Thursday, Apr 18, 2024

Campaign to Suppress Biden Emails Raises Concerns About DOJ Involvement

As explosive revelations concerning Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, begin to surface from an abandoned hard drive that belonged to Hunter, urgent questions are being asked why federal investigators who had possession of the material took no action on the matter for almost a year.
The revelations, published last week in a series of articles by the New York Post, concern thousands of personal and confidential emails revealing Hunter Biden cashing in on the political status of his father, Joe Biden, then vice president of the United States in the Obama Administration.
The emails were stored on the hard drive of a damaged computer that was reportedly brought to a repair shop in Delaware by Hunter Biden, but never retrieved. The emails suggest that a corrupt Ukraine energy firm, Burisma, secured direct access to then-vice president Joe Biden through his son Hunter.
Former Vice President Joe Biden exercised oversight of U.S.-Ukraine relations at the time and was also the point man for US foreign policy in China.
The Ukrainian company was paying Hunter Biden $50,000 a month to sit on its board of directors, “a position for which he had neither qualifications nor experience,” notes a Fox News article. His chief and only asset to the company appeared to be his relationship with Vice President Biden.
The selection of emails reproduced by the Post article contains one by a Burisma executive, Vadym Pozharskiy, asking Hunter to use his influence to thwart an investigation into the company by Ukrainian government authorities. Another email by Pozharskiy on April 17, 2015, thanked Hunter for setting up a for him with the vice president in Washington.
‘Dear Hunter, Thank You for Giving Me an Opportunity to Meet Your Father’
“Dear Hunter,” the email reads, “thank you for inviting me to DC and giving me an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s really an honor and pleasure. As we spoke yesterday evening, would be great to meet today for a quick coffee. What do you think? I could come to your office somewhere around noon or so, before or on my way to airport. Best, V.”
A few months later, Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was preparing to investigate Burisma. During a 2018 videotaped speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden bragged about how he pulled this off.
He recounted that in a December 2015 meeting with Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko, he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in much needed U.S. aid to Ukraine’s financially strapped government:
“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, [what do you know], he got fired!” Biden boasted to appreciative laughter.
In other emails to Ukrainian executives and Chinese government officials, the younger Biden is found to be negotiating multi-million dollar “remuneration packages” for himself and members of his family—including “the big guy,” as he refers to his father.
The email correspondence reveals that in return for exorbitant salaries—one deal called for Hunter to collect $10 million a year in salary for “making introductions” [to U.S. VIPs] —Hunter Biden was expected to garner political and economic favors to benefit his Ukrainian and Chinese business partners.
Half of His Salary Went to ‘Pop’
The drift in some of the emails is that father Joe Biden allegedly took a generous cut from some of the lavish payments paid to his son. In a personal email to his daughter, quoted by attorney Rudy Giuliani who has reviewed the material on the hard drive, Hunter complains that half of his salary goes to “Pop.”
“I love you all but I don’t receive any respect, and that’s fine, I guess,” Hunter wrote, quoted in the Fox News exclusive. “Works for you, apparently. I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for thirty years.”
Giuliani explained that the younger Biden was paying for everything in the family “because he was getting the money and keeping it from Joe so he wouldn’t have to report it.” In his text, Hunter added, “It’s really hard, but don’t worry, unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
Giuliani said some of Joe Biden’s activities, including the above-mentioned meeting Hunter allegedly arranged between his father and a Burisma executive, smacked of flat-out “racketeering.”
That such sensitive and incriminating information could have been so recklessly abandoned by Hunter Biden corresponds with what is known about his erratic life—one marked with a history of drug abuse. Apparently forgetting what he had done with his non-functioning laptop, Biden allowed a period of more than 90 days to elapse without retrieving it, or responding to calls by the shop owner.
Eventually, according to standard protocol regarding abandoned merchandise, the proprietor took legal possession of the hard drive, discovered its disturbing contents and contacted government authorities.
After an extended silence, related shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac in a CBS interview, the FBI confiscated the hard drive following the issuing of a grand jury subpoena, and cautioned Mac Isaac to keep quiet about it – in his words, “keep your mouth shut.”
Frightened by the implications of being in possession of politically explosive information, the shop proprietor decided to reach out to other higher-ups, seeking protection for himself. That is how a copy of the hard drive ended up in the hands of Robert Costello, attorney to Rudy Giuliani, who is President Trump’s personal attorney.
Costello in a Fox News interview testified he spent days authenticating its contents before he reached an understanding with the NY Post about bringing the story to the public.
Given the time frame—the hard drive’s recovery took place during the 2019 impeachment proceedings against President Trump—the FBI’s apparent inaction in investigating the reams of incriminating material is bizarre in the extreme, Costello said.
Smoking Gun Evidence?
The basis of the impeachment trial was the claim that Trump had colluded with Russian authorities to fabricate charges that Biden had abused his authority in ousting Ukraine’s top prosecutor. And here on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “smoking gun” evidence of these very charges.
Here also were revelations that undermined the impeachment proceedings against Trump, offering strong evidence that they were groundless—as the Senate later concluded.
Why was this evidence suppressed? Why was no investigation conducted to verify the authentication or fraudulence of the Biden emails? If the materials were in fact investigated, what findings emerged? Aren’t Americans entitled to the facts?
The fact that the American public has been kept so long in the dark about these critical issues, and that the news blackout continues, speaks to the larger issue of how trust in the media and in government institutions such as the FBI has tragically eroded.
Americans have historically been secure in their belief that their government institutions were on the whole non-partisan; that they could be trusted to deliver the truth, and to punish corrupt public officials guilty of abusing their authority.
Sadly, as the Biden scandal vividly illustrates, no longer is this the case. “Deep State” officials appear to have been complicit in a serious cover-up reaching the highest echelons of political power.
Media Struggle to Marginalize Scandal
For a liberal media favoring the Democratic candidate for president, the Biden scandal was deemed so dangerous to Biden that leading media organs took extreme measures to marginalize the fallout.
With the notable exceptions of the New York Post, Fox News and a number of smaller outlets, the story has been disparaged and mocked in most of the media as “Russian disinformation” or a Trump-led conspiracy.
Social media including Facebook and Twitter went into overdrive to suppress the Post disclosures, banning the story on its platforms, locking down the New York Post account and blocking the story’s circulation in every way possible.
Joe Biden has refused to address the emails, dismissing the bombshell revelations as “a smear campaign.”
Ever since the issue of Hunter’s suspicious business dealings first surfaced, Biden has sought to deflect congressional and media scrutiny by insisting that he never had any involvement whatsoever with his son’s foreign business affairs.
Biden insisted last year that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” and even called a voter who brought up the matter at a campaign event a “flat-out liar.”
When pressed on the matter by Trump during the first presidential debate last month, Joe Biden again denied Hunter had engaged in any wrongdoing.
“My son did nothing wrong at Burisma. He doesn’t want to let me answer because he knows I have the truth,” Joe Biden said.
Strikingly, Hunter Biden has not denied authorship of the emails even though they expose his father’s protestations as lies.
“Here’s what we do know and it’s important,” Senator Judiciary Committee member John Kennedy said in a Fox News interview.
“President Obama put Vice President Biden in charge of America’s foreign affairs with two countries, Ukraine and China — and in both cases, his son, Mr. Hunter Biden walked away with millions of dollars of contracts.
I’m not accusing anybody of anything,” Kennedy added, “but I’m telling you this: This is the message that is sent to the rest of the world. The foreign policy of the United States of America can be bought like a sack of potatoes, and that’s a disservice to America and to the world.”
Newly Released Memos Cast Doubt on Biden’s Story
The Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine came under special attention last year as House Democrats pursued an impeachment inquiry surrounding President Trump’s 2014 call with Ukraine’s president. In it, Trump asked President Zelensky to investigate the actions of Joe Biden in connection with the firing of the Ukrainian government’s top prosecutor, Victor Shokin.
This issue goes to the heart of claims by President Donald Trump that Biden acted inappropriately in calling for the firing of a prosecutor –claims that Hunter Biden’s emails, noted below, appear to have confirmed.
A May 2014 shows Vadym Pozharskiy, an adviser to Burisma’s board, allegedly asking for the younger Biden’s advice on how to stop “politically motivated actions.”
“We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions,” the email from Pozharskiy reads. And less than a year later, a purported email from Pozharskiy shows him thanking Hunter Biden for an invitation to meet his father.
Joe Biden aides do not dispute the e-mail or deny the two men met.
As mentioned above, Biden subsequently bragged in a televised meeting that in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its chief prosecutor. He did not admit, however, that his motive was to take the heat off Burisma and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He claimed instead that Shokin was corrupt and European leaders wanted him out.
Ukrainians Complained About Joe Biden’s Interference
Shokin himself in a sworn affidavit for a European court “testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation,” writes investigative reporter John Solomon in The Hill.
“The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin testified.
“On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation,” Shokin added.
Shokin certainly would have reason to hold a grudge over his firing, so his account is not unimpeachable. But it is supported by documents from Burisma’s legal team in America, which appeared to be establishing a foothold in Ukraine as Biden’s effort to fire Shokin gathered momentum, notes Solomon in The Hill article.
Ukrainian prosecutors say that since the summer of 2018, they sought to inform the U.S. Department of Justice about Joe Biden’s questionable interactions with Burisma as well as his campaign to oust Shokin. The Ukrainians felt these actions may have involved “violations of U.S. ethics laws,” the article attests.
Their efforts proved fruitless. In the fall of 2019, the Ukrainian team hired a respected former federal prosecutor to bring the information to the U.S. attorney in New York. When he showed no interest, the Ukrainians reached out to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
The former mayor of New York said that he also provided an outline of the corruption allegations to the State Department in March of 2020, and it was ignored.
Giuliani said that at the request of Attorney General William Barr, he provided the evidence to a U.S. attorney, whom he’s not at liberty to identify, and the U.S. attorney “did nothing but conduct one meaningless interview.”
“And the hard drive at the core of this [scandal] was delivered to the FBI at or about the same time, and the FBI has conducted zero investigation,” Giuliani attested. That path of inaction has blinded the American people and put the country in jeopardy, he said.
*****
‘I Saw Stuff’
John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a Delaware computer repair store where Hunter Biden allegedly dropped off laptops in April 2019, told Fox News that he was frightened by what he saw on the hard drive.
“I just don’t know what to say, or what I’m allowed to say,” Isaac said. “I know that I saw, I saw stuff. And I was concerned. I was concerned that somebody might want to come looking for this stuff eventually and I wanted it out of my shop.”
Isaac said the man who he believes to be Hunter Biden dropped off three laptops at his store in April 2019, only one of which was salvageable. While repairing the laptop, Isaac said he discovered disturbing material.
The customer did not return for the laptop within 90 days and Isaac could not get in touch with him. Isaac said he first searched the emails in June or July of 2019.
“If I’m somebody that has no journalistic ability, no detective or investigative ability and I was able to find [incriminating] stuff in a short period of time, somebody else should have been able to find something to show,” Isaac said.
In September, he contacted an intermediary about the emails. The intermediary then contacted the FBI.
According to Isaac’s account, the FBI first made a forensic copy of the laptop, then returned weeks later with a subpoena and confiscated it. When he stopped hearing from the FBI, Isaac said he contacted several members of Congress, who did not respond. At that point, his intermediary reached out to Rudy Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello.
When asked what he hoped would come of the information once it went public, Isaac referenced Trump’s impeachment as a motivating factor, recalling that it had made him feel frustrated and helpless. He also stressed his need for his own personal safety.
“I wanted — above all, I wanted safety and security,” Isaac said. “I wanted anonymity. I wanted just to be able to wash my hands of it, and like it never happened. And that did not happen.”
*****
Evidence Was Kept Hidden During Trump’s Impeachment
The NY Post revelations shed light on Biden’s web of entanglement in his son’s dealings with Burisma, which remained unknown until the bombshell discovery of Hunter Biden’s emails—and whose scope is still not clear.
One of the most troubling questions about the saga, however, is why the emails remained under wraps throughout the impeachment trial.
During the impeachment proceedings, the president’s legal team made efforts to confront the allegations against Trump by claiming there was evidence that Burisma was paying Hunter Biden for his access to the Obama administration. But that evidence was never produced.
One can now make an educated guess as to what—and where—that evidence was.
“How come [the existence of the laptop] didn’t pop up during the impeachment trial? There is material on here that’s exculpatory to President Trump. They should have turned that stuff over,” Costello told Fox News. “Who knows whether they ever even looked at it? Why did the FBI sit on this? They’ve had it for eleven months!”
Why this explosive evidence was withheld from the American people by the Justice Department is a subject that would once have been eagerly tackled by the nation’s most talented journalists. Given the media’s anti-Trump bias and the erosion of journalistic integrity today, however, the truth may never come to light.

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