While Joe Biden was Barrack Obama’s Vice President, he used his office to financially benefit his son Hunter through corrupt dealings in the Ukraine, the New York Post alleged yesterday.
Rumours of corruption have plagued the Biden family during the 2020 presidential election race, and new evidence obtained by the New York Post seems to confirm those rumours.
The Post was handed a trove of data from a laptop — almost certainly owned by Biden’s son Hunter — that had been left at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware, and was subsequently surrendered to the FBI by the store’s owner.
During his father’s Vice Presidency, Hunter Biden secured a $50,000-a-month salary working for the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma, despite having no qualifications for the role. A high-profile Burisma board member later admitted that Hunter was given the job because of his father’s political influence.
In the emails obtained this week, a Burisma advisor thanked Hunter Biden for introducing him to his father, then-VP Joe Biden. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads. In another email, the same advisor asked Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence”.
Using this influence is exactly what appears to have happened.
As a top Ukrainian prosecutor was investigating Burisma for corruption, Joe Biden threatened to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee unless the prosecutor was fired. Biden then followed through on his threat. The former VP has even publicly admitted as much.
Despite this, Joe Biden has denied any wrongdoing. “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden told a reporter. The former VP also became angry at a town hall event when a voter probed about Hunter’s shady Ukraine dealings. “You’re a damn liar, man,” Biden snapped.
On the heels of this week’s revelations, Biden’s campaign has denied that the meeting organised by Hunter took place — though this cannot possibly be true if the new FBI emails are to be believed. A probe launched by the U.S. Senate will now investigate the matter.
But the corruption appears to run even deeper in Washington, D.C.
Late last year, House Democrats moved to impeach Donald Trump. Though the impeachment ultimately failed in the Senate, the Democrat case against Trump centred on “abuse of power” — namely, that Trump had used his office as President to pressure Ukraine’s Prime Minister to investigate Joe Biden and Burisma. The Democrats pitched this as “election interference”, given Biden’s likelihood to challenge Trump in the 2020 election race.
Trump’s impeachment in the House was the first in U.S. history to fall along fully partisan lines: the Democrats couldn’t convince anyone outside their party that Trump was in the wrong. Three Democrats even voted in favour of Trump.
Given all that has come out about the Biden family’s dealings in the Ukraine, President Donald Trump appears to have been fully justified in demanding an investigation into the matter. In other words, when Trump continually decried the impeachment as a “hoax”, he was correct. Whether or not all House Democrats saw it as such, Trump’s impeachment amounted to a kind of information war to cover for probable malfeasance on the part of the Biden family.
Perhaps the most sinister aspect of all this is the response of Big Tech social media companies. Shortly after the New York Post bombshell report, Facebook and Twitter moved to censor the story. Facebook Policy Communications Director (and former Democrat staffer) Andy Stone tweeted:
While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020
Shortly afterwards, New York Post editor Sohrab Ahmari tweeted a screenshot showing his failed attempt to tweet the story, remarking:
This is a Big Tech information coup. This is digital civil war.
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) October 14, 2020
I, an editor at The New York Post, one of the nation’s largest papers by circulation, can’t post one of our own stories that details corruption by a major-party presidential candidate, Biden. pic.twitter.com/BKNQmAG19H
If this is about journalistic ethics, both Facebook and Twitter will have to explain why they allowed unfettered circulation of stories about Trump’s tax returns or the now-shaky claims about Russian collusion in Trump’s first presidential campaign.
That Big Tech companies have been so swift in censoring the New York Post story reveals not just their willingness to interfere in this year’s election — but also their admission that the new evidence against Biden is potentially damning.
“Drain the swamp” was Donald Trump’s 2016 pledge to rid D.C. of corrupt career politicians and put “we the people” back in power. It wasn’t clear at the time just how swampy that swamp was, but we have a much better idea now.
