Then-Vice President Joe Biden delivers a speech after meeting with Ukraine's acting Prime Minister during his visit to Kyiv on April 22, 2014. (Photo by SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) - In an exclusive report on Thursday, The Daily Mail noted that then-Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Ukraine on April 21, 2014 to push for increased natural gas production, among other things.
The timing of Biden's 2014 trip also came to the attention of Senate investigators, who remarked that Biden's 2014 trip to Ukraine came five days after Vice President Biden met with his son's business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House.
The day after Biden arrived in Ukraine, on April 22, Archer joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma -- a natural gas producer, the Senate report said.
And three weeks later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board. (The Daily Mail says Hunter joined Burisma three days before Biden arrived in Ukraine, but the Burisma press release announcing Hunter's employment is dated May 12, 2014.)
According to The Daily Mail report, a senior official -- identified by the newspaper as Jake Sullivan -- "briefed reporters on the plane that the VP was pushing "medium- and long-term strategies to boost conventional gas production, and also to begin to take advantage of the unconventional gas reserves that are in Ukraine."
Sure enough, here is a link to that senior official's press briefing, which happened during Biden's April 21 flight to Kyiv:
At the time, Sullivan was serving as Vice President Biden's national security advisor. (He currently serves as President Biden's national security advisor.)
"We’re about an hour and a half out of Kyiv, and I just wanted to lay out for you what the Vice President will be doing while he’s here, and then speak to some of the themes from the trip and then answer some of your questions," the senior administration official (Sullivan) said, according to the White House transcript of his remarks.
Sullivan mentioned that Biden would be meeting with the U.S. embassy team; and also with various Ukraine officials and civil society representatives to discuss "the full range of issues confronting Ukraine."
"He will speak about both the short- and long-term energy situation in Ukraine," the official said. "As he arrives, there will also be a team on the ground from the United States, a team of experts working on the reverse flow issue." (Reverse gas flows from European countries to Ukraine would allow Ukraine to avoid punitive Russian price hikes.)
"That team will be in Kyiv and then will travel also to Slovakia, Poland and Hungary to help address the issue of reversing the flow of natural gas to provide Ukraine with some measure of short-term supply of natural gas as they look to replenish their stores,” Sullivan said.
"But also he’ll discuss with them medium- and long-term strategies to boost conventional gas production, and also to begin to take advantage of the unconventional gas reserves that are in Ukraine."
The official (Sullivan) also told reporters that Biden would be discussing "a package of economic and energy and governance assistance."
"What kind of energy assistance can the U.S. provide broadly?" a reporter asked.
The official again mentioned the reverse flow issue, intended to shield Ukraine from Russian price hikes.
"The second is technical assistance to help them be able to boost production in their conventional gas fields, where presently they aren’t getting the maximum of what they could be.
"Third, technical assistance relating to a regulatory framework, and also the technology that would be required to extract unconventional gas resources; and Ukraine has meaningful reserves of unconventional gas according to the latest estimates.
"And then, finally, various forms of technical assistance relating to energy efficiency, where experts have shown that the Ukraine could substantially lessen its energy dependence and deny any country the capacity to use energy as a political weapon through a combination of all those things, but in no small part through greater energy efficiency and use of its existing energy."
Another reporter asked Sullivan, "Could you just say how this trip came about? Obviously the Vice President has a long history of diplomatic relations with Ukraine. Was this something that was his initiative? Did the President ask him to go because of those relationships? Or how did that come?"
Sullivan responded:
"The reason I’m pausing here is, it’s one of those -- it’s one of those conversations where it’s a little hard to say whether the President asked him or he said, I want to go. It grew out of a conversation that the two of them had, and both of them agreed that it was important for the U.S. to send a high-level signal of support for all of the lines of effort that this government is undertaking.
"Obviously, the most pressing and acute right now is the security situation. But these other lines of effort are also existential for Ukraine. Its politics, its economics and its energy also matter acutely, and so they felt it was important to have somebody with deep ties to and a deep passion for the U.S.-Ukraine relationship to come and send that message both privately and publicly.
"And there’s no better messenger for that than the Vice President. So that's what brings us here..."
On Thursday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a member of the Homeland Security Committee, told "Mornings With Maria" that he's not at all surprised to be reminded by "The Daily Mail" of what transpired in 2014 -- Hunter Biden getting a job at Burisma right after his father arrived in Ukraine to urge increased natural gas production.
"It really shouldn't surprise anybody," Johnson said.
"It certainly shouldn't surprise members of the mainstream media who have been covering up for Joe Biden for literally decades. This is all part and parcel what the Biden family does. They trade off the family name; there's all kinds of conflict of interest.
"President Biden is a now compromised president. We may not know all of the financial entanglements he has, but the Chinese intelligence does, Russian intelligence, probably Iranian intelligence, and they're probably wielding that over him. It's a very sad state of affairs."
Biden forces ouster of Ukraine prosecutor investigating Burisma
Years later, in January 2018, Joe Biden recalled another one of his trips to Ukraine, this one in 2016, amid concerns about government corruption in that country:
"I'll give you one concrete example," Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018:
"And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
So...they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to -- or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said -- I said, call him.
"I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."
According to the Senate report:
"In 2016, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, had an active and ongoing investigation into Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. At the time, (Devon) Archer and Hunter Biden continued to serve on Burisma’s board of directors.
“According to news reports, then-Vice President Biden 'threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine’s leaders did not dismiss [Shokin].' After that threat, Ukraine’s Parliament fired Shokin."
Benedict Arnold, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas – liars and traitors all
We can only wonder at the question: do the last two generations know who Benedict Arnold was? Most likely not; they’ve not been taught legitimate American history for decades. To the young of today, Arnold might be a hero for betraying his country.
Polls show our young people do not respect or even like this country. Arnold, who had been a good soldier, was angry at being passed over for promotion and so began colluding with the British. He was an 18th century. Mark Felt. His name is (or was) interchangeable with the word “traitor.”
Bill Clinton was generally known as a brazen liar about the Lewinsky affair and all that it entailed; a tawdry, unseemly affair that he lied about incessantly until he couldn’t. He paid Paula Jones a court-ordered $800k but was never prosecuted for his loathsome behavior and gross dishonesty.
His wife is equally and personally devious and corrupt; she had the fake “dossier” concocted she was certain would take Trump out of the running for president in 2016. Hillary used her position as Secretary of State of State to rake in millions of dollars to her phony Clinton Foundation, much of that money from other nations that sought to benefit from her largesse when President.
That couple’s corruption was and is a blight on America’s history. They made LBJ seem like an amateur. The Clintons were criminals and they delighted in their criminality; they knew they were untouchable. They were a greedy couple, and their illicit machinations made them fabulously rich.
The Obamas learned their lessons well and also became fabulously rich by perfidious means. It’s likely that Biden has based his corruption on the Clinton model.
Joe Biden has been a pathological liar for all his years in Congress, as a representative and then as a senator. He can’t open his mouth without lies spewing forth; there are far too many to list. From his early support of segregation to his later denial; his plagiarism, his lies about his academic record, etc., etc.
In truth, Biden has always been a racist, a rather vicious one at that. See his attempt to humiliate Clarence Thomas at his SCOTUS confirmation. The man is one of the most greedy, corrupt politicians ever to steal the presidency, which he did, and to end up in the Oval Office.
He is entirely without “knowledge” now; he is obviously in the throes of dementia. How else to explain his shocking inappropriate jollity when he was sent to a podium to speak about the Nashville murders of six people, three of them aged nine?
Biden has always been a liar; he became a traitor when he began using his position, his son, and brother to sell influence to China, Russia and Ukraine for millions of dollars. Given the damage he’s done to the country in two years, it is safe to assume he is a controlled asset of China. They own him, which is why he has allowed the destruction of the dollar as the global currency.
Every American surely knows by now that the Democrat party is pro-criminal, anti-dissent. In blue states across the nation, criminals are routinely allowed onto the streets without bail to commit more crime. Innocent people are being attacked with impunity on a daily basis in DC, in NY, Chicago, SF, and LA, etc.
If the perpetrators are caught, they are often released onto an unsuspecting public by Soros-funded DAs to repeat and escalate their criminal behavior. Our Marxist left relies on chaos, on the calculated destruction of the family, on the thorough indoctrination of our children.
How do they go about this decades-old plan? They advocate for the normalization of homosexuality, transgenderism and the genital mutilation that comes with that particular form of mental illness. The pro-trans activists encourage doctors to remove the breasts of girls as young as thirteen, even hysterectomies.
Who are the doctors that perform these procedures? They are purely evil, traitors to the Hippocratic Oath they may have sworn to uphold. The lies that undergird the ideology of transgenderism are not only appalling but provable. There are only two sexes. It is tragic that there is a Supreme Court justice that does not know what every three-year-old knows.
The appearance of Alejandro Mayorkas before the Senate on Tuesday was the height of prevarication. The man did not answer a single question. He stonewalled, dissembled and flat-out lied. He claimed not to know how many migrants have died on their journey to our southern border. He did not know how many children have been trafficked.
When Senator Cruz showed him pictures of the wrist bands that all migrants wear as ordered by the cartels, Mayorkas pretended not to know what they were. The bands indicate how much money each migrant owes the cartels for getting them across the border. There is no way Mayorkas does not know what they are, what they mean; the children especially will be slaves to the cartels. This man is truly abhorrent, another enemy of America in a position of undeserved power.
That the Republicans in congress have not impeached him is a testament to their culpability, their slavish cowardice. But they’ve also done nothing about the unconstitutional abuse of the J6 prisoners, so what more can we expect? The uniparty is the uniparty. The few who do remember and revere the Constitution are too few and their meek colleagues offer no support. They too, like the doctors who mutilate kids confused about their gender, have forgotten their oath. They too are liars and traitors.
In short, we are being governed by a host of Benedict Arnolds, liars and traitors who have done far less for the nation than even Benedict Arnold did. The Biden cabinet is an assemblage of incompetents, people chosen for their skin color or sexual orientation, not any particular skill or expertise. Consider Defense Department boneheads, Austin and Milley. Apparently there are drag queen performances for children on our military bases around the world! They each claimed not to know this! How is that possible?
Unless all Republicans step up to the plate to save the nation, we are well and truly done; over.
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rutling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. Marcus Tullius Cicero
Graphic credit: public domain
Peter Schweizer: Americans Have Gone to Jail for Doing Far Less Than What Hunter Biden Has Done
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/08/protecting-biden-crime-family-gamer.html
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation and the Obama book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/08/protecting-biden-crime-family-gamer.html
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation and the Obama book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption.
James Comer: Trump Indictment Spurs GOP County Attorneys to ‘Go After the Bidens’
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The Trump indictment has encouraged local attorneys to find ways to use their prosecutorial power to investigate the Biden family business for wrongdoing, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said Wednesday.
“I had two calls yesterday, one from a county attorney in Kentucky and one from a county attorney in Tennessee,” Comer told Fox News. “They were Republican, obviously, both states are heavily Republican. They want to know if there are ways they can go after the Bidens now.”
Comer explained that far-left Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s charges against former President Donald Trump, which many legal experts consider weak, have “opened a can of worms” and set a precedent on how political opponents are treated.
“They’ve set precedents now that we can’t go back on,” Comer said.
He also noted Republicans can expect more Democrat officials, incentivized by political gain, to target Republicans in the future.
“And now you’re going to start having ambitious political people like Alvin Bragg try to make a name for themselves and go after big pie-in-the-sky federal cases. And it’s just not a good path that we need to go forward on in our judiciary,” he said.
WATCH: Trump: “They Can’t Beat Us at The Ballot Box,” So Now They Try “The Law”
RSBN / RumbleThe Kentucky congressman is investigating Joe Biden and the Biden family for nine violations, including money laundering and wire fraud. The probe has involved subpoenaing bank records and requesting cooperation from family business associates. The probe has begun to deliver success.
Comer’s comments come after Trump was arraigned on Tuesday. Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree Tuesday afternoon during his historic arraignment, which brought huge TV ratings.
As Breitbart News reported, television ratings of the Trump indictment soared to 10.2 during the middle of Tuesday’s workday, surpassing many of the most popular shows on television, including the average ratings of 2022 evening news (6.47), the 2023 Golden Globes (1.1), the 2023 Oscars (4.0), and Trump’s own Celebrity Apprentice’s best rating of 10.1 in its 2004/2005 season.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.