OT Hunter Biden Received Millions From Wife Of Ex-Moscow Mayor, Etc.

Discussion in 'Blazers OT Forum' started by ABM, Sep 24, 2020.

  1. ABM

    ABM Happily Married In Music City, USA!

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    https://www.conservativereview.com/...ilitary-senate-report-alleges-2647776019.html

    Hunter Biden Received Millions From Wife Of Ex-Moscow Mayor, Paid Suspects Allegedly Tied To Trafficking, Had Contacts With Individuals Linked To Chinese Military, Senate Report Alleges


    A bombshell report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC) and the Committee on Finance makes a series of damning new allegations against Hunter Biden, the son of Democrat presidential nominee.

    The investigation launched after Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) publicly raised conflict-of-interest concerns about the sale of a U.S. company to a Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden a month before Congress was notified about a whistleblower complaint that was the catalyst for Democrats’ impeachment of President Donald Trump. The Senate’s investigation relied on records from the U.S. government, Democrat lobbying groups, and interviews of numerous current and former officials.


    The report outlined the following key findings from the investigation:

    • In early 2015 the former Acting Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, George Kent, raised concerns to officials in Vice President Joe Biden’s office about the perception of a conflict of interest with respect to Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board. Kent’s concerns went unaddressed, and in September 2016, he emphasized in an email to his colleagues, “Furthermore, the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”
    • In October 2015, senior State Department official Amos Hochstein raised concerns with Vice President Biden, as well as with Hunter Biden, that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine.
    • Although Kent believed that Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board was awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine, the Committees are only aware of two individuals — Kent and former U.S. Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs Amos Hochstein — who raised concerns to Vice President Joe Biden (Hochstein) or his staff (Kent).
    • The awkwardness for Obama administration officials continued well past his presidency. Former Secretary of State John Kerry had knowledge of Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board, but when asked about it at a town hall event in Nashua, N.H. on Dec. 8, 2019, Kerry falsely said, “I had no knowledge about any of that. None. No.” Evidence to the contrary is detailed in Section V.
    • Former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland testified that confronting oligarchs would send an anticorruption message in Ukraine. Kent told the Committees that Zlochevsky was an “odious oligarch.” However, in December 2015, instead of following U.S. objectives of confronting oligarchs, Vice President Biden’s staff advised him to avoid commenting on Zlochevsky and recommended he say, “I’m not going to get into naming names or accusing individuals.”
    • Hunter Biden was serving on Burisma’s board (supposedly consulting on corporate governance and transparency) when Zlochevsky allegedly paid a $7 million bribe to officials serving under Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Vitaly Yarema, to “shut the case against Zlochevsky.” Kent testified that this bribe occurred in December 2014 (seven months after Hunter joined Burisma’s board), and, after learning about it, he and the Resident Legal Advisor reported this allegation to the FBI.
    • Hunter Biden was a U.S. Secret Service protectee from Jan. 29, 2009 to July 8, 2014. A day before his last trip as a protectee, Time published an article describing Burisma’s ramped up lobbying efforts to U.S. officials and Hunter’s involvement in Burisma’s board. Before ending his protective detail, Hunter Biden received Secret Service protection on trips to multiple foreign locations, including Moscow, Beijing, Doha, Paris, Seoul, Manila, Tokyo, Mexico City, Milan, Florence, Shanghai, Geneva, London, Dublin, Munich, Berlin, Bogota, Abu Dhabi, Nairobi, Hong Kong, Taipei, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Johannesburg, Brussels, Madrid, Mumbai and Lake Como.
    • Andrii Telizhenko, the Democrats’ personification of Russian disinformation, met with Obama administration officials, including Elisabeth Zentos, a member of Obama’s National Security Council, at least 10 times. A Democrat lobbying firm, Blue Star Strategies, contracted with Telizhenko from 2016 to 2017 and continued to request his assistance as recent as the summer of 2019. A recent news article detailed other extensive contacts between Telizhenko and Obama administration officials.
    • In addition to the over $4 million paid by Burisma for Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s board memberships, Hunter Biden, his family, and Archer received millions of dollars from foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds.
    • Archer received $142,300 from Kenges Rakishev of Kazakhstan, purportedly for a car, the same day Vice President Joe Biden appeared with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arsemy Yasenyuk and addressed Ukrainian legislators in Kyiv regarding Russia’s actions in Crimea.
    • Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the wife of the former mayor of Moscow.
    • Hunter Biden opened a bank account with Gongwen Dong to fund a $100,000 global spending spree with James Biden and Sara Biden.
    • Hunter Biden had business associations with Ye Jianming, Gongwen Dong, and other Chinese nationals linked to the Communist government and the People’s Liberation Army. Those associations resulted in millions of dollars in cash flow.
    • Hunter Biden paid nonresident women who were nationals of Russia or other Eastern European countries and who appear to be linked to an “Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring.”
    The report also stated that the investigation found that the Obama administration “knew that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board was problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.”


     
  2. julius

    julius Global Moderator Staff Member Global Moderator

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    Good thing he's not running for President.
     
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  3. ABM

    ABM Happily Married In Music City, USA!

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    No kidding.
     
  4. julius

    julius Global Moderator Staff Member Global Moderator

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    I think you missed the point. who gives a shit. He's not a candidate. All this is is a desperate attempt to pin this on Biden in hopes to make trump look better. Nothing more, nothing less.
     
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  5. ABM

    ABM Happily Married In Music City, USA!

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    Shoot, why not? I mean, we have posts regarding Trump "doing" his daughter in the backseat of his limo for heaven's sake. All is fair in love and politics, right?
     
  6. ABM

    ABM Happily Married In Music City, USA!

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    • In early 2015 the former Acting Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, George Kent, raised concerns to officials in Vice President Joe Biden’s office about the perception of a conflict of interest with respect to Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board. Kent’s concerns went unaddressed, and in September 2016, he emphasized in an email to his colleagues, “Furthermore, the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”
     
  7. wizenheimer

    wizenheimer Well-Known Member

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    where is the THREAD for that joke. It's just a post in a bigger thread

    you decided this crap was worth a thread, and the R's have been telegraphing this smear for months
     
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  8. julius

    julius Global Moderator Staff Member Global Moderator

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    I think, though, that Trump has said things that are incredibly creepy about Ivanka and also, she's part of the whitehouse team. Hunter isn't.
     
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  9. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

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    Republican Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by Biden
    The report delivered on Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing of unproven allegations that echoed a Russian disinformation campaign.

    An election-year investigation by Senate Republicans into corruption allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter, involving Ukraine found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president, closing out an inquiry its leaders had hoped would tarnish the Democratic presidential nominee.

    The investigation found that Hunter Biden had “cashed in” on his father’s name to close lucrative business deals around the world. It also concluded that his work for Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company then mired in a corruption scandal, while the former vice president was directing American policy toward Kyiv had given the appearance of a conflict of interest and alarmed some State Department officials.

    But an 87-page report summing up the findings, released jointly on Wednesday by the Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees, contained no evidence that the elder Mr. Biden improperly manipulated American policy toward Ukraine or committed any other misdeed. In fact, investigators heard witness testimony that rebutted those charges.

    The homeland security panel’s Republican chairman, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, had made little secret of his political ambitions for his report, boasting for weeks that his findings would demonstrate Mr. Biden’s “unfitness for office.” Instead, the result delivered on Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing six weeks before Election Day of unproven allegations that echo an active Russian disinformation campaign and have been pushed by Mr. Trump.



    “What the chairmen discovered during the course of this investigation is that the Obama administration knew that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board was problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine,” the report said.

    The Trump campaign quickly promoted the “explosive new revelations,” zeroing in on financial records obtained by the senators that showed Hunter Biden receiving large sums of money — sometimes as large as seven figures — from foreigners in China, Russia and elsewhere while his father was in office. They amounted to “stunning levels of corruption and breathtaking breaches of America’s national security,” said Tim Murtaugh, a campaign spokesman.

    In their own competing document challenging the report, Democrats accused Republicans of cherry-picking their findings. All 10 witnesses interviewed by investigators, they noted, had testified that neither Mr. Biden nor anyone else had altered American policy because of his son.

    “Every witness stated that Hunter Biden and his associates had no role in the formulation of U.S. policy, that Hunter Biden’s role did not influence U.S. foreign policy decisions, and that Vice President Biden carried out U.S. foreign policy in the interest of the United States,” the Democrats wrote.

    The lack of meaningful new information and the overlap with a Russian disinformation campaign that American intelligence officials have said is designed to denigrate Mr. Biden only fed charges by Democrats and Mr. Biden’s campaign that Mr. Johnson had abused his Senate powers to aid Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign — and in so doing, had aided Moscow.

    Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s campaign, accused Mr. Johnson of subsidizing “a foreign attack against the sovereignty of our elections with taxpayer dollars” by promulgating “a long-disproven, hard-core right wing conspiracy theory” about the former vice president.

    Mr. Biden has conceded that the optics of Hunter Biden’s position were bad, but the former vice president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

    Though their scope was ultimately broader, Republicans set out to scrutinize a specific claim raised by Mr. Trump: that Mr. Biden had corruptly pushed for the ouster of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who had been investigating Burisma, as a favor to his son. Mr. Trump’s pursuit of that charge, including the pressure he tried to put on Ukraine’s leader to look into it, is what prompted his impeachment last year.

    The senators turned up no evidence to support it. Current and former government officials testified that the decision to remove the prosecutor had not been merely Mr. Biden’s position, but that of most Western nations determined through a rigorous policy process.

    The report’s lead finding — that Hunter Biden’s presence on the Burisma board posed a challenge for American diplomats — rested heavily on the testimony of George P. Kent, a State Department official involved in Ukraine policy. Mr. Kent raised concerns in 2015 and 2016, including with Mr. Biden’s staff, that the millions of dollars in payments to Hunter Biden by Burisma made it “very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”

    But Mr. Kent’s statements are not new. He had a prominent role in the House’s impeachment inquiry last fall, when he detailed his concerns about Hunter Biden, but also said he “did not witness any efforts by any U.S. official to shield Burisma from scrutiny.”

    “So there was no time, as I’ve testified, that the U.S. government, the U.S. Embassy ever made a decision” about the owner of Burisma or the firm itself “where we took the presence of a private citizen on the board into account,” he told Mr. Johnson’s staff. Other former diplomats, including the ambassador to Ukraine at the time, made similar statements.

    Neither Mr. Biden’s campaign nor Mr. Johnson would say whether he had sought information directly from the former vice president, and a lawyer for Hunter Biden did not respond to a request for comment.

    In an interview last week before the report’s release, Mr. Johnson said he was simply conducting the type of oversight with which his committee was tasked, and suggested that the investigation had been thrust upon him because Mr. Biden had opted to challenge Mr. Trump. The senator said that he “never thought Joe Biden should run for president,” and hinted that the former vice president had cognitive problems, a baseless attack frequently hurled by Mr. Trump.

    the Treasury Department said this month, bent on “spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to Election Day” — like the one Mr. Johnson conducted.

    Mr. Derkach claimed that he had provided information to Mr. Johnson and Mr. Grassley, though the senators said they never sought or received anything from him. (They have worked with Andrii Telizhenko, another Ukrainian, despite law enforcement officials sharing concerns with the committee that he, too, could be spreading the same Russian misinformation.)

    On Wednesday, Mr. Schumer said the report read “as if Putin wrote it, not United States senators.”

    Mr. Johnson forcefully denied that his report was based on any disinformation. But he also said a claim should not be off limits merely because bad actors were amplifying it.

    “If there is somebody in Ukraine and somebody in Russia also publicizing the fact that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden created this massive conflict of interest,” Mr. Johnson said, “is that something we are just supposed to take a hands-off attitude toward?”

    Democrats were not the only ones taking issue. Last week, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, criticized Mr. Johnson for pursuing what he called a “political exercise.”

    “It’s not the legitimate role of government for Congress or for taxpayer expense to be used in an effort to damage political opponents,” Mr. Romney said.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/politics/biden-inquiry-republicans-johnson.html
     
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  10. ABM

    ABM Happily Married In Music City, USA!

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    It's just the start. Both sides ammo'ing up.

    Sleepy Joe isn't that asleep.
     
  11. GoBlazersGo

    GoBlazersGo Well-Known Member

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    It's not like he hasn't said nearly as much on a few separate occasions, himself. That said, I'm sorry you felt personally attacked by such a statement. I mean, after all, she's NOT an unborn fetus...
     
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  12. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

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    The GOP’s own star witness just blew up Trump’s ‘Hunterghazi’ smear

    President Trump has spent over two years trying to “prove” that Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine were corrupt. He and lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani schemed over this for many months, with Trump ultimately trying to strong-arm the Ukrainian president into announcing an investigation into those activities, which got Trump impeached even as the smears they manufactured crashed and burned.


    Now Trump has been counting on Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) to validate these narratives, via an inquiry conducted by the Homeland Security committee, which Johnson chairs. The goal was to use the official sheen of a Senate probe — one also conducted with the Finance Committee — to manufacture the impression of wrongdoing on Biden’s part.

    But as befits this cast of bumblers and incompetents, the star witness in the GOP’s own investigation has actually further undermined those smears.

    Johnson has now released his long-awaited (by Trump, anyway) report on his investigation. One of its big revelations is supposed to be that George Kent, a top State Department official, testified that he “raised concerns” inside the Obama administration about appearances of conflicts of interest surrounding the business activities of the then-vice president’s son Hunter.

    But, while that itself is true, there’s a big problem here: Kent also gave the committee testimony that completely undermines the larger narrative that Trump and Republicans have tried to spin into political gold for over a year.

    The story they try to tell
    The basic story they have long tried to tell goes like this. As vice president, Biden sought the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect Burisma, an energy company that was paying Hunter Biden a lucrative salary to sit on its board, from investigation. Joe Biden also conditioned foreign aid on that prosecutor’s ouster.

    All this is supposed to show that Biden corrupted Obama administration foreign policy on his son’s behalf.

    But this “Hunterghazi” tale has been widely debunked. In reality, Burisma was not even being investigated at the time, and the vice president was working to oust that Ukrainian prosecutor because the prosecutor himself was corrupt.

    That was the actual Obama administration policy, and this goal was backed by international institutions precisely because they had a stake in a corruption-free Ukraine. GOP senators were briefed by Obama officials about this policy at the time, including about the conditioning of foreign aid, and had no objections to it.


    Kent himself — that would be the Republicans’ own star witness — has now confirmed much of this, in testimony to the committee as part of the GOP’s own investigation.

    In that testimony, as the Democratic response to the GOP report details, Kent knocked down every key pillar of the GOP story line:

    • Kent debunked the idea that Burisma was protected from investigation, stating that “I did not witness any effort by any U.S. official to shield Burisma from scrutiny.”
    • Kent debunked the idea that the U.S. effort to oust the Ukrainian prosecutor was about stopping an investigation into Burisma, flatly stating that it was not.
    • Kent confirmed that the quest for that ouster was about purging Ukraine of corruption, noting that “Ukrainian society” wanted the prosecutor gone because he was “protecting corrupt friends.”
    • Kent confirmed that the conditioning of aid as leverage had nothing to do with Hunter Biden and that it originated with those involved in formulating “Ukraine policy.”
    Kent already testified to some of these points during impeachment. But now he offered it directly to the GOP investigation itself.

    Appearances versus realities
    The Johnson report purports to use Kent’s concerns about appearances of conflict of interest to create the impression of corruption on Joe Biden’s part. It notes that in the last years of the Obama administration, Kent raised concerns to officials in Biden’s office about the “perception” of a conflict of interest, which he called “awkward.”


    The GOP report notes that Kent testified about this before the committee. But as the GOP report itself shows, in that testimony Kent worried that critics would use Hunter Biden’s involvement to question the true motives behind administration policy, not that the motives themselves were problematic.

    To be fair, the part of the story concerning appearances is problematic. Hunter Biden should not have taken the Burisma money. It did create perceptions of a conflict. State Department officials were in fact preoccupied with these appearances.

    And such perceptions themselves are bad. They undermine public faith in the integrity of government, even if there are no genuine underlying conflicts — that is, no actual cases of public officials using the government for private gain — as in this case there aren’t.


    It’s also fair to question the judgment of the vice president in allowing this to happen, though it’s unclear what control he might have exercised over his son, who had other personal problems that reportedly anguished his father.

    But the bottom line here is that the central holy grail that Trump and Republicans have been pursuing just isn’t there.

    Comically, the GOP report deals with this by slipping in the following line:

    The extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.
    Not clear? Actually it is clear: Hunter Biden’s role didn’t affect U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

    Indeed, the line itself constitutes a striking admission: After pouring extraordinary amounts of effort into making this seem like a scandal, they could not produce evidence of their central claim.


    The ultimate irony here is that this effort to prove that Joe Biden abused official resources for personal gain is itself an example of exactly this — but on the part of Trump and his co-conspirators.

    Just as Trump subverted U.S. foreign policy to his personal gain by attempting to bulldoze a foreign ally under duress into helping validate his campaign messaging, the GOP report is yet another attempt to manipulate a government product for Trump’s benefit. It may be dressed up with vague insinuations and the imprimatur of an oversight committee, but it’s just one more crass, shameless misuse of official resources.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...witness-just-blew-up-trumps-huntergazi-smear/
     
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  13. ABM

    ABM Happily Married In Music City, USA!

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  14. lawai'a

    lawai'a Well-Known Member

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    “Every witness stated that Hunter Biden and his associates had no role in the formulation of U.S. policy, that Hunter Biden’s role did not influence U.S. foreign policy decisions, and that Vice President Biden carried out U.S. foreign policy in the interest of the United States,” the Democrats wrote.
    any criminal charges forthcoming?
     
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  15. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

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    Who the fuck posted that?!?
     
  16. ehizzy3

    ehizzy3 RIP mgb

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    we got Russian propaganda now being posted in s2. Crazy times
     
  17. ABM

    ABM Happily Married In Music City, USA!

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    Doesn't matter.
     
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  18. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

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    We're a multicultural forum!
     
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  19. lawai'a

    lawai'a Well-Known Member

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    #S2 troll farm
     
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  20. Buffalo Custard

    Buffalo Custard Well-Known Member

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    I love it when Dems get smeared for behavior that would be considered perfectly acceptable on the part of a Republican!

    The hypocrisy and double standards make me puke.
     

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