Profiles in Corruption

By soupstock @Adobe Stock

“Sharpe as A Tack”
At Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton outlines how difficult Joe Biden’s cognitive decline was to hide. Despite powerful Democrats insisting that nothing was wrong with Joe, America could see Biden uttering confused answers to questions, mixing up his location, stumbling and falling, shaking hands with the air, and so forth.

The refusal to take a simple cognitive test was a persistent tell. Yes, the left-wing media should be ashamed of their reporting, but they were not really able to fool anyone who was paying attention.

This leads Francis Menton to the following corruption story, which Mr. Menton calls the most unreported story of the Biden presidency. Unless you have some knowledge of the facts and the law, you won’t fully understand whether there is anything to an allegation of bribery.

The mainstream media simply refused to provide the chronology of facts or a summary of the law to assist readers in understanding the circumstances.

Mr. Menton lists examples in his Manhattan Contrarian.

• When Hunter Biden’s laptop computer came to light in October 2020, containing extensive evidence of corrupt activities by the Bidens, nearly all left-wing sources imposed a complete news blackout on that development. The New York Post, which broke the story, was denounced for “misinformation,” and was banned from Twitter. On October 19, 2020, fifty-one “former intelligence officials” presented a letter claiming that the laptop bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, and that was reported as big news. Meanwhile The New York Times and Washington Post couldn’t be bothered to attempt to authenticate the laptop. Those two sources finally admitted that the laptop was authentic in March 2022.

• The media used one diversionary line after another to attempt to mislead the public about the bribery. As one example, there were endless stories about the lack of evidence of money going directly to Joe Biden, rather than son Hunter or brother Jim. For other politicians, federal prosecutors treat money going to family members of the politician as the equivalent of money going to the politician himself for purposes of the bribery statute. As a prominent example, former New York State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos spent four years in jail (much of it during the Biden presidency) for alleged bribes, all of which went to his son rather than to him.

• Another diversionary line was that Hunter Biden only sold the “illusion of access” to his father. Here is a July 2023 piece from PBS parroting that line. Even if that was true in some cases, it did not change the fact that, for example, Joe Biden got a prosecutor fired in Ukraine (and later bragged about accomplishing that), at a time when Hunter was getting paid a million dollars a year by a corrupt Ukrainian gas company, and the top priority of that company was to get the prosecutor fired.

Francis Menton gives special consideration to Miranda Devine at the New York Post for staying on top of the story of Biden’s corruption and “for pushing it forward despite all efforts to suppress it.”

For more information, Mr. Menton recommends you read his 11-part series. Below are key paragraphs written on 19 September 2023.

Of the various instances of corruption involving Joe Biden, the facts relating to Hunter Biden’s service on the Burisma board of directors most closely track the specific elements of the bribery statute. As to seeking, receiving or accepting anything of value, Hunter was paid at least $3 million over several years for board service that involved minimal work and no visible contribution to the enterprise other than access to his father. The board service began in 2014, when Joe was Vice President, and immediately after, Joe was named “point man” for U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine. After a corruption investigation into Burisma in Ukraine began in 2015, Burisma’s number one corporate objective became ending that investigation.

On November 2, 2015, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharsky stated to Hunter Biden in an email that Burisma’s “ultimate purpose” was to “close down” “any cases/pursuits against Nikolay [i.e., Burisma chairman Mykola Zlochevsky] in Ukraine.” Then, according to the Congressional testimony of Hunter Biden’s partner and Burisma co-board member Devon Archer, after a Burisma board meeting in Dubai on December 4, 2015, Zlochevsky and Pozharsky stepped out with Hunter to “call Washington.” A few days later, Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Kyiv and, as he himself has admitted on a widely-viewed videotape, threatened to withhold a billion dollars of U.S. aid to the country unless the prosecutor investigating Burisma was fired. And the prosecutor was fired.

A Lay Down
In other words, continues Mr. Menton, the prima facie case of all the elements of bribery is right there. It is what they call a laydown.

Meanwhile, as Mr. Menton points out, Joe Biden leaves office having never held any job other than modest-paying political positions, and yet somehow has two mansions, a collector car, and other perks of substantial wealth. Nobody has ever identified where all that money came from.