party loyalists, and at least one “respected diplomat” from Beijing. Despite its benign name, CEC has been called “a second foreign ministry” for the People’s Republic of China—a communist government that closely controls most businesses in its country. CEC was established in 2006 by a group of businessmen and Chinese government diplomats.
Re China Entrepreneurs Club… by Breitbart News
CEC’s leadership boasts numerous senior members of the Chinese Communist Party, including Wang Zhongyu (“vice chairman of the 10th CPPCC National Committee and deputy secretary of the Party group”), Ma Weihua (director of multiple Chinese Communist Party offices), and Jiang Xipei (member of the Chinese Communist Party and representative of the 16th National Congress), among others.
“I know it is political season and people are hesitant but a group like this does not come along every day,” an intermediary named Mohamed A. Khashoggi wrote on behalf of the CEC to an associate of Hunter Biden and Devon Archer. “A tour of the white house and a meeting with a member of the chief of staff’s office and John Kerry would be great,” Khashoggi said before including what should have been a major red flag: “Not sure if one has to be registered to do this.” Presumably, Khashoggi meant a registered lobbyist under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Khashoggi believed the trip presented “a soft diplomacy play that could be very effective” and would give Hunter Biden’s business partners “good access to [the Chinese] for any deal in the future.”
Indeed, the email boasted of CEC’s wealthy membership:
CEC’s current membership includes 50 preeminent figures such as: Liu Chuanzhi, Chairman of the CEC, Legend Holdings and Lenovo Group; Wu Jinglian, Zhang Weiying, and Zhou Qiren, China’s esteemed economists; Wu Jianmin, respected diplomat; Long Yongtu, representative of China’s globalization; Wang Shi (Vanke); Ma Weihua (China Merchants Bank); Jack Ma (Alibaba Group); Guo Guangchang (Fosun Group); Wang Jianlin, (Wanda Group); Niu Gensheng (LAONIU Foundation); Li Shufu (Geely); Li Dongsheng (TCL Corporation); Feng Lun (Vantone) and etc.
The gross income of the CEC members’ companies allegedly “totaled more than RMB 1.5 trillion, together accounting for roughly 4% of China’s GDP.” The overture to Hunter Biden’s associates described the Chinese CEC members variously as “industrial elites,” “highly influential,” and among “the most important private sector individuals in China today.”
Before contacting Hunter Biden’s associates, the CEC had been trying to get meetings with top Obama-Biden administration officials to no avail. “From the DC side as you will see below they [CEC] have written letters to several members of the administration and others and have so far not had a strong reaction.”
“This is China Inc,” wrote Khashoggi in the email, referring to the delegation of Chinese billionaires.
“Biggest priority for the CEC group is to see the White House, and have a senior US politician, or senior member of Obama’s administration, give them a tour… If your friend in DC can help, we would be extremely grateful,” Khashoggi emphasized.
Hunter Biden and Devon Archer apparently delivered for the Chinese Communist Party-connected industrial elites within ten days .
The original Oct. 19, 2011, email from Khashoggi was sent to Gary Fears — a controversial political fundraiser with a checkered history who was caught up in a riverboat casino scandal in the mid-1990s — who forwarded it on to Archer a couple weeks later on Nov. 5, 2011.
Time was short, as Khashoggi’s original email noted that the Chinese delegation would be in DC on Nov. 14, 2011. Fears told Archer to “reach out” to Khashoggi about the request regarding getting the Chinese businesspersons and officials into the Obama White House, adding it would be “perfect for” Archer to also “attend” with them and then “get guys for the potash deal.”
The same day Fears sent Khashoggi’s message to him, Archer took the email from Fears and sent to Khashoggi a business proposal for a potash mine deal he had lined up.
Six days after the initial overture, Archer received a followup email asking how a meeting with CEC’s representative went. The email closed with “Do me a favor and ask Hunter [Biden] to call me — I’ve tried reaching him a couple of times.” Archer responded, “Hunter is traveling in the UAE for the week with royalty so probably next week before he will be back in pocket…. The meeting with [CEC representative] was good. Seems like there is a lot to do together down the line. Probably not a fit for the current Potash private placement but he’s a good strategic relationship as the mine develops. Definitely have a drink with Mohammed and let him know how impressed I was with his whole deal.”
One minute later, Archer sent a follow-up email, “Couldn’t confirm this with Hunter on the line but we got him his meeting at the WH Monday for the Chinese folks.”
On the day of the meeting, November 14, 2011, Cooney emailed Fears to confirm that Archer “got the Chinese guys all taken care of in DC.”
The Obama-Biden Administration archives reveal that this Chinese delegation did indeed visit the White House on November 14, 2011, and enjoyed high-level access. The delegation included approximately thirty members, according to White House visitor logs. But those records also obscure perhaps the most important item for the Chinese delegation: a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden himself.
The visitor logs list Jeff Zients, the deputy director of Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as the host of the CEC delegation. Obama had tasked Zients with restructuring and ultimately consolidating the various export-import agencies under the Commerce Department—an effort in which the Chinese delegation would have a keen interest.
A trip itinerary posted by the CEC also confirms the delegation met with Obama’s then-recently-confirmed Commerce Secretary John Bryson.
Curiously, the Obama-Biden visitor logs do not mention any meeting with Vice President Joe Biden. But the Vice President’s off-the-books meeting was revealed by one of the core founders of the CEC. In an obscure document listing the CEC members’ biographies, CEC Secretary General Maggie Cheng alleges that she facilitated the CEC delegation meetings in Washington in 2011 and boasts of the Washington establishment figures that CEC met with. The first name she dropped was that of Vice President Joe Biden.
The relationships established during that visit may have benefited Hunter Biden and Devon Archer down the road. Two years later, they famously helped to form the Chinese government funded Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) investment fund. One of BHR’s first major portfolio investments was a ride-sharing company like Uber called Didi Dache—now called Didi Chuxing Technology Co. That company is closely connected to Liu Chuanzhi, the chairman of the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the founder of Legend Holdings—the parent company of Lenovo, one of the world’s largest computer companies. Liu is a former Chinese Communist Party delegate and was a leader of the 2011 CEC delegation to the White House. His daughter was the President of Didi.
Liu has long been involved in CCP politics, including serving as a representative to the 9th, 10th, and 11th sessions of the National People’s Congress of the PRC and as a representative to the 16th and 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Liu was the Vice Chairman of the 8th and 9th Executive Committee of All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (ACFIC), an organization known to be affiliated with the Chinese United Front.
The Biden campaign has not responded to a request for comment on this story.
This is a developing story.
Peter Schweizer is the author of Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. Seamus Bruner is the author of Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties.
Biden Whistleblower Emails: Chinese Energy Company Gave $5 Million Non-Secured, Forgivable Loan to Biden ‘Family’
MATTHEW BOYLE
A 2017 email from a top official with a Chinese energy firm, provided by a whistleblower to U.S. Senate investigators, demonstrates the terms of an agreement included officials with the firm giving a $5 million non-secured, forgivable loan to the Biden “family.”
The email, sent to SinoHawk Holdings CEO Tony Bobulinski, shows how a top official with CEFC Energy — a now bankrupt and defunct energy company based in China — offered to wire $10 million into an account to begin operations, $5 million worth of which would be a non-secured forgivable loan to the “BD Family,” which means the Biden family.
Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer spent four and a half hours with Bobulinski before he went public, and discussed these communications in particular regarding this loan during that meeting. According to Schweizer, the Chinese energy company officials were going to put $10 million into an account, $5 million of which was designated as a non-secured forgivable loan to the Biden family. Schweizer said this would constitute significant leverage the Chinese energy company officials would have over the Biden family.
“In a way, this would give CEFC greater leverage over the Biden family than simply giving them a gift or bribe because if they were dissatisfied with what the Bidens were doing they could ask for their money back,” Schweizer told Breitbart News when asked about the arrangement upon the public release of Bobulinski’s emails.
The email also says that $5 million loan is “interest free” and asks how that $5 million would be used, and if used up, whether CEFC should lend more money to the Biden family.
This email further fleshes out details surrounding the controversial arrangement first uncovered by U.S. Senate investigators in a recent Homeland Security Committee report, and later further uncovered by a bombshell New York Post story on emails retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Bobulinski’s new emails add to the story by including terms of the financial arrangement behind the wire transfer that CEFC officials made into a firm aligned with the Bidens that then made significant payments to Hunter Biden’s own firm, a wire transfer and financial payments that were first exposed by Senate investigators. The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop emails added more information to this questionable arrangement by revealing emails that showed how Biden associates intended to divvy up the cash from the Chinese investors.
These new emails from Bobulinski add more to the picture by showing that the agreement was that this payment would serve as a non-secured forgivable loan, and that the CEFC side of the arrangement understood that the then-forthcoming payment — which Senate investigators confirmed was made just two weeks after these discussions —would serve as a loan to the Biden “family,” not just to Hunter Biden.
An e-mail to Hunter Biden's partner from a top Chinese official on July 26, 2017 shows the Chinese energy company CEFC proposed a $5 million "interest-free" loan to the Biden family "based on their trust on [Biden] family[.]"
"Should CEFC keep lending more to the family?" pic.twitter.com/MGFizPqOdm
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) October 22, 2020
This email is part of a broader trove of documents that Bobulinski provided to U.S. Senate investigators with the Homeland Security and Finance Committees, and also to media outlets including Breitbart News. Other media outlets are reporting on the emails as well.
According to the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s recent report, $5 million was wired directly into the account in question two weeks later — and then Hunter Biden’s firm spent the next year wiring $4.8 million from there into his own firm’s account:
Less than two weeks later, on August 8, 2017, $5 million was wired from a CEFC-affiliated investment vehicle to a Delaware LLC, which spent the next year transfering nearly $4.8 million directly to Hunter Biden's firm, according to Senate investigators. https://t.co/Byyo3FNp3T pic.twitter.com/8XHHVTuFml
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) October 22, 2020
CEFC was a controversial energy company, as Breitbart News has reported. “The owner of CEFC, Ye Jianming, was among the most ambitious of Chinese tycoons before his business empire collapsed and he vanished into the Communist nation’s shadowy prison system,” Breitbart News’ John Hayward wrote earlier this week. “Ye was once portrayed as one of China’s greatest rags-to-riches stories, a humble park ranger who began making successful oil investments in his twenties and became a billionaire before he hit 40. He was marketed as an affable businessman foreigners could feel safe making deals with, well-connected but not an obvious tool of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
CEFC is at the center of the burgeoning Biden scandal. When Bobulinski went public on Wednesday night, he was the first source on one of the emails that the New York Post published from Hunter Biden’s laptop retrieved from a computer repair store in Delaware. One such story that the Post published was about Hunter Biden and the Biden family seeking a deal with CEFC, and in those original emails James Gilliar of J2cR emails Bobulinski about “remunerations packages” related to the CEFC deal.
“I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is genuine,” Bobulinski said in his statement issued publicly.
Bobulinski had been, sources familiar with the matter told Breitbart News, cooperating with the Wall Street Journal for an investigation it is working on. But since the Journal has not published its story several days later after its staff had indicated it would, Bobulinski decided to go public on his own on Wednesday night — and made clear he is cooperating with Senate investigators.
In the original email, published by the New York Post, from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Gilliar references a breakdown of how money acquired would be distributed throughout the firm of which Bobulinski was CEO. The email says at one point that “10 held by H for the big guy.”
In his nearly 700-word statement, Bobulinski confirmed the authenticity of that email and further explained its meeting including that “the big guy” was a reference to former Vice President Joe Biden, the 2020 Democrat presidential nominee, himself.
“What I am outlining is fact. I know it is fact because I lived it. I am the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings which was a partnership between the Chinese operating through CEFC/Chairman Ye and the Biden family,” Bobulinski said. “I was brought into the company to be the CEO by James Gilliar and Hunter Biden. The reference to ‘the big guy’ in the much publicized May 13, 2017 email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden. The other ‘JB’ referenced in that email is Jim Biden, Joe’s brother. Hunter Biden called his dad ‘the Big Guy’ or ‘my Chairman,’ and frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals that we were discussing. I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business. I’ve seen firsthand that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.”
The Biden Crime Family Comes Undone
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The Biden family is notorious for being the crookedest clan not only in Delaware, but in D.C.
And yet the Biden family stood out even there. To be born a Biden in the era after Joe switched his party affiliation, plagiarized his speeches, and inappropriately touched every woman or girl he could get his hands on in the state and the nation, was to be bred into dirty money.
Joe Biden was now asked in Wisconsin if Hunter had “profited off the Biden name”.
“None whatsoever,” the godfather of Delaware retorted. And the entire state laughed.
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, in Delaware, everyone knows that the Biden name means money in the bank. Literally. Just ask MBNA, Hunter’s former employer, whose executives poured $200,000 into Joe’s coffers, and one of whom bought his house.
“Don’t worry about investors,” James Biden, Joe's brother, famous for scoring a billion dollar contract to build houses in Iraq, told executives at Paradigm Global Advisors. “We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
James had bought Paradigm together with Hunter Biden.
Biden can try to deny the obvious, but he isn’t even trying to deny that the emails and photos are real, or that it was his son’s laptop. Instead, he spouted a word salad of gibberish, stating, “the vast of the intelligence people have come out and said there’s no basis at all.”
Why does Biden need to call on “the vast of the intelligence people” who carefully avoided making a firm statement, to deny something he is better able to deny on his own?
Because it’s really an admission.
The latest emails make it all too clear that Joe Biden got Viktor Shokin, the Ukranian prosecutor, fired because Burisma wanted him gone and that Hunter Biden's purpose in making deals with a powerful Chinese energy company linked to the Communist regime was to produce income for "me and my family". It’s no wonder that the latest reports link the FBI’s subpoena of the laptop, not to the media’s false claims of a Russian op, but to a money laundering investigation.
Investing in Joe Biden or, as one message allegedly has it, "the big guy", meant depositing the money with James or Hunter. And then Hunter deposited a laptop with a small computer repair shop in Delaware five miles from his father’s home, and never picked it up. The rest is history.
And the history is happening now.
The Hunter Biden laptop unrolls two ragged threads. One is the descent of Joe Biden’s son into new depths of depravity and the other are the foreign investors who bought into Joe Biden Inc.
The alleged photos of Hunter Biden’s drug use and underage girls might be dismissed as a spoiled rich kid’s demons. But, looking at public photos and videos of Joe Biden touching, caressing, and sniffing women and young girls, it’s hard not to see the influence. What did a teenage Hunter grow up seeing his father do? How did that shape him into the man he is?
And why was Hunter able to get away with it for so long?
In alleged text messages exchanged between Joe and Hunter Biden, father and son discuss "sexually inappropriate" behavior with a 14-year-old girl.
"She told my therapist that I was sexually inappropriate with [name of 14-year-old girl redacted] when she says that I facetime naked with her and the reason I can’t have her out to see me is because I’ll walk around naked smoking crack talking [redacted] girls on face time," Hunter appeared to message his father.
What was done about this? The odds are good that the answer is nothing.
The Hunter Biden laptop was turned over to the FBI in December of 2019. And the FBI appears to have done little with it. Giuliani submitted material allegedly showing criminal sexual behavior to the Delaware police who passed it off to the Delaware Department of Justice.
A spokesman for Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings said it was sent to the FBI.
Jennings is not only a Democrat, but a friend of the Biden family who had worked under Beau Biden and has been vigorously campaigning for Joe Biden.
"I’ve known Joe, Jill, and the Biden family for most of my life. Joe is one of the kindest and most genuine people I’ve ever known," Jennings had posted on her Facebook page.
The Biden family may have been able to get away with a lot for the same reason as the Kennedy clan. They were big fish in a small pond being protected by the Democrat club. Like some Kennedy sons, Hunter may have spun out of control because he could get away with it.
That’s why Hunter Biden’s story is just an echo of Joe. Father and son appear to share a boundless greed for unearned wealth and women, and a complete lack of self-control with both.
And both men have spent their lives being protected from the consequences of their actions.
Laptop computers, like notebooks, are the mirrors of their owners. We use them and fill them with the things that matter to us. Going through a lost laptop or phone tells us a lot about the man or woman who spent years with it. Hunter Biden’s laptop is a mirror of the man. And the mirror shows a broken and corrupt human being filling its gigabytes with his demons.
What were Hunter Biden’s demons? The same as the ones that bedeviled Joe. Women and money. And as dirty and wrong as possible. That’s why Hunter allegedly didn’t just seek out money, he went after business opportunities in the most corrupt places in the world, like Kazakhstan and the People’s Republic of China, and he didn’t just chase women.
Instead, Rudy Giuliani has said that the laptop contained photos of underage girls.
But the bigger story isn’t Hunter’s depravity, it’s the business opportunities, the lobbying gigs and board seats offered to him by foreign companies looking to invest in Joe Biden.
In less than two weeks, Joe Biden’s stock will either boom or bust. And voters are entitled to know who, beyond the battalions of domestic special interests from Wall Street to Hollywood, from the gun control lobby to green businesses, pouring hundreds of millions into his campaign, is getting ready to collect interest on the foreign money that financed Hunter’s lifestyle.
Hunter Biden's emails offer a window into a global operation, in the Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, and the People's Republic of China, of investing in Joe Biden courtesy of his wastrel son.
Joe Biden has claimed that he has nothing to do with his son’s business affairs, but that’s a transparent lie that had been shot down even long before the laptop by media reporting. The media is frantically trying to bury information that backs up their own reporting from the primaries when the same media now trying to save Joe Biden originally wanted to bury him.
Why did so many Democrat officials, beginning with Barack Obama, try to keep Joe Biden from running in 2016 and then 2020? Joe Biden is a mediocre hack, but he’s a better candidate than Hillary Clinton, not to mention lefty luminaries like Al Gore or John Kerry. The problem was that the small state that spawned the Biden crime family was littered with their dirty laundry.
And now, in the final stretch before Election Day, the messy stained laundry is spilling out.
Like Humpty Dumpty, all the Democrat horses and men are trying to keep the mess contained. Twitter and Facebook are blatantly suppressing the story. The media has refused to cover the biggest scandal of the election while falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation despite clear denials by the intelligence community and the FBI.
Hunter Biden’s laptop isn’t just evidence of a degenerate past, but of the coming attractions.
The Biden crime family has built a global network of contacts. And when their father was a mere veep, they could only wet their beaks a little. If he wins, they’ll be able to drown in money.
Joe could throw around his weight in a backwater like Ukraine, but if he wins, Burisma will just be a tiny taste of what is to come. And the corruption in D.C. will make Delaware blush again.
Corruption is nothing new in D.C., but what the laptop reveals about Hunter Biden and his father is that, like the Clintons, they have no self-control. And the only thing more dangerous than cunning crooks at the head of a nation are inept kleptocrats who would leave evidence of their financial and sexual corruption on a laptop abandoned in a Delaware repair shop.
As new details trickle out, two things are obvious about the Biden crime family: they’re not only as crooked as a bent tree in a thunderstorm, they’re also hopelessly stupid at covering it up.
Even as the media denies everything for the Bidens, they have yet to deny the core facts.
Rep. Schiff may claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a Russian conspiracy, but neither Joe nor Hunter will say it. And what Schiff and the Democrats and their media can only say behind their backs is that they can’t believe how corrupt and incompetent the horse they bet on really is.
They haven’t seen anything yet.
Some signs of the couple’s prior lifestyle, however, appear to have remained in tact. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, Biden’s charitable giving has only slightly increased. According to the most recent tax returns released, Biden gave 1.4 percent of his income to charity in 2016. The following year, when the couple reported making 11 million, they donated just around 9.2 percent to charity. The percentage fell significantly in 2018 to six percent, even though the couple earned more than $4.58 million.
The more you know about Biden, the ickier he is
By Andrea Widburg
We've long known that Joe Biden is a man with unseemly habits. He sniffs and fondles little girls, swims naked in front of female Secret Service agents, and has a legitimate sexual assault claim hanging over him. If the Biden hard drive documents are legitimate (and they seem to be), he used his drug-addicted son as a bagman for bribes from foreign governments and businesses and knew that his son was inappropriate with underage girls. A recently unearthed 1974 interview with Biden shows us the genesis of all these gross and illegal activities.
Kitty Kelly interviewed Biden two years after he entered Congress — and two years after his wife, Neilia, ran a stop sign and collided with a truck, killing her and their baby daughter. Beau and Hunter suffered serious injuries. (Hunter had a "serious head injury," which — and I say this without sarcasm — may explain a lot about his struggles with drugs and alcohol.) It was a tragedy and garnered the 31-year-old Biden some much deserved sympathy.
Sympathy, however, cannot obscure that Biden is an unpleasantly weird character. There's the arrogance from a man who was a mediocre student at best:
"My wife always wanted me to be on the Supreme Court," he says. "But while I know I can be a good Senator, and I know I can be a good President, I do know that I could never be another Oliver Wendell Holmes. I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia. And my family still expects me to be there one of these days. With them behind me anything can happen."
Biden also engages in weird sexual boasting about his dead wife, both in terms of how sexy she was and how much she sexually satisfied him:
"Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover. The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports. Most guys don't really know what I lost because they never knew what I had…."
[snip]
"Let me show you my favorite picture of her," he says, holding up a snapshot of Neilia in a bikini. "She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn't she?"
[snip]
"At first she stayed at home with the kids while I campaigned but that didn't work out because I'd come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn't have much time for anything else."
Do you want to know about Joe Biden's sex life and his Playboy bunny fantasies? I sure don't. His sexual obsessions seem to pair well with his behavior around little girls.
Biden's compulsive boasting shows up, too. Was Joe really a "football hero"? He says he was, but we now know he freely borrowed other people's life experiences. Also, while he praises his dead wife's intelligence, there's the familiar theme of his own above-average intelligence:
"She was the most intelligent human being I have ever known. She was absolutely brilliant. I'm smart but Neilia was ten times smarter."
Biden is also openly greedy. When you read his complaints about this salary, you can practically see him thinking of ways to use his political power to augment the salary:
Unlike most other senators, Biden makes no bones about saving he is underpaid. Last September, when the Senate was debating a pay raise for itself, he said, "I don't know about the rest of you but I am worth a lot more than my salary of $42,500 [$224,379.31 in 2020] a year in this body. It seems to me that we should flat out tell the American people we are worth our salt."
No wonder Biden told Kelly he was already feeling "the temptation to sell out":
He feels the indignity is compounded by the temptation to sell out to big business or big labor for financial help, and says it's almost impossible for a candidate to remain true to his conscience in this situation. He admits that more than once he was tempted to compromise to get campaign money.
While Biden claimed then that the memory of his upright wife restrained him from corruption, that restraint apparently vanished over the years.
The whole interview is peculiar and creepy. It also foreshadows the man Biden became after 47 years of power and corruption.
Lastly, here's something to chew on, which I think is the most unnerving statement that Biden made in the whole interview:
He defines politics as power. "And, whether you like it or not, young lady," he says, leaning over his desk to shake a finger at me, "us cruddy politicians can take away that First Amendment of yours if we want to."
That's the Democrat view of politics in a nutshell: it's about power, and Democrats in power will always trample Americans' constitutional rights given half a chance.
JOE BIDEN HAS NEVER DONE ANYTHING FOR AMERICA BUT HE SURE GOT RICH DOING IT!
Some signs of the couple’s prior lifestyle, however, appear to have remained in tact. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, Biden’s charitable giving has only slightly increased. According to the most recent tax returns released, Biden gave 1.4 percent of his income to charity in 2016. The following year, when the couple reported making 11 million, they donated just around 9.2 percent to charity. The percentage fell significantly in 2018 to six percent, even though the couple earned more than $4.58 million.
Federal Lawsuit: Joe Biden’s Brother Accused of Defrauding Rural Healthcare Company
HARIS ALIC
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, is being accused of defrauding a Tennessee rural healthcare company.
A lawsuit filed in federal court late last month alleges James Biden, who has a history of murky financial dealings, and his associates deceived and defrauded two Tennessee businessmen.
Michael Frey and his business partner, Dr. Mohannad Azzam, brought the suit claiming James Biden and his associates promised and failed to line up investors for their rural healthcare enterprise. Instead, the suit alleges, James Biden urged the two men to borrow $10 million from a hedge fund manager involved in the deal and then proceeded to pass their idea off as his own to a conglomerate of Turkish investors.
“The lawsuit takes direct aim at Biden, painting him as a con artist who uses his ties to his brother — now a Democratic candidate for president — to lure his victims,” the Knoxville News Sentinel reported.
According to documents filed with the U.S. District Court, Frey and his wife developed a business model to take over rural hospitals and retrofit them to not only offer traditional hospital care, but also drug addiction and mental health treatment. After incorporating the enterprise as Diverse Medical Management, they brought on Azzam, “who contracted with nursing homes to provide medical care for seniors.”
The business model was lucrative enough that by 2017, Frey and Azzam were actively pitching it to investors and hospitals across the country. One investor particularly taken with the idea was Americore Health, an operator of rural hospitals.
At the behest of Americore CEO, Grant White, Frey and Azzam were urgd to pitch their business plan to rural hospitals in Kentucky. It was at one such meeting where the two men met James Biden, who identified himself as a “principal” at Americore.
Not long after their initial encounter, James Biden introduced the men to Michael Lewitt, a hedge fund manager and well-known “credit strategist.” Around this time, Americore made plans to buy Diverse Medical for the sum $7 million.
Despite the deal, Americore quickly fell behind on its scheduled payments to Frey and Azzam. It was then that James Biden and Lewitt, as detailed in the lawsuit, hatched a plan to oust White and sell Americore along with Diverse Medical to a third company called the Platinum Group.
Biden or Lewitt’s role within the Platinum Group is unclear. The organization, which is little-known and has no social media presence, is likely a holding company specifically set up for the purchase of Americore.
Frey and Azzam appear to have been uncomfortable with turn the deal took, especially the notion of removing White. The men, though, went along with the plan after being told a payout was “imminent.”
“They repeatedly assured (Frey) that investment capital originating from and flowing through foreign entities was not only certain, but was imminent,” documents filed by Frey and Azzam’s attorney state.
James Biden is alleged to have put the men at ease by playing up his political connections. The lawsuit reads:
Biden promised (Frey’s) Intensive Outpatient Model would play an integral role in health care policy at the highest levels of the United States government.
Since the deal had evolved to include the purchase of Americore, Frey and Azzam were encouraged to take a $10 million loan — part of which would came from Lewitt’s hedge fund — to expand their business. Frey and Azzam claim the loan was taken with the understanding it would be repaid by money brought in from new investors.
Throughout the entire process, the suit states, James Biden was promising investment capital was forthcoming. As more time elapsed and new investors failed to materialize, Frey and Azzam became suspicious they were being set up. Those feelings only intensified when James Biden inadvertently sent Frey a text message about their company meant for someone else in November 2018.
“We can wrap a/c into Frey’s entity further diluting them both in the process? After we take control of both. Just a thought,” the purported text from James Biden reads, as included in the lawsuit. “We must have complete control, too many moving pieces. Jim.”
When asked to explain, James Biden demurred and requested more information on Diverse Medical and the range of healthcare services offered. Even though they provided the information, Azzam and Frey’s suspicions were only further heightened.
The final breakdown in the relationship occurred when the men learned that Biden and Lewitt had left them out of the picture when selling the deal in Turkey. Although, Azzam and Frey knew their business model was being pitched to the “Qatar Investment Authority in Turkey,” they were unaware the documents presented to investors by James Biden and Lewitt were scrubbed clean of the Tennessee businessmen. The lawsuit says:
On January 23, Platinum Group … and Biden submitted a White Paper … outlining ‘Platinum Group Diverse Medical Management (PGDMM)’s business model. What the investors were not told, however, was that this white paper was drafted by (Frey and Azzam) and sent to Biden … Platinum Group simply replaced all references to Plaintiffs with PGDMM, a non-existent entity.
When Frey and Azzam attempted to reassert control over their business, the lawsuit alleges that Lewitt demanded repayment of the money his hedge fund loaned them.
It is unclear if the lawsuit will progress or if James Biden and Lewitt will choose to settle given the high-profile nature of the allegations and the impact they may pose to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
This is not the first time that James Biden’s business dealings have raised eyebrows. As Breitbart News reported on Friday, the younger-Biden received “unusually generous” bank loans to open a night club during the 1970s while his brother sat on the Senate Banking Committee. The ample terms under which the loans were issued drew attention and concerns about influence peddling given James Biden’s lack of business experience and paltry net worth.
The former vice president’s younger brother is not member of the Biden clan to come under fire for leveraging political connections to secure lucrative business deals recently. In Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed that in 2013 “Hunter Biden’s firm signed a billion-dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China just 10 days after Joe and Hunter Biden flew to China aboard Air Force Two.”
Schweizer also detailed how Hunter Biden secured a seat on the board of Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), which invested in a Chinese company that was indicted for engaging in a “nuclear power conspiracy against the United States.”
“When you have the motive of greed and when you don’t worry too much about ethics, it’s very easy to come up with creative ways to enrich yourself, and one of those is what we call ‘American princelings,” Schweizer told Breitbart News Tonight last year. “The term ‘princelings’ is really a term that’s been widely used in China and in the West to talk about China, where in communist China, if you want to get deals done, if you want to get favors from the government, you basically do business with their children, and these children of communist party officials are called the princelings.”
‘10% Joe’ – From Grandfather to Godfather
By David Isaac
We thought Joe Biden was the grandfather. It turns out he’s more like the godfather.
It’s the big reveal in the Hunter Biden story.
Until now, we thought Hunter, the “f—ked up addict that can’t be trusted” (in his own words) who sent not one but three laptops full of incriminating material in for repairs – an act so stupid that even crack can’t be blamed – was the one taking advantage of his father’s position to enrich himself.
(Compounding the idiocy, despite repeated notifications, he failed to pay the $85 bill to reclaim the one salvageable laptop, so that after 90 days it became the legal property of the repair shop.)
What we learn from the laptop is that Joe (referred to as “the big guy”) was to get a 10% cut of the loot from a deal with a now defunct Chinese energy company with strong ties to the Chinese government (the email outlines an equity split including “20 for H” and “10 held by H for the big guy.” That makes “10% Joe” analogous to the Godfather, the capo dei capi, the boss due his share of the family’s enterprises.
So Biden is getting “his beak wet,” as former NYC Mayor and current Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani points out in a damning video describing the “Biden crime family’s payoff scheme.”
There’s more. Hunter tells his daughter Naomi in a 2018 text-message exchange: “I hope you all can do what I did, and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years and it has been tough. It’s really hard but don’t worry, unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
It would take some real mental gymnastics to convince any normal person – that is, anyone not marinating in Democratic talking points - that “Pop” wasn’t referring to Joe Biden.
Did Biden really get half? It sounds more like Hunter is complaining that he had to give his dad anything.
The amount really doesn’t matter. It puts paid to Joe’s claims that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” It should lead to a federal investigation, starting with subpoenas to Hunter’s banks.
Other emails are equally damning when it comes to Joe’s claims to know nothing of his son’s business affairs. There’s the email from Burisma board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi thanking Hunter for setting up a meeting with then Vice President Biden.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.
Up to now the worst that was usually said of Biden is that he wasn’t up to the job. He was a kindly grandfather who was cognitively slipping. To Trump opponents, it didn’t matter. What was important was that Biden would return the country to “normalcy.” Peggy Noonan wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 8):
“If Joe Biden wins big, part of the reason, maybe a big part, will be simply that he is normal. Not ‘he’s such an accomplished legislator,’ not ‘he’s the man of the future’ or ‘charismatic’ or ‘warm’ or ‘has such a moving back story.’ No. He is normal. And people miss normal so much.”
A family business raking in millions for access to U.S. policy makers is “normal”?
Still less excusable than Noonan’s silly remarks are those of U.S. Adm. (ret.) William McRaven, who extols Biden in the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 20), well after the scandal broke: “We need a leader of integrity whose decency and sense of respect reflects the values we expect from our president.”
We hope McRaven was a better admiral than he is a judge of character.
And the response of mainstream media to the Post’s revelations?
In what may be the most blatant example of media censorship in U.S. history, the story has been buried by Big Tech and blackballed/denied by the media giants.
Facebook and Twitter, in the tank for Biden, both blocked the link to the Post story. Twitter blocked the Trump campaign’s official account and also that of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. The major news outlets have rushed in unison to label the Post scoop “Russian disinformation.” Their response was so monolithic that John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence felt impelled to intervene, assuring there was “no intelligence that supports that.”
The hard drive is full of pictures of the Biden family, Hunter (sometimes in compromising positions) and over 11,000 emails, most of them harmless. And why, as Giuliani points out, did Hunter Biden’s lawyers repeatedly demand his computer be returned (once they realized the disaster that was brewing)? Seems like a strange approach if you think it’s all Russian disinformation, and not Hunter’s computer at all.
'Middle class Joe' Biden cashed in to the tune of $15 million after leaving vice presidency
By Thomas Lifson
Joe Biden has released his tax returns as part of the Democrats' campaign to force the release of President Trump's tax returns. Access to those returns, with hundreds, probably thousands of pages each year, would enable them to niggle-to-death every detail. It's an obvious trap intended to distract and mire a president who has accomplished an astounding list of achievements, starting with reversing the "new normal" of stagnation that Obama assured us would require a "magic wand" to reverse.
But it turns out that Biden has made himself and his wife, "Doctor Jill Biden" (with a doctorate in education), into multimillionaires in just over two years. Even NPR sees the problem for his image:
Former Vice President Joe Biden has referred to himself as "middle class Joe" throughout his political career, and used to regularly joke about being the "poorest person on Congress."
Those terms no longer apply.
Biden and his wife, Jill, have together earned more than $15 million since Biden left office. That's according to tax returns and other financial disclosure forms released by Biden's campaign on Tuesday. The bulk of the Bidens' earnings come from book sales and paid speaking engagements — two routine sources of income for former high-ranking public officials.
The documents show Biden has earned far more than the rest of the 2020 presidential field, with the likely exception of billionaire Tom Steyer, who entered the race Tuesday.
I don't know about you, but I prefer my rich politicians to have made their money before they enter what is laughably called "public service."
I still don't think Biden will be the nominee. But if he does cop the Dems' crown, the phoniness of his claims to be an ordinary guy will be self-evident.
Of Biden can be said what originally was said of the early missionaries who came to Hawaii and bought up land: "They came to do good, and did very well, indeed."
Exclusive: Hunter Biden Lived in Wilmington House with Classified Documents While Bagging Millions Linked to the Highest Levels of Chinese Intelligence
782
CEFC; AP Photo; P. Richards, J. Watson/Getty Images; Twitter
SEAMUS BRUNER
18 Jan 20230
11:53
While addicted to drugs, cavorting with prostitutes, and making deals with businessmen tied to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, Hunter Biden lived in the house where Joe Biden stored classified documents.
On a background-check application dated July 2018, Hunter Biden claimed that he paid $49,910 per month in rent and that his “current residence” at that time was 1209 Barley Mill Road in Wilmington, Delaware, according to a document found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
Hunter also listed that Wilmington address as his primary residence on at least one form of identification (his Delaware driver’s license) and used the same address as his billing address for both his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, a review of files from Hunter’s abandoned laptop reveals.
According to the background check document, Hunter claimed that he paid rent from March 2017 until February 2018 (11 months) at the Wilmington address leading some to wonder if he was paying rent to his father, who has owned the home since 1996. But Hunter apparently filled out the form in error.
Contrary to some reporting, Hunter Biden was not paying his father $49,910 per month; rather, that figure represents the amount Hunter was paying to rent prime office space at the prestigious House of Sweden in Washington, D.C., materials in Hunter’s laptop show.
Nevertheless, the period that Hunter claimed he was living at 1209 Barley Mill Rd (the Wilmington house where classified documents were found) overlaps with the time multiple Biden family members were taking money from foreign businessmen linked to the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligence apparatus.
President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Johns Island, SC, on Aug. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Hunter claimed on various documents and financial statements that he lived at the Wilmington House between early 2017 and 2019—immediately following his father’s second term as vice president and as Joe Biden was gearing up for his presidential run.
Given the discovery of the classified documents at multiple unsecure locations, the timeline of the Bidens’ Chinese business deals paints a troubling picture.
Beginning in late 2015, while his father was still vice president, Hunter Biden began making plans to meet with officials from the Chinese energy company CEFC. CEFC and at least four of its principals and associates, Ye Jianming, Patrick Ho, Gongwen Dong and Jiaqi Bao, have been linked to the Chinese government and its military intelligence apparatus. Hunter once described Patrick Ho as “the fucking spy chief of China.”
Many observers viewed CEFC as a state-directed entity. CNN, for example reported in 2018:
From the yellow stars in its logo to the fact it had China in its name – a privilege normally reserved for state-owned companies – CEFC China Energy’s messaging strongly suggested state ties.
By early 2017, Hunter was directly corresponding with CEFC personnel and flew to Miami in February of that year to meet with CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming. During this trip, Ye Jianming gave Hunter a 3.16 carat diamond valued at approximately $80,000.
Photo from Hunter Biden’s laptop showing the diamond he received from the CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming.
When Hunter’s ex-wife discovered that he had obtained something of such immense value, she had her divorce attorney send an “Urgent” email seeking to determine the whereabouts of the diamond and secure the asset before Hunter could “dissipate” it. Hunter’s attorney offered a shady denial:
There is no diamond in Hunter’s possession. I don’t know where Kathleen is getting access to this information, but on this score, what your email purports below is inaccurate.
Metadata gleaned from photos of the diamond on the abandoned laptop indicate that Hunter lied about not having the diamond and he in fact had the diamond with him in Wilmington. The current location of the 3.16 carat diamond remains unknown.
After the fateful February 2017 meeting with Ye, and around the time Hunter claimed to have moved into the Wilmington house where classified documents were found, the Bidens’ business with CEFC exploded.
Nine days after Miami meeting, Hunter received two separate wire transfers of $3 million which the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network flagged as suspicious.
CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming (Photo: CEFC)
Between April 2017 and September 2018, CEFC and its affiliates funneled millions of dollars to the Bidens (mostly to Hunter, but some of that money flowed to Joe Biden’s brother and sister-in-law, James and Sara Biden). Joe Biden met with Hunter’s business partners during this time. All the while, top secret and sensitive compartmented information documents were just lying around in unsecured locations (such as the closet of the Penn Biden Center and the Wilmington garage), easily accessible by the Bidens and their associates.
James Biden, Joe’s brother, was central to the Biden business dealings with CEFC. One of Hunter’s former business associates, Tony Bobulinski, messaged another associate, James Gilliar, on April 30, 2017, wondering “what is the deal [with] Jim Biden as he wasn’t part of the discussion and now seems a focal point.” Likely alluding to Hunter’s addictions, Gilliar replied:
[With Hunter’s] demons, [it] could be good to have [Jimmy as] a backup…he strengthens our U[nique] S[elling] P[roposition] to [the] Chinese as it looks like a truly family business. [Emphasis added]
Bobulinski met with Hunter, James, and Joe Biden for at least an hour on the evening of May 2, 2017, and he alleges that they discussed the Biden family business dealings in China with which the former vice president was “plainly familiar.”
James and Sara Biden arrive at the White House to attend the State Dinner for South Korea, on October 13, 2011. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)
On May 13, 2017, Gilliar emailed Bobulinski an equity breakdown of a new business venture involving CEFC wherein Gilliar proposed Hunter will hold a 20 percent equity stake and 10 percent will be held by Hunter for “the big guy.” Tony Bobulinski alleges that Joe Biden is the big guy.
According to messages Bobulinski provided to congressional investigators, Hunter claimed he talked to Ye on a “regular basis” because “we have a standing once a week call as I am also his personal counsel (we signed an attorney client engagement letter) in the U.S.” Hunter also claimed he was advising Ye “on a number of his personal issues (staff visas and some more sensitive things).”
The chairman of CEFC, Ye Jianming, has been linked to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence and CNN reported that Ye was a suspected “princeling” of People’s Liberation Army top brass.
In their summer 2017 correspondences, Hunter sent “best wishes from the entire Biden family” and Ye concluded his reply “please accept my best regards to you and your family.”
Between February 9, 2017, and December 20,2018, tens of millions—perhaps more than $150 million—flowed between a dizzying web of CEFC-linked companies and shell corporations. And some of that money went directly into Biden family coffers.
On August 8, 2017, CEFC wired $5 million to an entity called Hudson West III. That same day, Hudson West began wiring payments that would ultimately total $4,790,375.25 to Hunter Biden’s Owasco LLC. The last payment was on September 25, 2018, according to congressional investigators. Between August 14, 2017, and August 3, 2018, Owasco sent 20 wires totaling $1,398,999 to James and his wife Sara Biden’s consulting firm.
The following photo retrieved from Hunter Biden’s hard drive appears to show a flow chart describing the ownership breakdown of Hudson West.
Throughout the summer of 2017, as the CEFC arrangements were being hashed out, Hunter talked with Ye Jianming about the impending legal troubles of another CEFC principal, Patrick Ho (the “spy chief”).
In September 2017, Hunter agreed to represent Ho and executed an agreement to provide “Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer.” Hunter was ultimately paid $1 million through his Owasco LLC (the wire transfer memo line read “Dr Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation”) to represent Ho.
Patrick Ho was arrested on November 18, 2017 and he was convicted in December 2018 on international bribery and money laundering charges, according to the New York Times. Upon incarceration, Ho’s first phone call from jail was to James Biden. He was looking for Hunter and James Biden gave him Hunter’s contact information.
Notably, Hunter Biden had never been a serious attorney, so his receiving one million dollars to represent Ho is notable given that Hunter was apparently living in a house with classified documents at the time.
Patrick Ho, former Hong Kong home secretary and senior executive with CEFC Fund, poses during an interview in Hong Kong in July 2015. (AP Photo)
The same month that Hunter executed the representation agreement for the Patrick Ho matter, September 2017, CEFC-linked companies provided three separate credit cards for Hunter, James, and Sara Biden. These credit cards allowed the Bidens to go on extravagant shopping sprees and the racked up more than $100,000 in purchases.
Also in September 2017, Hunter Biden leased the plush office space at the House of Sweden for an entity called the Biden Foundation and for a CEFC branch. A September 2017 email shows Hunter requesting keys to the building for Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Jim Biden, and “Chairman Ye CEFC emissary.” It was here that he paid $49,910 per month. in rent.
And it was at this time that Hunter claimed 1209 Barley Mill Road as his residence. That home, owned by Joe and Jill Biden, is where Joe Biden kept the sensitive documents next to his Corvette in the garage (“so it’s not like [these classified documents] were just sitting in the street,” Biden said in his own defense last week).
By spring 2018, the business with CEFC was beginning to fall apart. Patrick Ho was tainted by his international bribery charges and Ye Jianming was under investigation in China for “suspected economic crimes,” and had essentially vanished after detention by CCP officials.
In a now famous January 2019 text message, Hunter complained to his daughter Naomi that Joe Biden (whom the family called “Pop”) had demanded half his (Hunter’s) salary for decades:
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.
Joe Biden benefitted from Hunter’s business dealings which helped to finance father’s monthly bills, paid for repairs to the Barley Mill road estate in Wilmington, and bankrolled the office space for Joe and Jill Biden’s foundation at the pricey House of Sweden complex.
Hunter Biden (right) watches as his father Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2021. (Saul Loeb/Pool Photo via AP)
My colleague Peter Schweizer’s runaway bestseller, Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, first revealed that the Biden family received some $31 million from the highest levels of Chinese intelligence at the same time Hunter was paying the vice president’s bills. Schweizer believes that there is a slam dunk case to indict Hunter Biden.
The latest developments involving apparent mishandling of classified information underscore the gravity of the ongoing Biden corruption scandals.
Seamus Bruner is the director of research at the Government Accountability Institute and the author of Compromised: How Money & Politics Drive FBI Corruption and Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russia Spies, and D.C. Lies. Follow him @seamusbruner.
‘Middle Class Joe’ Is Actually Multi-Millionaire Joe
Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images
HARIS ALIC
9 Jul 2019911
4:39
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who often pitches himself as “Middle Class Joe” on the campaign trail, is a multi-millionaire, according to his most recent tax returns.
On Tuesday, Biden’s presidential campaign released three years worth of tax filings showing the Democrat frontrunner and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, earned more than $15.6 million since leaving the White House. The majority of the couple’s income came from a book deal — estimated to be worth $8 million — and lucrative speaking engagements.
In 2017, Biden’s first year out of elective office since 1973, the couple earned more than $11 million. This was exponentially more than the $396,552 both reported making in 2016. The following year, the couple’s annual income decreased slightly to $4. 58 million.
Biden’s political standing appears to be the reason for the couple’s new found wealth. The returns show that Biden earned $9.49 million in 2017 through CelticCapri Corp., a shell company named after the couple’s Secret Service code names.
CelticCapri, which was incorporated in Delaware only days after Biden left office, serves as the main vehicle for the former vice president’s public engagements. In 2018, Biden was paid $2.73 million through the company for appearances and speeches all across the country. In total, over the two year period, Biden made 49 speeches with some generating honorariums upwards of $249,000.
Not to be outdone, Jill Biden also cashed in on her public persona. The former second lady delivered 18 speeches between 2017 and 2018, earning on average $36,000 per event. Giacoppa Corp., the former second lady’s shell company named after her family’s original last name, reported paying her more than $557,00 in 2017 and $506,000 in 2018 for such engagements.
Rounding out the couple’s income was Biden’s pension from the U.S. Senate and the vice presidency which generated $241,00 in 2017 and more than $190,000 in 2018. Biden also earned a six figure salary from the University of Pennsylvania. The former vice president leads the university’s Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., a position that paid more than $371,000 in 2017 and more than $405,000 in 2018.
The couple’s income for both 2017 and 2018 put them squarely within the top one one percent of economic earners, a threshold set at $480,930 by the IRS. In fact, the former vice president’s income was the largest of any of his fellow 2020 Democrats.
Biden’s ascension into the economic elite comes relatively late in life. For the majority of his political career, Biden was one of the poorest members of Congress. The couple’s income barely edged above $300,000 until Biden’s first year in the vice president’s office, when he became eligible to to receive social security and his governmental pension.
Despite waiting so long to break into the one percent, the Bidens appear to have comfortably transitioned into their new lifestyle. Last month, it was disclosed the couple now resides in a 11,750 square foot Georgian-style mansion overlooking the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia. Biden rents the house, which once belonged to the late-Secretary of State Alexander Haig, even though he owns two properties within driving distance in his home state of Delaware. One of those is a recently purchased $2.7 million vacation house on the Atlantic Ocean.
Some signs of the couple’s prior lifestyle, however, appear to have remained in tact. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, Biden’s charitable giving has only slightly increased. According to the most recent tax returns released, Biden gave 1.4 percent of his income to charity in 2016. The following year, when the couple reported making 11 million, they donated just around 9.2 percent to charity. The percentage fell significantly in 2018 to six percent, even though the couple earned more than $4.58 million.
Since signaling his intention to run for president, Biden has sought to regain some of the working-class appeal that was exhibited in his early career.
“I know I’m called Middle-Class Joe. It’s not meant to be a compliment. It means I’m not sophisticated. But I know what made this country what it is: ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” the former vice president said last year.
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
JOHN BINDER
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors, those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall Street.
CNBC reports:
CNBC reviewed a new list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall, Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff Zients.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and Wall Street executives and employees have donated more than $74 million to elect the former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In a post on Sunday, Biden wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000 that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
at @JxhnBinder
Treasury Withholds Biden Family Suspicious Bank Records, James Comer Threatens Subpoena
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images, NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images
WENDELL HUSEBØ
27 Jan 20230
4:16
The Treasury Department on Wednesday denied the House Oversight Committee’s request to disclose 150 suspicious reports flagged by U.S. banks concerning Biden family business transactions, causing the committee’s chairman to threaten a subpoena.
U.S. banks have flagged over 150 suspicious financial transactions from Hunter and James Biden, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), House Oversight Committee chair, told Breitbart News. The wire transfers included “large” amounts of money tripped for further review by American banks.
Wire transfers are widely used by money launderers. To mitigate the risks to the financial institutions, suspicious wire transfers over $10,000 are flagged for review. Wire transactions involving more than $10,000 are also to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.
Comer demanded the Treasury on January 11 to turn over the suspicious bank records. But the Treasury denied Comer’s request, citing “improper disclosure” of relevant information that could reduce the Biden administration’s ability to “conduct of law enforcement, intelligence, and national security activities.”
Treasury’s legislative affairs chief Jonathan Davidson asked Comer to provide more justification for seeking “highly sensitive” information on the Biden family business.
The Oversight committee responded Thursday and vowed to retrieve the bank reports by the “power of the gavel if needed.”
“[T]his coordinated effort by the Biden Administration to hide information about President Biden and his family’s shady business schemes is alarming and raises many questions,” he added.
The Biden family bank records are a key trove of information related to the House’s investigation into the Bidens for alleged violations, including wire fraud and money laundering.
The suspicious records will provide details about how the family business operates and desired transparency on Hunter’s anonymous art sales and foreign business transactions, along with knowledge of whether Joe Biden remains compromised by foreign governments through his family’s business.
CNN reported in January the family business remains operational, even as Joe Biden is president. On at least two separate occasions, Frank Biden, Joe Biden’s younger brother, publicly cited the president as a means by which he has influence, despite holding no government position or relation to the White House other than by having the same last name as the president and being his sibling.
The Biden family has been alleged to have been peddling influence many times over Joe Biden’s career.
According to Breitbart News’s senior contributor Peter Schweizer, Hunter earned great sums of money from Ukraine for which he “offered no real work,” a statement that infers Hunter was profiting from peddling White House influence. In one of the most blatant examples, Hunter was paid $83,000 per month in 2017 to be on the board of Burisma. Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma in 2014 with no prior experience in the energy sector or Ukraine.
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
Exclusive — Elise Stefanik: Whistleblowers Will Be Key in Helping Republicans Expose Government Corruption
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Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
HANNAH BLEAU
28 Jan 20231,095
4:46
House Republicans must make whistleblowers feel “comfortable in coming forward” and testifying on government corruption witnessed within federal agencies, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), member of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, told Breitbart News Saturday.
The work done on the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Stefanik said, will be what she described as “some of the most important work that House Republicans do in the majority” in terms of bringing “accountability and transparency to what the American people understand has been the weaponization of the federal government against everyday Americans.” She cited several examples, including the Department of Justice (DOJ) designating concerned parents as domestic terrorists or the FBI targeting President Joe Biden’s political adversaries.
Americans, Stefanik continued, see that there appears to be two sets of rules: “One set of rules if you are a well-connected Democrat who was part of the swamp” and another for law abiding Americans who happen to hold conservative views.
“So there’s a lot of digging that we need to do, let alone the egregious illegal acts,” she said, highlighting the FBI working with Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“So the first service we can do is shining sunlight and bringing transparency, and we have subpoena power or in the majority and we’re not going to hesitate to use it,” she explained.
Stefanik admitted they anticipate a lack of cooperation from the Biden White House and Department of Justice but said they will “use every tool at our disposal” to bring the truth to light.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) building headquarters is seen in Washington, Saturday, Aug. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
“Obviously, there is egregious, egregious crimes that have been committed if they’re so unwilling to turn over just basic documents, basic information to Congress. And, you know, hopefully what will come out of this is not only shining a transparent spotlight on these abuses of power on potential criminal acts, we need to reform these agencies so they’re not able to target Americans. Again, these agencies work for the American people, not the other way around,” the congresswoman explained, making it clear that there are good individuals who work at these agencies as well — some of whom may be willing to speak out, which could be key in exposing government corruption.
“There is a difference between the rank-and-file, hard-working, law-abiding FBI agents across this country, versus the politicized bureaucrats, the political appointees based in Washington, D.C.,” she said, citing a buried report that came out prior to the midterm elections from the Judiciary Committee, detailing “multiple whistleblowers from within the FBI and the Department of Justice who came forward” and provided what she described as a “deposition of the abuse that they see internally of the FBI from political leaders at the top and how they’re trying to use the Biden agenda.”
“So an example, there was an extraordinary amount of pressure to designate acts as domestic violent extremism as part of the left’s agenda, to boost that number in terms of the reporting. And these regional FBI officials across the country said that, basically to boost your score to boost your likelihood of promotion, career advancement, there’s an expectation that you continue down this road of priority to the Biden administration and the left,” she said, emphasizing the importance of these whistleblowers’ testimonies.
LISTEN:
Breitbart · Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) – January 28, 2023
“The left only likes a whistleblower when it’s whistleblower and impeachment. They want to silence whistleblowers when they’re coming forward to expose the lies of the left. So we’re going to have to make sure that these patriots feel comfortable in coming forward and we encourage them to do so,” she said, noting that whistleblowers are protected by law and Republicans will make sure that protection is enforced.
Stefanik said a “silencing effect” was a major theme that came out of the report released prior to the midterms, noting that there has “already has been retaliation, whether it’s stripping of security clearances,” stopping promotions, or taking individuals off high profile cases, she explained.
“That’s why this subcommittee is so important in terms of really providing transparency to the abuses that are happening within these agencies, not just against the American people, but the rank and file hardworking Americans who make up the bulk of … the personnel in these agencies,” she said, lamenting the damage that the likes of James Comey, Christopher Wray, and Rod Rosenstein have done in terms of politicizing and breaking these agencies.
“It’s impacted the morale and it’s impacted retention as well,” she added.
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