Tale as Old as Time – Biden and “The Brand”

It’s a tale as old as time. A government official takes action. That action benefits his family. And then, when questions are asked, there’s a cover-up. For President Joe Biden, it’s a story about money, influence, and protecting the Biden family brand.

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟏 – 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝

Between 2014 and April 25, 2019, the day Joe Biden announced his candidacy for President, Biden family members received approximately $15 million from foreign entities.  It was done through a complex series of transactions involving over 20 different companies. What did the Bidens do? What services did Hunter Biden and his associates provide? What was worth the receipt of $15 million?

Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner, gave us the answer. In his transcribed interview before Congress, he said they were selling “the Brand.” And “the Brand” was Joe Biden. As another one of Hunter Biden’s business partners, Jason Galanis, put it, the Bidens provided the “relationship capital”—the “political access” the brand provided “in the United States and around the world.” 

The deal with the Chinese energy company, CEFC, is one example of how the Bidens’ influence peddling operation worked. For months, Hunter Biden and his associates had been working to close a deal with CEFC. However, it wasn’t until “the Brand” himself stopped by a lunch at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C. in mid-February 2017 that the agreement was finalized. At the lunch were Hunter Biden, his business partners, and eight Chinese executives with CEFC. Joe Biden—the “big guy”—“drop[ped] by” and gave remarks to the group. Just a few weeks later, Hunter Biden and his partners received $3 million from CEFC.

Four months after the $3 million was wired to Hunter Biden, he sent a WhatsApp message to a CEFC official: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not be fulfilled. I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.” Later he reiterated, “I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.” Nine days later, another $5 million was wired to an entity jointly controlled by Hunter Biden. Later that same day, $400,000 was moved from the joint entity’s account to a personal account of Hunter Biden. A few weeks later, Joe Biden received a $40,000 check.

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟐 – 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐧, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

Joe Biden had forty thousand reasons to be aware of Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. But as Mr. Biden began to run for President in 2020, these foreign entanglements became a political liability. And so Joe Biden and his campaign attempted to mislead the American people.

On October 22, 2020, Joe Biden declared that Hunter Biden “has not made money in terms of this thing about…China.”  But the facts of the CEFC deal plainly contradict his statement. Joe Biden also stated that he “never discussed a single thing with [his] son about anything having to do with Ukraine.” Devon Archer’s testimony to Congress contradicts this statement. But the lie with the greatest impact was one Joe Biden made about his son’s laptop.

On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published the story on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, including evidence of Biden family influence peddling.  Testimony given to Congress by current and former FBI officials confirm that the FBI took possession of the laptop in December of 2019, and that they had authenticated it by the date the New York Post ran its story. Yet the FBI said nothing when the story was censored by Big Tech. Even as Twitter locked the New York Post out of its account, the FBI remained silent. The silence continued when 51 former Intelligence Community officials published a statement that the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”  A subsequent investigation later showed, the catalyst for this letter was the Biden campaign itself.

Three days after the Post’s story ran, Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign official and now President Biden’s Secretary of State, emailed former Acting Director of National Intelligence Michael Morell about the story. Morell, who longed to be the CIA Director in a Biden Administration, told Congress it was Blinken’s email that prompted him to organize the letter and gather the signatures. On October 19, 2020, the letter went public. Three days later, Joe Biden cited it in the final presidential debate, claiming—falsely, we now know—that “50 former national intelligence folks” said the laptop story was “a Russian plan.” Just hours after the debate, the Biden campaign chair, Steve Richetti called Morell to thank him for the statement. The move worked exactly as planned. The only problem—it was a lie. The FBI knew it was a lie! Joe Biden knew it was a lie. And his campaign knew it was a lie.

Polling, not to mention common sense, strongly suggest that if Americans had been given the truth about the laptop and the Biden family influence peddling operation, the outcome of the 2020 presidential election would have been different.

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟑 – 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐎𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫-𝐮𝐩, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐥

As with most lies, the story from the Bidens and the White House has changed over time. On September 21, 2019, Joe Biden unequivocally said he had “never spoken” to his son about his business dealings. Then, on July 24, 2023, the White House walked it back, stating that President Biden had never been “in business with his son.” On December 13, 2023, Hunter Biden hedged even further, saying his father was “not financially involved” in his business. “Never spoken” became “never in business with,” which then became “not financially involved.” The President and the White House aren’t the only ones who have changed their statements.

Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who ran the Justice Department’s Hunter Biden investigation and is now the Special Counsel conducting the investigation, also couldn’t keep his story straight. For months, many in Congress had been urging Attorney General Garland to appoint a special counsel due to the obvious conflicts of interest in investigating the President’s son. In a letter to the Judiciary Committee on June 7, 2023, however, Weiss told us: “I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges” against Hunter Biden. In other words, Weiss, vowed, he’s got all the authority he needs, and no special counsel designation is needed.

But then, on June 30, 2023, we received a second letter from Weiss. In it he now stated, “I stand by what I wrote and wish to expand on what this means…[M]y charging authority is geographically limited to my home district.”

Wow. In 23 days, David Weiss went from pounding his chest about his “ultimate authority” to, well, actually my authority is “limited.” Why? What happened between June 7 and June 30?

Here’s what happened: the testimony of two IRS whistleblowers, Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler, was published on June 22. Shapley and Ziegler were the agents who had worked on the Hunter Biden investigation. In the whistleblowers’ testimony, they told Congress that the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office slow-walked the entire investigation and prohibited standard investigative actions. Shapley and Ziegler were not allowed to interview certain witnesses. In the interviews they were allowed to conduct, they were prohibited from referencing the term “dad” or “the big guy.” The prosecutors notified Hunter Biden’s attorney about a pending search warrant, and they allowed the statute of limitations to lapse for the most serious criminal conduct.

All of this culminated in a proposed sweetheart plea deal with just two misdemeanor tax charges and a diversion agreement for a gun charge in Delaware. The sweetheart deal was so sweet that a federal judge refused to accept it. During the court proceedings, the judge asked the prosecutors, “[D]o you have any precedent for agreeing not to prosecute crimes that have nothing to do with the case or the charges being diverted?” Their response: “I’m not aware of any[.]” The judge then asked, “[H]ave you ever seen a Diversion Agreement where the agreement not to prosecute is so broad that it encompasses crimes in a different case?” “No” was the response from Weiss’s prosecutors. This type of plea agreement had never been done before—it was unprecedented and the judge was having none of it.

The sweetheart plea deal blew up, but the Biden-Garland Justice Department was not going to be deterred in its cover-up effort. It turned to plan B.

After months of insisting that Weiss had full authority and that no special counsel was needed, the Justice Department named a special counsel. And the man they chose for that important role was none other than David Weiss. The same David Weiss who couldn’t get his story straight. The same David Weiss who put together the sweetheart plea deal. The same David Weiss whose deal was laughed out of court.

The end result: Weiss can take his sweet time in completing the investigation. And, more importantly, Garland, Weiss, and the Biden-Garland Justice Department now maintain that they cannot answer Congress’s questions because there is an “ongoing investigation.” How convenient.

𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲 – 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐦𝐚

If there’s one case that best shows the Biden family influence operation, it’s Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. There are four key facts to this case study—four facts that will never change.

Fact #1: Hunter Biden gets put on the Board of Burisma and gets paid $1 million a year.

Fact #2: Hunter Biden is not qualified to be on the Board. He said so himself. In an ABC News interview in 2019, he was asked, “If your last name wasn’t Biden, do you think you would’ve been asked to be on the board of Burisma?” Mr. Biden responded, “I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect…I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.” 

Fact #3: Executives at Burisma asked Hunter Biden to alleviate the pressure coming from the Ukrainian government. Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner, gave Congress details. On December 4, 2015, Burisma executives Mykola Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharsky asked Hunter Biden if he could help them with the pressure they faced from the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin. What did Mr. Biden do after receiving the request from the Burisma executives? Mr. Archer replied, “I did not hear this phone call but he—he called his dad.”

Fact #4 – Three days later, on December 7, 2015, Vice President Joe Biden went to Kyiv and conditioned the release of the $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine on the firing of Shokin, the same prosecutor who was applying the pressure to the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Don’t take our word for it—Joe Biden said it himself. In a now infamous clip, he boasted about telling the Ukrainian President: “You are not getting the billion dollars. I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you are not getting the money.” And what do you know, Shokin got fired.

There was just one problem. Withholding the loan guarantee was contrary to the overwhelming consensus of the Obama-Biden State Department.

Six months before Vice President Biden’s trip to Ukraine, State Department Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland had written Prosecutor General Shokin, “We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government.” On October 1, 2015, two months before the Vice President’s trip, the Interagency Policy Committee in the Obama-Biden Administration announced, “Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third [loan] guarantee.”  Even the preparation documents for Vice President Biden’s trip to Ukraine, dated November 22, 2015 stated, “You will sign our third billion-dollar loan guarantee…” 

So what happened with the loan guarantee? As the Washington Post explained, Vice President Biden “called an audible.”  Instead of just pushing for the firing of Prosecutor General Shokin—the same Prosecutor who a few months earlier the State Department and IPC said was doing a good job—Joe Biden decided on the plane ride to Ukraine that he would condition the release of American tax dollars on the firing of Shokin.

Why the sudden change? What caused the audible? Could it have been the phone call Hunter Biden made to D.C. two days earlier with Mr. Zlochevsky and Mr. Pozharsky by his side? Might the sudden change of U.S. policy have something to do with the fact that Hunter Biden was being paid $1 million a year, by the very company under investigation by the prosecutor who Vice President Biden bragged about getting fired?

It’s also worth noting the prosecutor general before Shokin had permitted the release of $23 million in seized assets back to Burisma executive Zlochevsky. The prosecutor general who followed Shokin, Yuriy Lutsenko—who had already been removed from office before for corruption—closed the case against Zlochevsky. The one prosecutor it seems who was actually investigating Zlochevsky, is the one who Vice President Joe Biden pushed to get fired.

Also in the background, leading up to Vice President Biden’s trip to Ukraine, Hunter Biden and his associates connected Burisma with Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat public relations firm in Washington. In a November 2015 communication to Burisma Executive Vadym Pozharsky, Hunter Biden wrote, “Devon and I do feel comfortable with [Blue Star Strategies] and the ability of [executives] Sally [Painter] & Karen [Tramontano] to deliver.” What were they going to deliver? Three days earlier, Pozharsky had told Hunter Biden and his business partners that Blue Star and Burisma needed to develop a “concrete course of actions” that included meetings with “US officials in Ukraine…and in [the] US…expressing their…support of [Zlochevsky]/Burisma to the highest level decision makers” with the “ultimate purpose to close down for any cases/pursuits against [Zlochevsky] in Ukraine.”  Were they successful? In October 2016, Painter forwarded an article to Hunter Biden’s business partners Eric Schwerin and Devon Archer. The article’s title was “The Interior Ministry confirmed that Zlochevskiy is no longer wanted.” Ms. Painter wrote simply: “We won and in less than a year.”

Simply put, the Bidens were successful in firing the Prosecutor General investigating Zlochevsky and in getting the next Prosecutor General to take him off the wanted list. The Burisma case study shows the interconnected web of Joe Biden’s power, his family’s foreign business dealings, and foreign companies paying for access and influence.

It’s really a story as old as time. The question is—will Americans let the Bidens get away with it?

Reposted with Permission from The House Judiciary Committee – By Chairman Jim Jordan

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.