There is a corruption investigation unfolding in America, one that could prove to be so big that it will take up the entire America Report this week.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives is making a difference in more ways than one. Not only are they fighting with Democrat President Joe Biden over the debt ceiling, but they are also investigating the president’s family for allegedly corrupt business dealings.
And this is getting big. It could prove to be as serious as Watergate.
In a press release on May 10th, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability reports that its chairman, Representative James Comer (R-Ky), is in possession of bank records that detail “the Biden family’s influence peddling and business schemes.” The press release explains:
The Oversight Committee has obtained thousands of pages of financial records revealing the Biden family and associates’ complicated network of companies set up during Joe Biden’s vice presidency and the millions the Bidens received from foreign sources.
The press release accuses the Biden family of using “complicated transactions,” in other words moving money between multiple bank accounts in different financial institutions, in a scheme “to hide payments from foreign nationals.” Among the sources of that money are allegedly some with links to the Chinese Communist Party—which, if true, would effectively mean that Joe Biden has sold his political clout and power to a foreign adversary.
So far, nobody has spelled out that accusation, but it is brimming just under the surface of the statement from the Oversight Committee. Its chairman, James Comer, points in that very direction:
The Bidens’ foreign entanglements are breathtaking and raise serious questions about why foreign actors targeted the Biden family, what they expected in return, and whether our national security is threatened.
Again: as unthinkable as it may seem, especially to many who voted for Biden, we now have to entertain the possibility that the Oversight Committee will prove that Joe Biden has sold his political influence to the Chinese government.
This opens up a sensational continuum of possibilities, at the far end of which lies high treason. I cannot imagine that Biden would betray America for a little bit of money, but this press release from the Oversight Committee is so serious that things that were unthinkable might not be so unthinkable anymore.
It is easy to dismiss a press release from a Congressional committee as just that: a statement of allegations with no substance. Some could even point to the January 6th committee, which in the end turned out to be nothing more than a pathetic political stunt. Is not the Oversight Committee of the same quality?
No, it is not. Unlike the J6 committee, this one is organized, seated, and operated entirely according to Congressional rules and standards. It is a bona fide investigative outfit, working within the boundaries of the powers of the legislative branch of government. For this reason alone, it would be a grave mistake to dismiss its findings as just a political stunt.
Furthermore, anyone with knowledge of the inner workings of American politics knows that allegations like this do not just float around without substance to them. You don’t just lob serious accusations like these at a person in power—and certainly not against a president who came to Washington as a U.S. senator in 1973.
This is a man who has entrenched himself in the political inner circles over a period of 50 years. He has more connections than almost anyone in that town. On top of that, Washington is filled to the brim with lawyers of all political colors, ready to use the legal system in an instant against the adversaries of their political masters. If Congressman Comer used the Oversight Committee to even hint at these allegations without having anything substantive to back them up, he would be finished in politics.
But wait—there are more reasons to believe that Comer is onto something sensational. His committee is not the only source of evidence of alleged corruption within the Biden family. Other sources are emerging as well. Consider this story from Fox News:
A former federal prosecutor who reportedly notified the Trump Justice Department about an alleged Biden pay-to-play scheme in 2018 spoke out to Fox News on Tuesday [May 9th]. Bud Cummins, who served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas during the George W. Bush administration, said he was in touch with a “foreign witness” who could attest Joe Biden was engaged in alleged influence peddling or bribery in connection to son Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business dealings.
Hunter Biden, who has no energy-industry credentials, was in 2014 appointed to the board of directors of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, a position for which he had no qualifications yet was paid anywhere from $50,000 to $83,333 per month.
You can buy a lot of BMWs for that money. If you are Hunter Biden you can also get yourself in trouble with the tax collectors at the IRS. That is a different story, although it hints at moral arrogance: $600,000 per year—an astounding amount of money for almost all Americans—is not enough to share between he who gets the money and the government. The real problem here is that when Joe Biden was vice president, he used his political power to protect Burisma from prosecutorial investigation.
Joe Biden has even bragged about it in front of cameras, and how he threatened to withhold a large amount of U.S. government aid to Ukraine unless the prosecutor investigating Burisma was fired. Biden did it at an event organized by the Council of Foreign Relations—an establishment-friendly outfit in Washington—so there was no risk that anyone would ask why he wanted to protect Burisma from legal scrutiny. However, the main point of his unabashed bragging is that it gives us a chilling insight into his character. He wanted to protect Burisma from scrutiny because of the $600,000 or more that his son was receiving annually, which looks very much like a payoff from Burisma to the Biden family.
This is where the Oversight Committee’s accusations of pay-to-play corruption become relevant. Burisma did not bring Hunter Biden onboard for pure charity; their payments were not just a year-long Christmas present to the Biden family. Their payments were part of a business deal, where Burisma—or whoever was bankrolling Hunter Biden’s paychecks—thought the $600,000 annual payments were worth every penny.
Someone was making more than $600,000 per year on the leverage that it bought with Joe Biden (who, again, was Obama’s vice president at the time).
It is not rocket science to conclude that Biden’s efforts to protect Burisma from prosecutorial investigation were motivated by that very same business deal. This is just the logic of corruption. It is also the product of a crass examination of the human character of a man who sits in front of the cameras and brags about abusing his influence as vice president.
Whoever was benefiting from buying influence with Biden, and whatever that influence resulted in, is of less importance, at least for now. Some day, we will probably know; for now, suffice it to say that the Burisma story makes perfect sense in the context of the damning—and presumably substantiated—accusations that are now coming out of the Congressional Oversight Committee.
As mentioned, the circumstantial and increasingly substantial evidence raises uncomfortable but eventually inevitable questions. What happens if the committee gets to a point where it can prove that President Biden, either in his current office or in his capacity as vice president, has done favors for people, organizations, and perhaps even countries that have paid money to him or his family members?
In short: what happens if we find out that the current U.S. president is so corrupt that he has compromised the integrity of his own government—and maybe even the very security of his own country?
It is not as easy to answer this question as it may seem. Corruption is unfortunately a way of life in American politics. The nation’s capital is nicknamed “the swamp” for a reason, and it is not just because of the marshlands that flanked the Potomac River before the District of Columbia was founded. From a cynical viewpoint, it would be easy to say that the corruption case against Biden is unfolding not because people in Washington are interested in cleaning up corruption, but because someone else, who is of equally weak moral fiber, wants his job.
I find this explanation a bit hard to believe. There is not enough logical mileage for it to explain the work that the Oversight Committee is doing, and why other sources are beginning to come forward with similar accusations. The only thing that speaks in favor of the cynic’s take on the corruption allegations is their timing: a conveniently short period of time—about nine months—before the presidential primary season begins. This gives the media enough time to build a picture of Biden as corrupt and unelectable in 2024.
If we play the cynic’s advocate a little bit more, Biden’s corruption is no longer the main issue. The entire case against him is now built on the power ambitions harbored by some of his political competitors. Who would they be? Probably not members of Congress; the people who really benefit from a weak president like Biden are those who can buy themselves influence over his decisions and policies.
At the same time, the timing of the Oversight Committee’s work can easily be explained by the mere fact that the Republican majority took office in January. They have just gotten started and this is as far as they have come. This is a more credible approach to what we are now seeing, and it also aligns well with the influx of a new generation of officials, elected and otherwise, into Washington. These are red-blooded Americans, people who actually want to “drain the swamp” as President Trump used to say. They want to try to save their country from the corrosive fusion of power and money.
To make things more interesting, it is not just within the Republican party that anti-establishment sentiments are surfacing. This is happening on the left as well.
It might be hard to believe given the superficial American media discourse, but Washington is full of loose alliances between political factions, primarily under the respective party umbrellas. These alliances come and go, and sometimes end up in surprisingly bitter battles where no lines were visible before. A case in point is the 2018-2020 political cycle when the neocon faction of the Republican party declared war on the Trump faction. The neocons teamed up with establishment Democrats and paved the way for the Biden presidency.
In the past year, we have seen the beginning of a new alignment, this time between Democrats on the outskirts of their own party establishment, and Trump-friendly Republicans. This particular alliance is perhaps the most difficult one to believe in, and it is not really an alliance yet. It is more of two caucuses within Congress that have found some common political ground, namely Ukraine:
- Non-establishment Democrats who oppose the war in Ukraine on the grounds of its devastating effect on life in Ukraine; and
- So-called MAGA Republicans who are among President Trump’s most passionate supporters, have vowed to bring a ceasefire to Ukraine in short order.
With both caucuses wanting peace, and above all wanting to keep America out of more wars, we effectively have a peace vs. war fault line in Congress.
If we roll the dice and see where this fledgling peace alliance may go, we land on a square called Burisma. Once there is peace in Ukraine, that country can be expected to return to normality again, which includes the resumption of prosecutorial investigations into corrupt dealings between, on the one hand, businesses and government agencies in Ukraine and, on the other hand, similar entities in foreign countries.
So long as the war continues, no such investigations will be done. Is it really a coincidence that the most passionate supporters of more aid to Ukraine are the same people who seem to oppose the ongoing corruption investigations? Or is that overlap a mirage, created by the complex web of alliances, factions, and cross-sections of political entanglements that is the lifeblood of Washington, D.C.?
The America Report: Corruption, Corruption, and Biden
There is a corruption investigation unfolding in America, one that could prove to be so big that it will take up the entire America Report this week.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives is making a difference in more ways than one. Not only are they fighting with Democrat President Joe Biden over the debt ceiling, but they are also investigating the president’s family for allegedly corrupt business dealings.
And this is getting big. It could prove to be as serious as Watergate.
In a press release on May 10th, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability reports that its chairman, Representative James Comer (R-Ky), is in possession of bank records that detail “the Biden family’s influence peddling and business schemes.” The press release explains:
The press release accuses the Biden family of using “complicated transactions,” in other words moving money between multiple bank accounts in different financial institutions, in a scheme “to hide payments from foreign nationals.” Among the sources of that money are allegedly some with links to the Chinese Communist Party—which, if true, would effectively mean that Joe Biden has sold his political clout and power to a foreign adversary.
So far, nobody has spelled out that accusation, but it is brimming just under the surface of the statement from the Oversight Committee. Its chairman, James Comer, points in that very direction:
Again: as unthinkable as it may seem, especially to many who voted for Biden, we now have to entertain the possibility that the Oversight Committee will prove that Joe Biden has sold his political influence to the Chinese government.
This opens up a sensational continuum of possibilities, at the far end of which lies high treason. I cannot imagine that Biden would betray America for a little bit of money, but this press release from the Oversight Committee is so serious that things that were unthinkable might not be so unthinkable anymore.
It is easy to dismiss a press release from a Congressional committee as just that: a statement of allegations with no substance. Some could even point to the January 6th committee, which in the end turned out to be nothing more than a pathetic political stunt. Is not the Oversight Committee of the same quality?
No, it is not. Unlike the J6 committee, this one is organized, seated, and operated entirely according to Congressional rules and standards. It is a bona fide investigative outfit, working within the boundaries of the powers of the legislative branch of government. For this reason alone, it would be a grave mistake to dismiss its findings as just a political stunt.
Furthermore, anyone with knowledge of the inner workings of American politics knows that allegations like this do not just float around without substance to them. You don’t just lob serious accusations like these at a person in power—and certainly not against a president who came to Washington as a U.S. senator in 1973.
This is a man who has entrenched himself in the political inner circles over a period of 50 years. He has more connections than almost anyone in that town. On top of that, Washington is filled to the brim with lawyers of all political colors, ready to use the legal system in an instant against the adversaries of their political masters. If Congressman Comer used the Oversight Committee to even hint at these allegations without having anything substantive to back them up, he would be finished in politics.
But wait—there are more reasons to believe that Comer is onto something sensational. His committee is not the only source of evidence of alleged corruption within the Biden family. Other sources are emerging as well. Consider this story from Fox News:
Hunter Biden, who has no energy-industry credentials, was in 2014 appointed to the board of directors of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, a position for which he had no qualifications yet was paid anywhere from $50,000 to $83,333 per month.
You can buy a lot of BMWs for that money. If you are Hunter Biden you can also get yourself in trouble with the tax collectors at the IRS. That is a different story, although it hints at moral arrogance: $600,000 per year—an astounding amount of money for almost all Americans—is not enough to share between he who gets the money and the government. The real problem here is that when Joe Biden was vice president, he used his political power to protect Burisma from prosecutorial investigation.
Joe Biden has even bragged about it in front of cameras, and how he threatened to withhold a large amount of U.S. government aid to Ukraine unless the prosecutor investigating Burisma was fired. Biden did it at an event organized by the Council of Foreign Relations—an establishment-friendly outfit in Washington—so there was no risk that anyone would ask why he wanted to protect Burisma from legal scrutiny. However, the main point of his unabashed bragging is that it gives us a chilling insight into his character. He wanted to protect Burisma from scrutiny because of the $600,000 or more that his son was receiving annually, which looks very much like a payoff from Burisma to the Biden family.
This is where the Oversight Committee’s accusations of pay-to-play corruption become relevant. Burisma did not bring Hunter Biden onboard for pure charity; their payments were not just a year-long Christmas present to the Biden family. Their payments were part of a business deal, where Burisma—or whoever was bankrolling Hunter Biden’s paychecks—thought the $600,000 annual payments were worth every penny.
Someone was making more than $600,000 per year on the leverage that it bought with Joe Biden (who, again, was Obama’s vice president at the time).
It is not rocket science to conclude that Biden’s efforts to protect Burisma from prosecutorial investigation were motivated by that very same business deal. This is just the logic of corruption. It is also the product of a crass examination of the human character of a man who sits in front of the cameras and brags about abusing his influence as vice president.
Whoever was benefiting from buying influence with Biden, and whatever that influence resulted in, is of less importance, at least for now. Some day, we will probably know; for now, suffice it to say that the Burisma story makes perfect sense in the context of the damning—and presumably substantiated—accusations that are now coming out of the Congressional Oversight Committee.
As mentioned, the circumstantial and increasingly substantial evidence raises uncomfortable but eventually inevitable questions. What happens if the committee gets to a point where it can prove that President Biden, either in his current office or in his capacity as vice president, has done favors for people, organizations, and perhaps even countries that have paid money to him or his family members?
In short: what happens if we find out that the current U.S. president is so corrupt that he has compromised the integrity of his own government—and maybe even the very security of his own country?
It is not as easy to answer this question as it may seem. Corruption is unfortunately a way of life in American politics. The nation’s capital is nicknamed “the swamp” for a reason, and it is not just because of the marshlands that flanked the Potomac River before the District of Columbia was founded. From a cynical viewpoint, it would be easy to say that the corruption case against Biden is unfolding not because people in Washington are interested in cleaning up corruption, but because someone else, who is of equally weak moral fiber, wants his job.
I find this explanation a bit hard to believe. There is not enough logical mileage for it to explain the work that the Oversight Committee is doing, and why other sources are beginning to come forward with similar accusations. The only thing that speaks in favor of the cynic’s take on the corruption allegations is their timing: a conveniently short period of time—about nine months—before the presidential primary season begins. This gives the media enough time to build a picture of Biden as corrupt and unelectable in 2024.
If we play the cynic’s advocate a little bit more, Biden’s corruption is no longer the main issue. The entire case against him is now built on the power ambitions harbored by some of his political competitors. Who would they be? Probably not members of Congress; the people who really benefit from a weak president like Biden are those who can buy themselves influence over his decisions and policies.
At the same time, the timing of the Oversight Committee’s work can easily be explained by the mere fact that the Republican majority took office in January. They have just gotten started and this is as far as they have come. This is a more credible approach to what we are now seeing, and it also aligns well with the influx of a new generation of officials, elected and otherwise, into Washington. These are red-blooded Americans, people who actually want to “drain the swamp” as President Trump used to say. They want to try to save their country from the corrosive fusion of power and money.
To make things more interesting, it is not just within the Republican party that anti-establishment sentiments are surfacing. This is happening on the left as well.
It might be hard to believe given the superficial American media discourse, but Washington is full of loose alliances between political factions, primarily under the respective party umbrellas. These alliances come and go, and sometimes end up in surprisingly bitter battles where no lines were visible before. A case in point is the 2018-2020 political cycle when the neocon faction of the Republican party declared war on the Trump faction. The neocons teamed up with establishment Democrats and paved the way for the Biden presidency.
In the past year, we have seen the beginning of a new alignment, this time between Democrats on the outskirts of their own party establishment, and Trump-friendly Republicans. This particular alliance is perhaps the most difficult one to believe in, and it is not really an alliance yet. It is more of two caucuses within Congress that have found some common political ground, namely Ukraine:
With both caucuses wanting peace, and above all wanting to keep America out of more wars, we effectively have a peace vs. war fault line in Congress.
If we roll the dice and see where this fledgling peace alliance may go, we land on a square called Burisma. Once there is peace in Ukraine, that country can be expected to return to normality again, which includes the resumption of prosecutorial investigations into corrupt dealings between, on the one hand, businesses and government agencies in Ukraine and, on the other hand, similar entities in foreign countries.
So long as the war continues, no such investigations will be done. Is it really a coincidence that the most passionate supporters of more aid to Ukraine are the same people who seem to oppose the ongoing corruption investigations? Or is that overlap a mirage, created by the complex web of alliances, factions, and cross-sections of political entanglements that is the lifeblood of Washington, D.C.?
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