IMAGE: Then President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden.
Indeed, there’s much more at stake with the 2020 election than most people care to admit.
Will just over a month to go before polling day, the one scandal which continues to dog Democratic nominee Joe Biden is issue of he son Hunter Biden’s previously shielded affairs in Ukraine which saw a string of clandestine diplomatic and financial maneuvers that led up to and followed the US State Department-led ‘Maidan’ coup in 2014 which ousted the country’s democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych. As it turns out, US officials at the time thought Hunter Biden should have stepped down from his position at Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings – a position gifted to the younger Biden by local oligarchs presumably to curry favor with then Vice President Joe Biden. But political pressure appears to have been placed on officials by the Obama White House which prevented any intervention to resolve that tenuous situation.
It took 12 months, but now the story has now been blown wide open.
Wall Street Journal reports…
WASHINGTON—Two Obama administration officials raised concerns to the White House in 2015 about Hunter Biden serving on the board of a Ukrainian natural-gas company while his father, then Vice President Joe Biden, led U.S. policy efforts toward the country, a Senate investigation by Republicans concluded.
The GOP-led probe shows that officials working on U.S.-Ukraine relations saw Hunter Biden’s position as creating the perception of a conflict of interest with his father’s work, a concern that had previously been made public during last year’s impeachment proceedings. The findings, outlined in an 87-page report, don’t support a central accusation President Trump and other Republicans have made about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s duties in Ukraine: that he sought the removal of the country’s top prosecutor to protect the gas company, Burisma Holdings, from investigation.
“Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board cast a shadow over the work of those advancing anticorruption reforms in Ukraine,” the report says, calling the arrangement “problematic.”
Both Bidens have denied wrongdoing.
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said before the report’s release that Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee who led the probe, was using committee resources to “subsidize a foreign attack against the sovereignty of our elections with taxpayer dollars—an attack founded on a long-disproven, hard-core right-wing conspiracy theory.”
SEE ALSO: Joe Biden Caught Lying About Son Hunter’s Corruption in Ukraine, China
(…) The Republican report contained few revelations about the Bidens’ work in Ukraine that haven’t previously emerged publicly. Republicans identified as a central finding the efforts of a State Department official, George Kent, to raise concerns in 2015 with unidentified officials at the White House working for Mr. Biden about his son’s position at Burisma. Mr. Kent served as the acting deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.
Mr. Kent previously told congressional investigators in testimony during last year’s impeachment inquiry of his concern about Hunter Biden’s board position and the potential optics of a conflict of interest, which he said at the time he had raised with the Obama White House.
“The presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine,” Mr. Kent wrote in a September 2016 email to other senior State Department officials.
In testimony to the Senate committees for their investigation, the report says Mr. Kent explained he was concerned Hunter Biden’s position could send the wrong message at a time when U.S. officials were pressing Ukraine to root out corruption. He said he believed that Hunter Biden should have stepped down from his position at Burisma. Hunter Biden took the board position with Burisma in May 2014 and stepped down in April 2019 and was paid roughly $50,000 a month for his work…
Continue this report at the Wall Street Journal
21st Century Wire says…
It’s important to note that back in 2019, President Donald Trump asked the following rhetorical question:
“Are we going to be sending massive amounts of money to a country and they’re corrupt and they steal the money and it goes into everybody’s bank account?”
This is the comment which triggered the subsequent storm, as the President’s many political opponent accused him of somehow pressuring the newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in order to get Kiev authorities to investigate the business activities and corruption of Hunter Biden – a supposed favor in exchange for prompt military and financial aid from Washington. Ukrainian journalist Sergey Belous reported last year:
“This wouldn’t normally have garnered so much attention, if not for the fact that Hunter Biden is the son of the ex-US Vice President and 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden. Hence, Trump is being accused of soliciting a ‘Quid Pro Quo’ from a foreign government in order undermine his supposed political rival in the upcoming 2020 election. But it’s only part of the story.”
That was the basis for the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings which dragged on from September 2019 to February 2020, but failed in the end to make the shaky case stick.
By contrast, the GOP’s latest investigation confirms what Belous and other journalists knew long before Pelosi and Schiff’s the impeachment debacle took shape – that the Bidens were neck-deep in corruption during Obama’s reign in office. Moreover, partisan conflicts of interests extended far beyond even the Bidens – as Ukrainian investigators have already uncovered a massive junk bond fraud scheme perpetrated between shady US holding firms and their local agents of influence in the Ukraine – all presided over by Obama’s VP.
The question now remains: will anyone actually be held to account, or will this scandal languish alongside so many others in the basement of the US Department of Justice?
Solving this issue could go a long way to draining at least part of the swamp.
READ MORE 2020 ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Election 2020 Files
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