Biden waves it away but hard evidence remains

FPI / October 1, 2019

Former Vice President Joe Biden is reminding the media that any Ukraine investigations should be focusing on President Donald Trump, not him.

However, while the president is dogged by unproven allegations and inferences, there seems to be no shortage of photographic, audio and video evidence about him, his son and certain key Ukrainian officials.

A photo obtained by Tucker Carlson Tonight shows Biden and son Hunter sharing a round of golf with Devon Archer, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings alongside Hunter.

Analysts said the photo raises serious questions regarding the extent to which Joe Biden is aware of his son’s overseas business deals — something the former vice president claimed earlier this month he has never discussed with his son.

“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden told reporters during a campaign stop in Iowa.

Hunter Biden has a slightly different recollection. He told the New Yorker magazine that he and his father discussed his business activities in Ukraine “just once.”

Joe Biden went on to say: “I know Trump deserves to be investigated. He is violating every basic norm of a president. You should be asking him why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader. You should be looking at Trump.”

In a Sept. 29 appearance on the Fox News Channel’s Life, Liberty & Levin, researcher Peter Schweizer, pointed out that Hunter Biden was appointed as a board member of Burisma Holdings despite his lack of experience in the energy sector.

“The key question here that nobody seems to want to ask in the media is: What was he being paid for? He wasn’t being paid for his expertise. What was he being paid for? And what were the Ukrainians expecting to get in return?” Schweizer asked host Mark Levin. Schweizer is Breitbart News senior contributor and the author of Secret Empires.

“I think when you overlay the financial payments with the fact that Joe Biden as point person on Obama administration policy to Ukraine was steering billions of dollars of Western money to Ukraine it becomes crystal clear exactly why they were paying him money. They wanted access and they wanted to influence Joe Biden. And Joe Biden has been around a long time here, and he had to know exactly why his son was being paid.”

Appearing on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos on Sept. 29, Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani produced a copy of a sworn witness statement from the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Shokin claims that he was forced out of office as Ukraine's top prosecutor because he was leading a "wide-ranging corruption probe" into an energy company that was paying Hunter Biden, $50,000 per month to sit on its board.

"Why is this less credible than the whistleblower when this is direct knowledge and the whistleblower is hearsay?" Giuliani asked in the ABC interview.

Shokin alleges that he was "staunchly politically unaffiliated" and that then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko ordered him to resign due to pressure from Joe Biden who was threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. subsidies to Ukraine "until I was removed from office."

Video from a 2018 meeting with the Council on Foreign Relations shows Joe Biden bragging about how, while he was vice president, he forced the firing of the prosecutor after threatening to withhold the U.S. funds.

The golf photo’s emergence comes as House Democrats are moving swiftly with an impeachment inquiry against Trump over his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he raised the issue of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.

Breitbart News noted that “A partisan CIA officer, with second-hand knowledge of the call, filed a so-called ‘whistleblower’ complaint with the intelligence community about the conversation, alleging Trump sought to exchange U.S. military aid for a probe into Hunter. However, both Trump and Zelensky have denied any pressure to look into the Biden family was applied and the White House, in a nod to transparency, released the transcript of leaders’ July 25th conversation last week.”

Free Press International