The Biden Family Scandals, a Basic Primer Tony Thomas
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2023/07/the-biden-family-scandals-a-basic-primer/
“When you talk to people who have spent time around Joe Biden, including Republicans, there is one word that keeps coming up…”extraordinarily decent person”… “the most decent, honourable politician I’ve ever known”…”a person with decency” — ABC icon Leigh Sales shilling for Joe Biden days before the 2020 election
President Joe’s son, Hunter, made it into the ABC’s news selection the other day, when he was let off from paying his debt to society for a trio of crimes normally viewed as prison-worthy felonies. According to the ABC team, nothing much to see here. Hunter pleaded guilty to a couple of tax misdemeanours – he’d under-paid $US580,000 tax for 2017 and $US620,000 tax for 2018, according to IRS whistle-blower Gary Shapley. The official court documents spoke merely of him evading about $US100,000 tax per year. Hunter’s total earnings for 2014-19 were $US8.3 million, derived mainly from shaking down corrupt Ukrainians, Romanians, Kazakhs and Chinese-based tycoons affiliated with the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army.
He got probation on tax, not even a fine, thanks to his dad’s Justice pals. He also admitted to lying when buying a handgun, signing that he wasn’t a drug addict. For that, he is to do a year’s upmarket rehab, called “a pre-trial diversion program”. When he completes rehab, the gun charge lapses.
I’d thought Joe Biden and his Democrats were fiercely for gun control but apparently not when it’s Joe’s son buying a Colt Cobra .38 Special. President Joe just one year ago signed into law the Safer Communities Act, with gun violation penalties upped from a maximum 10 years to 15 years goal. “It keeps guns out of the hands of people who are a danger to themselves and to others,” he explained. Around when Hunter bought the gun he was living in a stupor of crack cocaine and making home-made porn films of himself with prostitutes, all of it filed on his laptop. He also wrote off $US106,000 of payments to hookers and sex clubs as business expenses, a further tax crime Biden’s Justice Department has been happy to overlook.
In Joe’s relatively coherent presidential gun-law speech (compared those of the past month, when he has twice said Putin was getting beaten “in Iraq”), Joe called gun safety “a critical issue”.[1]
Lives will be saved … I’ve been at this work for a long, long time, and I know how hard it is, and I know what it takes to get it done. It was there — I was there 30 years ago, the last time this nation passed meaningful gun safety laws. And I’m here today for the most significant law to be passed since then, since — for the last 30 years … How many times we heard that? ‘Just do something. For God’s sake, just do something’.
Well, today, we did. Today, we say more than ‘enough’. I know there’s much more work to do, and I’m never going to give up. But this is a monumental day. God bless us with the strength to continue to work to get the work that’s left undone done … I’m now going to sign this bill into law. [The bill is signed.] God willing, it’s going to save a lot of lives.
So what happened to Hunter’s Colt .38?[2] Trigger warning: don’t let your children read this. Hunter’s brother, Beau, died of brain cancer in 2015 (not during his time in Iraq in 2008-9 (as judge advocate) as Joe Biden has claimed multiple times. Hunter within days (or even one day) after Beau’s death began regular sex with Beau’s widow, Hallie, and soon concurrently running an affair with Hallie’s married elder sister, Elizabeth. Plus he fathered a daughter on a stripper who has been told she is not allowed to give her child the Biden surname. On October 23, 2018, Hallie found Hunter’s handgun in the glove box of his unlocked car. Concerned that her kids could get hold of it, she threw it into a public trash can by a grocery store near a Delaware high school, which seemed to her a good idea at the time.
When Hallie told Hunter, he had an expletive-laden meltdown (“You have truly f***ed me over” etc). He ordered Hallie to get the handgun back from the bin but it was gone. Someone called the local police, and somehow US Secret Service operatives rushed to the scene, notwithstanding that ex-VP Joe Biden was no longer involved with Secret Service protection.
The agents went to the store where Hunter had bought the gun, demanding that the owner Ron Palmieri hand over the paperwork. Palmieri, of Starquest Shooters & Survival Supply, refused in light of his pro-gun sympathies and on the strength of his suspicion that the G-Men were on a cover-up exercise for the Bidens. The gun was handed in a few days later by a bin-fossicker. No charges or arrests followed, and Joe Biden all the while claimed ignorance.
Joe often remarks how proud he is of his son as a recovered addict.[3] Indeed, within days of the court giving Hunter probation, the princeling turned up at the White House dinner for India’s Narendra Modi, at which Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland was a co-invitee. This was banana-republic practice in plain sight. Was it all merely a coincidence that a cache of cocaine turned up soon after in the White House residential wing?.
The Biden family’s can of worms was best left unopened. Some escaped worms are now gesticulating suggestively that Joe might actually be involved in Hunter’s multi-million shakedowns, which Joe denies. Joe told Trump incorrectly during the 2020 debates that Hunter had made no money out of any Chinese dealings, and earlier claimed (improbably) that he had never had any conversation with Hunter about his son’s overseas deals: he knew nothing. Hunter’s abandoned laptop says otherwise, corroborated by Hunter’s business partners like US Navy vet Tony Bobulinski. The most alarming communications are not even from the laptop[4] but obtained under search warrant from Apple by the Internal Revenue Service from Hunter’s iCloud messaging
Try this one: a Mob-style WhatsApp message on July 30, 2017, from Hunter to Henry Zhao. Zhau was a top Chinese businessman and CCP general secretary at his firm. Hunter was trying to shake him down for $US10m ($A15m), after telling him that the “Bidens are the best I know at doing exactly” what the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party-linked firm wanted. His follow-up message was
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight.
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, 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.
I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.’(My emphases, though hardly needed).
Hunter was indeed at Joe Biden’s home that day, [5] and the two had posed together for pics with Joe’s Corvette (normally garaged alongside boxes of officially-secret papers illegally retained from Joe’s vice-presidency). Hunter’s lawyer, Chris Clark, argued Hunter was just too cracked out and drugged up to be taken seriously when he invoked his father’s name in a threatening text.
Even the Democrat-loving White House press pack took an interest in Hunter’s WhatsApp. They asked Joe at a press conference last month if he had indeed been sitting alongside Hunter. “No!” Biden shouted back. Other questions to Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre got the runaround – she referred media to a previous faux answer from the White House Counsel which was itself a runaround.
So, was Hunter freelancing with his shakedowns or were they a Hunter/Joe joint venture? You might think that the Deep State powers of the IRS, FBI, NSA, Justice Department et al could resolve this issue of whether Joe was sitting alongside Hunter. The IRS was investigating Hunter’s tax evasion, with added legal interest in where and to whom Hunter’s offshore loot was being distributed. Perhaps 10 per cent was even earmarked for Joe Biden as the “Big Guy”, according to Hunter’s laptop-from-hell. The investigators were, of course, well aware of another Hunter laptop text, this time to his daughter Naomi in January 2019:
I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. [Hunter was then aged 49]. It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.
But the Justice Department, led by Biden’s Attorney-General Merrick Garland, ordered the IRS to leave Joe Biden out of the investigations, slow-walked the probe and denied necessary powers, according to Gary Shapley, the IRS whistleblower who was investigating Hunter’s tax returns. Garland denied intervention, so one party or another is lying. Moreover, Shapley found that when his IRS unit in December 2020 planned a search raid for important Hunter documents in Hunter’s abandoned storage unit in Washington DC, higher authorities immediately notified Hunter’s defence team, sabotaging the planned raid.
Keep in mind that Hunter somehow managed to earn $US8.3 million during 2014-19. This was quite a feat for a crack-addicted talentless sleaze who fathered but disowned a daughter, Navy, with Joan Roberts, a former stripper while he was partnering Hallie, his deceased brother’s wife, plus Hallie’s elder sister. Navy’s mother legally stuck him for $US20,000 a month maintenance.[6]
Also keep in mind that the global Democrat-friendly media ran the Trump-Russia proven hoax for four years based on nothing but vapour-ware (in the process inspiring provincial hacks far and wide to regurgitate the lies, which is how we ended up with three Four Corners‘ episodes that saw the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson attain and surpass the gold standard for gullible reporting. Her magnum opus, Story of the Century, remains uncorrected. Yet here we have an officially authenticated email from the President’s son claiming Joe Biden was helping shake down a Chinese Communist for $US10 million, but it’s of negligible media interest. The ABC search engine, for example, shows zero zilch nada since 2020 about Hunter’s chicanery, when it ran a piece larded with ‘get-out clauses’ for Hunter like “unsubstantiated charges” and “no proof of impropriety”. The current US media narrative, led by The New York Times, is that some ordure happened, but the take-home message is that Joe Biden deeply loves his troubled son, and this new saga is causing Joe hurt feelings — we ourselves ought to feel Joe’s pain.[7]
To recap, Hunter has been up to his gullet in multi-million chicanery for a decade but his pop Joe says he never knew anything about it, while he was in and out of the White House circle. There is no smoking gun here because Joe’s two-tier Justice apparatus stopped an official search for it. But now let’s look at the probabilities, focusing just on Hunter’s Beijing shakedown. Here’s the timeline that passes through Hunter’s Mob-style message of 2017.
2013-17: Vice President Biden uses Air Force 2 to visit foreign leaders. Often on the plane are Hunter and family, and sometimes Hunter’s business cronies.
December 2013: Biden flies to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping. Hunter is aboard with his daughter, Finnegan. Joe, Hunter and Finnegan do things en famille there like tea in tea houses and afternoon icecreams. It later emerges that Hunter was also setting up there the China state-backed investment fund BHR, partnering with Shanghai banker Jonathan Li. The official story is that all this was just “a social visit”. However, ten days after the trip the Shanghai authorities licensed the fund, with Hunter on the fund’s board (not that Hunter had any corporate governance skills to offer). Hunter explained later that he had no equity in the fund nor was paid as a director.
However, it emerged that the 2013 deal involved him acquiring the delayed pay-off of free equity in the fund in 2017, when Joe would no longer be vice-president. That’s according to Ben Shapiro of Daily Wire (Episode 1757 of June 30). We are also to believe that Joe had no idea what business Hunter was cooking up during the Beijing trip.
Curiously, V-P Joe now and then invited Hunter’s foreign business associates to his official residence and White House office, according to Australian investigative journo Miranda Devine writing for the New York Post in 2021. Ostensibly, it was all social and no Hunter business matters were ever discussed. Even more remarkable, on at least one of Joe’s Air Force 2 trips, according to the infamous laptop, Hunter brought along a business associate.
May 13, 2017: Hunter’s business partner, James Gilliar, suggests 10 per cent of Chinese venture proceeds should be held by Hunter for the “Big Guy”. The Washington Post authenticated the email as genuine. Gilliar elsewhere and contemporaneously identifies the Big Guy as Joe Biden.
July 30, 2017: Hunter, claiming to be sitting with his father, sends the irate text to the investment fund co-owner demanding the Chinese honour their commitment to send him $US10 million. It is possible that the Chinese leaders had decided Joe Biden’s influence post Vice-Presidency was not worth that sum, hence Hunter’s anger.
August 4, 2017: Five days after Hunter’s WhatsApp, the Chinese entity CEFC wires $US100,000 to Hunter’s law firm, Owasco, which Hunter part-owned.
August 9, 2017: Another five days later, CEFC wires $US5 million to Hudson West 111, the company Hunter opened with Chinese associates for his CEFC business. The bank data was released last month by the House Ways and Means Committee.
2019: Hunter’s laptop reveals the message he sent his daughter Naomi that Joe for decades was demanding and getting half of Hunter’s earnings.
27 April 2020: A UK Daily Mail investigation finds that Joe Biden in his government transparency filings revealed $US11m less income than on his IRS tax returns. And $US5.2m of the anomaly was completely unexplained.
October 22, 2020: Biden claims in his final election debate with Trump that he has never taken a cent from overseas dealings.[8]
October-November 2020: The Deep State and Deep Data (FBI and the legacy media in cahoots with Twitter, Facebook, Google etc) suppress revelations in the New York Post about Hunter’s laptop contents, claiming the affair derives from Russian disinformation. This censorship helps get Biden elected in close-run states. One post-election poll showed 36 per cent of Democrat voters didn’t know about the laptop, and 13 per cent would not have voted for Biden if they had known.
January 27, 2022: The New York Post’s investigative reporters calculate that the Biden family has done five deals in China totaling $US31 million arranged by individuals with direct ties to Chinese intelligence — some reaching the very top of China’s spy agency.
March 2022: The New York Times and Washington Post confess that the laptop and its contents were authentic Hunter material. The Australian Broadcasting Commission’s initially branded the laptop as a Russian plant, and then refused to correct and apologise for its own trash-talking. This is a disgrace almost on par with Sarah Ferguson’s fake Story of the Century.
April 2022: Joe Biden claimed on the Iowa campaign circuit in 2019 that he had never spoken to Hunter about Hunter’s overseas dealings. Now, rather than persist in denying knowledge of them, he has switched to claiming all Hunter’s dealings were lawful
June 23, 2023: The White House, rattled by Hunter’s “sitting with my father” text, issues a statement for Biden saying he was never “in business” with Hunter. The expression is legally meaningless, given that, to take one example, any spouse earning a wage might be said to be “in business” or “not in business” with the other spouse.[9]
Conservative media analyst Ben Shapiro maintains that to avoid impeachment, Biden will never admit knowledge or facilitation of Hunter’s corrupt dealings, nor pressuring his Attorney General Merrick Garland to stifle investigations.
The above material is a huge truncation of all the nefarious doings of the Biden crime family. For example, it does not include talentless Hunter’s non-job on Ukraine’s Burisma energy board — for which Burisma paid him $US83,333 per month – and the many interfaces between Joe Biden and Burisma. But I can’t end without sketching the ultimate banana-republic scam of Hunter (abetted by Joe) in selling his hand-painted art. Here’s the details:
Hunter in mid-2021, after six months of Joe’s presidency and while under investigation by the FBI on money-laundering, starts a new line of fortune-hunting. He begins offering his paintings at his first-ever art exhibition for up to $US500,000 apiece. At art shows in Los Angeles and New York, he notches up sales to anonymous buyers of at least five small-ish drawings on paper at $US75,000 each and at least one large painting for $US225,000. The major canvases are called by art critics “generic post-zombie formalism illustration” and a “screen saver” mash-up. However, the LA Gallery owner explains, ‘I think this series is meditative and contemplative, and I think it’s reflective of how he [Hunter] is at the moment.’
Hunter himself, as a self-taught artist, described his works as a search for the ”universal truth”. He called one set depicting trees and flowers his “Haiku” series. He slapped on them his own haiku,
Atoms bloom in my chest
All the room is filled it is full
I can see all the colors
How many haiku paintings he sold and for how much, we don’t know because the edict came down from Dad at the White House that details were to be kept secret. The secrecy was supposedly to abolish any suspicion that Hunter is just influence-peddling to well-heeled shady characters wanting an inside track to the President. Joe’s then Press Secretary Jen Psaki further announced that
All interactions regarding the selling of art and the setting of prices will be handled by a professional gallerist, adhering to the highest industry standards, and any offer out of the normal course would be rejected out of hand.
If you’re amazed at this, you’re not alone. Walter Shaub, who was President Barack Obama’s ethics director, said, “They have outsourced government ethics to an art dealer. You don’t run an ethics program on the idea that you hope everybody behaves… It’s an industry that’s notorious for money laundering. There’s no standards in that industry.” He griped that Leigh Sales’ thoroughly-decent Joe should have either persuaded his son to drop the scam, or ensured that every detail of sales and buyers became public information, not hidden in a cone of silence.
Talking of cones of silence, the ABC is a master of them. Its last substantive mention of Hunter and his laptop was in October 2020,[10] with this heading:
“Joe Biden and Hunter Biden have been accused of corruption, but there’s good reason to be sceptical”
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