This is Ethics 101-level stuff, so I find your cluelessness really hard to believe. I would like to say "I can't help you," but I'll respond for the record and for posterity.
The conflict of interest was that Biden had direct family members self-dealing, making millions off the family name, in foreign countries when Biden was VP. There was a conflict of interest , or at least the appearance of a conflict of interest, as to whether Biden would act in the best interests of his oath of office, or whether he would act in the best interest of his family members' bank accounts.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/12/hunter-biden-corruption-515583“Even though this administration isn’t corrupt on the same level as the previous administration, which seemed to embrace the corruption,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor and government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis, “the public has reason to be concerned.”
"I think Hunter and James Biden should not have entered into those relationships, full stop," Weissman said. "To the extent those occurred while Joe Biden was the vice president, there's a worry that they hope to get something direct from the Obama administration."
Weissman added that even after Biden was vice president, there should still have been concern about the potential for "investing in these family members to get future benefits in the possibility … that Joe Biden would become president later on."<<<
I'm sure your response will be ol' Joe is squeaky clean, everybody's hunky-dory, nothing to see here, move along folks, go blue team. But the conflicts of interest are clear as a bell.
none of what you describe is an actual conflict of interest. it's just descriptions of dodgy behavior by Hunter.
what could Biden as President do that could possibly be helpful to Hunter's China related investments? If you can't answer that question, then you've got nothing.
And as far as I can tell from this wapo article, Hunter does not even have a current relationship with China. If that's true, the notion of a conflict of interest is even more ludicrous.
There's a reason that Thiessen didn't actually name something that Biden should recuse himself from.
If you can't understand how Hunter and James Biden's foreign business dealings didn't present a conflict of interest to VP Biden, then I truly can't help you.
Obviously you don't understand ethics in this context. It is well-known that just the appearance of a conflict of interest is the same as a conflict of interest. Look it up. And whoever has even the appearance of a conflict of interest should do something to stop it, or at least disclose it fully. It seems questionable, at best, whether Joe did either.
you still haven't described either what the conflict of interest is, or what Biden could possibly do to avoid it.
Especially if it's the case that Hunter has no active investments with CEFC (the China company)
These are fundamental questions, which you continue to avoid. Probably because you have no answer
The conflict of interest regarding Thomas is as clear as day.
I explained the conflict of interest clearly in 10:49 am post. And linked two articles that explained it further, which included non-right wing expert sources offering their perspective.
And I said what Biden could have done to avoid it in 1:03 pm post.
Again, it's Ethics 101, which you seem unable to grasp, or more likely unwilling to grasp because it casts the blue-team manager in an unflattering light. And we can't have that.
The issue as I see it is that there was absolutely nothing VP Biden could have done to stop his brother and son from trading on the family name in other countries. Was he supposed to resign as VP?
And to this point there is no evidence he ever acted on behalf of either James or Hunter.
There's a sleaze factor to all of this. But on the part of James and Hunter. And at this point no evidence that Joe involved himself in it.
So, "not me, them! (Joe points at his son and brother, who look down sheepishly)"?
That's good enough? Shouldn't you expect more from the Vice President of the United States, whose administration (then and now) prided itself on having the highest ethical standards?
what is your suggestion for what Joe Biden should have done about all this? You seem pretty outraged over it, so you must think there was some action he should have taken.
I don't see anything in your linked articles that spell out an actual conflict of interest. Maybe you can point them out to me.
If Hunter has no active relationship with CEFC, can there be a conflict of interest?
For about the 3rd time, answer that. It shouldn't take more than a sentence or two.
I really question your ability to read sometimes. Those articles consist of nothing but criticism of Hunter's activities, which I have no argument with. They don't speak at all about conflicts of interest with Joe Biden.
Probably, again, because there are none.
You know, part of the reason these rabbit holes with you go on forever is because you avoid answering basic questions.
The issue as I see it is that there was absolutely nothing VP Biden could have done to stop his brother and son from trading on the family name in other countries. Was he supposed to resign as VP?
And to this point there is no evidence he ever acted on behalf of either James or Hunter.
There's a sleaze factor to all of this. But on the part of James and Hunter. And at this point no evidence that Joe involved himself in it.
So, "not me, them! (Joe points at his son and brother, who look down sheepishly)"?
That's good enough? Shouldn't you expect more from the Vice President of the United States, whose administration (then and now) prided itself on having the highest ethical standards?
what is your suggestion for what Joe Biden should have done about all this? You seem pretty outraged over it, so you must think there was some action he should have taken.
He says it's in his 1:03 post, which is below, but your guess is as good as mine.
I guess it's "do something to stop it or at least disclose it fully"
Whatever "it" is. What was Joe Biden supposed to stop exactly? This stuff all happened before he was even President.
If you can't understand how Hunter and James Biden's foreign business dealings didn't present a conflict of interest to VP Biden, then I truly can't help you.
Obviously you don't understand ethics in this context. It is well-known that just the appearance of a conflict of interest is the same as a conflict of interest. Look it up. And whoever has even the appearance of a conflict of interest should do something to stop it, or at least disclose it fully. It seems questionable, at best, whether Joe did either.
Again, it's Ethics 101, which you seem unable to grasp, or more likely unwilling to grasp because it casts the blue-team manager in an unflattering light. And we can't have that.
It may not be “Ethics 101”, but lecturing on something you haven’t shown you understand, combined with insulting the people who point that out, is Honors Trolling.
I don't see anything in your linked articles that spell out an actual conflict of interest. Maybe you can point them out to me.
If Hunter has no active relationship with CEFC, can there be a conflict of interest?
For about the 3rd time, answer that. It shouldn't take more than a sentence or two.
I really question your ability to read sometimes. Those articles consist of nothing but criticism of Hunter's activities, which I have no argument with. They don't speak at all about conflicts of interest with Joe Biden.
Probably, again, because there are none.
You know, part of the reason these rabbit holes with you go on forever is because you avoid answering basic questions.
If in all the years you have lived on this earth (IDK, 50-60 I guess?), you haven't learned enough about ethics to recognize that the self-dealing of Joe Biden's family members was a fundamental conflict of interest for VP Biden, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to help you this afternoon here on this internet message board.
I suggest you take a class or something. I imagine you can find some good free stuff online.
The issue as I see it is that there was absolutely nothing VP Biden could have done to stop his brother and son from trading on the family name in other countries. Was he supposed to resign as VP?
And to this point there is no evidence he ever acted on behalf of either James or Hunter.
There's a sleaze factor to all of this. But on the part of James and Hunter. And at this point no evidence that Joe involved himself in it.
So, "not me, them! (Joe points at his son and brother, who look down sheepishly)"?
That's good enough? Shouldn't you expect more from the Vice President of the United States, whose administration (then and now) prided itself on having the highest ethical standards?
what is your suggestion for what Joe Biden should have done about all this? You seem pretty outraged over it, so you must think there was some action he should have taken.
You didn't say it wasn't, so I assume "Not me, them!" is a good enough ethical standard for you?
My suggestion is, when Biden was VP, he should have requested his family members cease self-dealing on their family name in a way that could invite scrutiny on VP Joe Biden, potential future Presidential candidate Joe Biden, and potential future president Joe Biden. If the family members declined to cease their self-dealing, I would make sure I disclosed the arrangements as fully as I possibly could.
I don't see anything in your linked articles that spell out an actual conflict of interest. Maybe you can point them out to me.
If Hunter has no active relationship with CEFC, can there be a conflict of interest?
For about the 3rd time, answer that. It shouldn't take more than a sentence or two.
I really question your ability to read sometimes. Those articles consist of nothing but criticism of Hunter's activities, which I have no argument with. They don't speak at all about conflicts of interest with Joe Biden.
Probably, again, because there are none.
You know, part of the reason these rabbit holes with you go on forever is because you avoid answering basic questions.
If in all the years you have lived on this earth (IDK, 50-60 I guess?), you haven't learned enough about ethics to recognize that the self-dealing of Joe Biden's family members was a fundamental conflict of interest for VP Biden, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to help you this afternoon here on this internet message board.
I suggest you take a class or something. I imagine you can find some good free stuff online.
if it's so simple, you should be able to clearly explain why there's more substance to this than just an appearance of conflict of interest.
with regard to Ukraine and Hunter Biden, there's this:
Burisma Holdings was not under scrutiny at the time Joe Biden called for Shokin to be removed, per the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency that has worked closely with the FBI.
In 2014, Shokin had investigated Burisma for money laundering and tax irregularities, per USA TODAY.The probe focused on 2010-12, according to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Hunter Biden — who joined the board in 2014 and served on it until early 2019 — was not the subject of the investigation.
Our rating: False Based on our research, the claim that Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion from Ukraine to save his son's job is FALSE. The then-vice president leveraged aid dollars to persuade the country to oust its top prosecutor as part of anti-corruption efforts endorsed by other international players that were unrelated to his son, Hunter Biden.
dude, you're describing something that could have happened years ago.
wtf does that have to do with today?
And what exactly was he supposed to do anyway? Bar Hunter from doing what, exactly? Not deal with China? Not deal with anyone? Not use his family connections? How can you possibly enforce such a thing?
The issue as I see it is that there was absolutely nothing VP Biden could have done to stop his brother and son from trading on the family name in other countries. Was he supposed to resign as VP?
And to this point there is no evidence he ever acted on behalf of either James or Hunter.
There's a sleaze factor to all of this. But on the part of James and Hunter. And at this point no evidence that Joe involved himself in it.
So, "not me, them! (Joe points at his son and brother, who look down sheepishly)"?
That's good enough? Shouldn't you expect more from the Vice President of the United States, whose administration (then and now) prided itself on having the highest ethical standards?
what is your suggestion for what Joe Biden should have done about all this? You seem pretty outraged over it, so you must think there was some action he should have taken.
You didn't say it wasn't, so I assume "Not me, them!" is a good enough ethical standard for you?
My suggestion is, when Biden was VP, he should have requested his family members cease self-dealing on their family name in a way that could invite scrutiny on VP Joe Biden, potential future Presidential candidate Joe Biden, and potential future president Joe Biden. If the family members declined to cease their self-dealing, I would make sure I disclosed the arrangements as fully as I possibly could.
Actually, it should be a good enough ethical standard for anyone. Do you think it would be fair for me to hold you responsible for the ethical behavior of a sibling or some other family member?
We don't know to what extent Joe Biden requested Hunter not work for Burisma. And I'm not aware that when he did it was kept secret. I was under the impression it was well-known and not covered up.
and maybe this was forgotten, but in 2020, even Republicans couldn't find any wrongdoing by Joe Biden as a result of his son's business in Ukraine. The worst they could come up with was to call it "problematic."
A report released Wednesday by Senate Republicans found that the role of Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma was "awkward" and at times "problematic" for U.S. officials dealing with the country, but provides no new evidence and found no instance of policy being altered as a result of his role.
The issue as I see it is that there was absolutely nothing VP Biden could have done to stop his brother and son from trading on the family name in other countries. Was he supposed to resign as VP?
And to this point there is no evidence he ever acted on behalf of either James or Hunter.
There's a sleaze factor to all of this. But on the part of James and Hunter. And at this point no evidence that Joe involved himself in it.
So, "not me, them! (Joe points at his son and brother, who look down sheepishly)"?
That's good enough? Shouldn't you expect more from the Vice President of the United States, whose administration (then and now) prided itself on having the highest ethical standards?
what is your suggestion for what Joe Biden should have done about all this? You seem pretty outraged over it, so you must think there was some action he should have taken.
You didn't say it wasn't, so I assume "Not me, them!" is a good enough ethical standard for you?
My suggestion is, when Biden was VP, he should have requested his family members cease self-dealing on their family name in a way that could invite scrutiny on VP Joe Biden, potential future Presidential candidate Joe Biden, and potential future president Joe Biden. If the family members declined to cease their self-dealing, I would make sure I disclosed the arrangements as fully as I possibly could.
Actually, it should be a good enough ethical standard for anyone. Do you think it would be fair for me to hold you responsible for the ethical behavior of a sibling or some other family member?
If I'm VPOTUS, and my family member could compromise me and by extension the U.S. government: YES.
The president and vice president (as well as other elected leaders) are not "anyone". They should be held to a higher standard. I'm surprised you seem to not believe this.
The issue as I see it is that there was absolutely nothing VP Biden could have done to stop his brother and son from trading on the family name in other countries. Was he supposed to resign as VP?
And to this point there is no evidence he ever acted on behalf of either James or Hunter.
There's a sleaze factor to all of this. But on the part of James and Hunter. And at this point no evidence that Joe involved himself in it.
So, "not me, them! (Joe points at his son and brother, who look down sheepishly)"?
That's good enough? Shouldn't you expect more from the Vice President of the United States, whose administration (then and now) prided itself on having the highest ethical standards?
what is your suggestion for what Joe Biden should have done about all this? You seem pretty outraged over it, so you must think there was some action he should have taken.
You didn't say it wasn't, so I assume "Not me, them!" is a good enough ethical standard for you?
My suggestion is, when Biden was VP, he should have requested his family members cease self-dealing on their family name in a way that could invite scrutiny on VP Joe Biden, potential future Presidential candidate Joe Biden, and potential future president Joe Biden. If the family members declined to cease their self-dealing, I would make sure I disclosed the arrangements as fully as I possibly could.
Actually, it should be a good enough ethical standard for anyone. Do you think it would be fair for me to hold you responsible for the ethical behavior of a sibling or some other family member?
If I'm VPOTUS, and my family member could compromise me and by extension the U.S. government: YES.
The president and vice president (as well as other elected leaders) are not "anyone". They should be held to a higher standard. I'm surprised you seem to not believe this.
I do believe that there are ethical standards to be held to. But I only hold the office holder to those standards, not their relatives who don't share a household with them. For instance, the business dealings of Ivanka and Jared in other countries were not problematic because they were related to Trump as much as because they were actually White House advisors.
and if you think this is partisan it's not. If for example you want to write about how awful it is that members of both parties in Congress trade individual stocks, I'm with you on that. It's corrupt, and it's corrupt when Democrats do it, as much as when Republicans do it.
This 2019 article discusses how Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election and there were more fishy activities related to Biden(s) and Birisma. As others have pointed out, it does not look good for Biden and he was called out for this by the New York Times. Still Biden did not get the scrutiny he deserved. Also notice how closely the Atalantic council was involdved.
Mate: . . .So let’s talk about Joe Biden here and his involvement with this story. One facet of this that I find striking is that once again, kind of like Russiagate, Democrats are centering a scandal that forces the highlighting of their own corruption.
So in the case of Russiagate, by talking about the stolen Democratic Party emails, that brought attention to the fact that those emails revealed corruption by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in their bias against Bernie Sanders.
Now again the victim, purported victim here, is Joe Biden, so now Democrats are in this awkward position where they have to defend the fact that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, got a $50,000 a month seat on a Ukrainian gas company’s board of directors, months after his father helped back a coup in Ukraine.
And Democrats have to defend that once again, and I guess my read on this, Max, is even if the suspicions from Giuliani, that the prosecutor that Biden got fired was fired because he was investigating Hunter Biden’s company, even if that’s not true, which I don’t have a reason to believe that at this point because it’s hard to trust what comes out of Ukraine.
But even if Giuliani’s suspicions are not true, just what is established is damning enough: the fact that Hunter Biden got this gig, I mean, imagine if one of Trump’s kids had gotten a comparable gig in Venezuela had, say, Trump’s coup in Venezuela had been successful, like Biden’s coup in Ukraine was.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, the Democrats, by driving towards impeachment, you know, they might help their prospects winning some Senate seats, they might impeach Trump in the House, who knows? But they’re going to keep this story out there, and it’s a story that is incredibly harmful for Joe Biden, because it is largely true, it is a case of legal corruption in Washington, and it’s something that Biden largely can’t deny.
So what Giuliani has done, and I think maybe his mistake is he’s gone overboard and tried to allege that Biden, going in, in late 2015, early 2016, to Ukraine and demanding the firing of the general prosecutor, the attorney general of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, was related to an investigation Shokin was carrying out against Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that had hired Biden’s son Hunter Biden as a board member to the tune of $50,000 a month, in order to cover for his own son.
Now that may have happened, it may be true. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. The problem is there’s no concrete evidence to prove it, and so the Democrats are hammering Giuliani about that and saying it’s completely meritless. And right now, it is.
What isn’t meritless is the fact that the same month that Joe Biden made his first big visit to Ukraine in April 2014 to raise the morale of this flailing government that had been installed by a coup that Biden personally midwifed, his son Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of this insanely corrupt company, by its oligarch founder Mykola Zlochevsky, who was currently under investigation in the UK and had $23 million of his assets frozen by the UK government because he was considered to be so corrupt.
So Zlochevsky wanted to not only get out from that UK investigation but also to improve his name in Washington, because he was associated with the previous government of Yanukovych, who is considered pro-Russian. And so he hires Hunter Biden, he brings on Devon Archer, who, you know, is close to the Heinz family, basically close to John Kerry, and he basically starts paying anyone he can to whitewash his corruption.
Hunter Biden then enlists a law firm, a powerful law firm run by David Boies, where he’s a co-counsel, to start advising Burisma on how to supposedly improve its ethics. And The New York Times, at the time, in an editorial board op-ed written by the whole editorial board, wrote this, “It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.”
So the issue is, you’re Joe Biden, the New York Times editorial board calls you out for your son’s intimate association with one of the most corrupt oligarchs in one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where you have just implemented regime change as a personal project that you deeply believe in, and you have never spoken with him about his business dealings once. I find that completely unbelievable. I find that totally unbelievable.
And the timing of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board is very fishy, so this is a real issue for Joe Biden, and for anyone to say “Oh, there’s nothing there. Let’s move on,” they’re not holding Biden up to the scrutiny he deserves. He’s running for president, and this is someone who I think is not trustworthy.
And Trump is doing what he did to Hillary Clinton, pointing to, using the Peter Schweizer Clinton Cash investigation, about all of the money that the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation was pumping in from the Gulf States. And then, you know, doing these arms deals that Hillary Clinton was authorizing as, as Secretary of State, to those very same theocratic monarchies in the Gulf, and it gets framed in a partisan way, but the fact is the Clinton Global Initiative was an influence peddling operation and it did great damage to public trust in Hillary Clinton.
And so this whole narrative is coming back on Joseph Biden, and it’s doing damage to him no matter whether no…whether or not Giuliani is able to come up with the evidence, that Biden fired Shokin to protect his son.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and on that point you raised about Joe Biden, saying he’s never discussed Hunter’s business dealings with him, well, that’s contradicted by Hunter himself, in that long profile in The New Yorker about Hunter’s personal struggles, including drug addiction.
The article says, “As Hunter recalled, his father discussed Burisma with him just once,” and it quotes Hunter saying, “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do,’ ” unquote, so right there, even a contradiction from Biden’s own kid.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’m sure the conversations went further than that. I’m sure they did, and so Joe Biden is not telling the truth about that.
AARON MATÉ: So, Max, speaking of Burisma, let’s talk more about this company and their influence in Washington. It’s just one more facet of all the ways in which corruption in Ukraine intertwines with corruption in Washington. Talk to us more about what you know about Burisma and its ties to the lobbying world in DC.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, this is another angle of this so-called Ukrainegate scandal that’s been completely ignored. And I think once we probe deeper into it we can maybe understand why it’s being ignored. It’s just another story about legal bipartisan corruption in Washington.
Basically, you know, Hunter Biden enlisted his law firm where he was co-counsel to quote-unquote improve Burisma’s corporate governance. And by January of 2015, the Burisma founder, who’s this corrupt oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky, who had had to flee Ukraine, flee charges that he was illegally enriching himself, his assets were unfrozen in the UK.
Now, later that year Geoffrey Pyatt, who was the US Ambassador to Ukraine, who was another person who was a key architect of the Maidan coup who was handing out cookies along with Victoria Nuland in Maidan Square, who was plotting who would be the successor to Yanukovych, goes and declares that the prosecutor general Viktor Shokin needs to be fired for corruption. They take him out and then they bring in this guy Leshchenko, who everybody says is discredited now, but Joe Biden, I think last year called him “solid,” very weird.
Leshchenko ultimately closes the criminal probes in Ukraine, of Zlochevsky and Burisma. And the date here is really important. Those criminal probes were closed by Leshchenko, who Joe Biden called “solid” on January 12, 2017.
Less than a week later, on January 17, Joe Biden travels to Ukraine and makes what is his final speech as vice president. Ukraine was so important to Joe Biden that he chose to make his final public appearance as vice president a speech to the Ukrainian Rada — the Ukrainian Parliament — and he calls for them to continue on this IMF-led path of austerity and mass privatization, and then he urges them to, quote, “press forward with energy reforms that are eliminating Ukraine’s dependence on Russian gas.”
This means a boon for companies like Burisma, that are domestic gas producers, because Ukraine and Russia are having all of this tension thanks to the US, which is funding and influencing this proxy war in the east of Ukraine. So Ukraine has to rely on domestic gas producers instead of Russian gas, so Burisma’s doing really well.
Exactly two days after Biden’s speech and about a week after the charges are dropped against its founder, Burisma announces a major cooperative agreement with the Atlantic Council, which is one of the major think tanks focusing on Ukraine and Eastern Europe and Washington.
It’s basically NATO’s unofficial think tank, and it takes money from the Gulf States, it takes money from the arms industry, it takes money from corporations like Chevron and Exxon Mobil and everyone else.
But now it signs a cooperative agreement with Burisma, which was, had been under investigation for years, its founder had had to flee Ukraine for illegally enriching itself, and it was so corrupt that even at that time, after the charges were dropped against it in Ukraine, the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine rejected Burisma’s application for membership.
A western financial institution told the Financial Times that, you know, “we’ve never worked with Burisma for integrity reasons.” But the Atlantic Council was willing to do so, and you know who inked that deal was John Herbst, who was a US ambassador to Ukraine under Bush, who testified to Congress a year before in support of all of these reform measures and said he was against corruption.
So the point is, well, let me make another point. The Atlantic Council is very closely connected to Joe Biden. Biden has rolled out his foreign policy vision while he was vice president at the Atlantic Council, given several speeches there, and Joe Biden’s top adviser, his top foreign policy adviser, his point man on Ukraine, Michael Carpenter, who heads the Penn Biden Center, basically Biden’s think tank, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council.
So we’re told that Biden went to Ukraine and told them to fire the prosecutor, even though it would hurt his son, that he was so concerned about corruption in Ukraine. But here you have an institution in Washington very closely linked to the Biden campaign and Biden, which was, is taking as much as $250,000 a year from Burisma, this hopelessly corrupt company that’s at the center of the Ukrainegate scandal.
I think that it’s shocking that no one has even scratched the surface of this angle, and it’s because this is the way Washington works. As I said before, there are a million Manaforts in Washington and there are no prosecutors following them around.
AARON MATÉ: Alright, so we’re going to pause there and come back in part two and discuss the underlying issue here, when it comes to the US military assistance to Ukraine that Trump briefly froze, the apoplectic reaction in Washington to that and what is the actual impact of that military aid and the interests behind it.
The piece about the Atlantic Council contains this paragraph near the top:
This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board.
Now, you see, this is flatly not true. Blumenthal just brazenly lies, and his fans just lap it up.
Blumenthal is a freaking embarrassment.
The other piece's premises is just ridiculous and really doesn't warrant any serious consideration.
This 2019 article discusses how Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election and there were more fishy activities related to Biden(s) and Birisma. As others have pointed out, it does not look good for Biden and he was called out for this by the New York Times. Still Biden did not get the scrutiny he deserved. Also notice how closely the Atalantic council was involdved.
Mate: . . .So let’s talk about Joe Biden here and his involvement with this story. One facet of this that I find striking is that once again, kind of like Russiagate, Democrats are centering a scandal that forces the highlighting of their own corruption.
So in the case of Russiagate, by talking about the stolen Democratic Party emails, that brought attention to the fact that those emails revealed corruption by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in their bias against Bernie Sanders.
Now again the victim, purported victim here, is Joe Biden, so now Democrats are in this awkward position where they have to defend the fact that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, got a $50,000 a month seat on a Ukrainian gas company’s board of directors, months after his father helped back a coup in Ukraine.
And Democrats have to defend that once again, and I guess my read on this, Max, is even if the suspicions from Giuliani, that the prosecutor that Biden got fired was fired because he was investigating Hunter Biden’s company, even if that’s not true, which I don’t have a reason to believe that at this point because it’s hard to trust what comes out of Ukraine.
But even if Giuliani’s suspicions are not true, just what is established is damning enough: the fact that Hunter Biden got this gig, I mean, imagine if one of Trump’s kids had gotten a comparable gig in Venezuela had, say, Trump’s coup in Venezuela had been successful, like Biden’s coup in Ukraine was.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, the Democrats, by driving towards impeachment, you know, they might help their prospects winning some Senate seats, they might impeach Trump in the House, who knows? But they’re going to keep this story out there, and it’s a story that is incredibly harmful for Joe Biden, because it is largely true, it is a case of legal corruption in Washington, and it’s something that Biden largely can’t deny.
So what Giuliani has done, and I think maybe his mistake is he’s gone overboard and tried to allege that Biden, going in, in late 2015, early 2016, to Ukraine and demanding the firing of the general prosecutor, the attorney general of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, was related to an investigation Shokin was carrying out against Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that had hired Biden’s son Hunter Biden as a board member to the tune of $50,000 a month, in order to cover for his own son.
Now that may have happened, it may be true. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. The problem is there’s no concrete evidence to prove it, and so the Democrats are hammering Giuliani about that and saying it’s completely meritless. And right now, it is.
What isn’t meritless is the fact that the same month that Joe Biden made his first big visit to Ukraine in April 2014 to raise the morale of this flailing government that had been installed by a coup that Biden personally midwifed, his son Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of this insanely corrupt company, by its oligarch founder Mykola Zlochevsky, who was currently under investigation in the UK and had $23 million of his assets frozen by the UK government because he was considered to be so corrupt.
So Zlochevsky wanted to not only get out from that UK investigation but also to improve his name in Washington, because he was associated with the previous government of Yanukovych, who is considered pro-Russian. And so he hires Hunter Biden, he brings on Devon Archer, who, you know, is close to the Heinz family, basically close to John Kerry, and he basically starts paying anyone he can to whitewash his corruption.
Hunter Biden then enlists a law firm, a powerful law firm run by David Boies, where he’s a co-counsel, to start advising Burisma on how to supposedly improve its ethics. And The New York Times, at the time, in an editorial board op-ed written by the whole editorial board, wrote this, “It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.”
So the issue is, you’re Joe Biden, the New York Times editorial board calls you out for your son’s intimate association with one of the most corrupt oligarchs in one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where you have just implemented regime change as a personal project that you deeply believe in, and you have never spoken with him about his business dealings once. I find that completely unbelievable. I find that totally unbelievable.
And the timing of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board is very fishy, so this is a real issue for Joe Biden, and for anyone to say “Oh, there’s nothing there. Let’s move on,” they’re not holding Biden up to the scrutiny he deserves. He’s running for president, and this is someone who I think is not trustworthy.
And Trump is doing what he did to Hillary Clinton, pointing to, using the Peter Schweizer Clinton Cash investigation, about all of the money that the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation was pumping in from the Gulf States. And then, you know, doing these arms deals that Hillary Clinton was authorizing as, as Secretary of State, to those very same theocratic monarchies in the Gulf, and it gets framed in a partisan way, but the fact is the Clinton Global Initiative was an influence peddling operation and it did great damage to public trust in Hillary Clinton.
And so this whole narrative is coming back on Joseph Biden, and it’s doing damage to him no matter whether no…whether or not Giuliani is able to come up with the evidence, that Biden fired Shokin to protect his son.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and on that point you raised about Joe Biden, saying he’s never discussed Hunter’s business dealings with him, well, that’s contradicted by Hunter himself, in that long profile in The New Yorker about Hunter’s personal struggles, including drug addiction.
The article says, “As Hunter recalled, his father discussed Burisma with him just once,” and it quotes Hunter saying, “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do,’ ” unquote, so right there, even a contradiction from Biden’s own kid.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’m sure the conversations went further than that. I’m sure they did, and so Joe Biden is not telling the truth about that.
AARON MATÉ: So, Max, speaking of Burisma, let’s talk more about this company and their influence in Washington. It’s just one more facet of all the ways in which corruption in Ukraine intertwines with corruption in Washington. Talk to us more about what you know about Burisma and its ties to the lobbying world in DC.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, this is another angle of this so-called Ukrainegate scandal that’s been completely ignored. And I think once we probe deeper into it we can maybe understand why it’s being ignored. It’s just another story about legal bipartisan corruption in Washington.
Basically, you know, Hunter Biden enlisted his law firm where he was co-counsel to quote-unquote improve Burisma’s corporate governance. And by January of 2015, the Burisma founder, who’s this corrupt oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky, who had had to flee Ukraine, flee charges that he was illegally enriching himself, his assets were unfrozen in the UK.
Now, later that year Geoffrey Pyatt, who was the US Ambassador to Ukraine, who was another person who was a key architect of the Maidan coup who was handing out cookies along with Victoria Nuland in Maidan Square, who was plotting who would be the successor to Yanukovych, goes and declares that the prosecutor general Viktor Shokin needs to be fired for corruption. They take him out and then they bring in this guy Leshchenko, who everybody says is discredited now, but Joe Biden, I think last year called him “solid,” very weird.
Leshchenko ultimately closes the criminal probes in Ukraine, of Zlochevsky and Burisma. And the date here is really important. Those criminal probes were closed by Leshchenko, who Joe Biden called “solid” on January 12, 2017.
Less than a week later, on January 17, Joe Biden travels to Ukraine and makes what is his final speech as vice president. Ukraine was so important to Joe Biden that he chose to make his final public appearance as vice president a speech to the Ukrainian Rada — the Ukrainian Parliament — and he calls for them to continue on this IMF-led path of austerity and mass privatization, and then he urges them to, quote, “press forward with energy reforms that are eliminating Ukraine’s dependence on Russian gas.”
This means a boon for companies like Burisma, that are domestic gas producers, because Ukraine and Russia are having all of this tension thanks to the US, which is funding and influencing this proxy war in the east of Ukraine. So Ukraine has to rely on domestic gas producers instead of Russian gas, so Burisma’s doing really well.
Exactly two days after Biden’s speech and about a week after the charges are dropped against its founder, Burisma announces a major cooperative agreement with the Atlantic Council, which is one of the major think tanks focusing on Ukraine and Eastern Europe and Washington.
It’s basically NATO’s unofficial think tank, and it takes money from the Gulf States, it takes money from the arms industry, it takes money from corporations like Chevron and Exxon Mobil and everyone else.
But now it signs a cooperative agreement with Burisma, which was, had been under investigation for years, its founder had had to flee Ukraine for illegally enriching itself, and it was so corrupt that even at that time, after the charges were dropped against it in Ukraine, the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine rejected Burisma’s application for membership.
A western financial institution told the Financial Times that, you know, “we’ve never worked with Burisma for integrity reasons.” But the Atlantic Council was willing to do so, and you know who inked that deal was John Herbst, who was a US ambassador to Ukraine under Bush, who testified to Congress a year before in support of all of these reform measures and said he was against corruption.
So the point is, well, let me make another point. The Atlantic Council is very closely connected to Joe Biden. Biden has rolled out his foreign policy vision while he was vice president at the Atlantic Council, given several speeches there, and Joe Biden’s top adviser, his top foreign policy adviser, his point man on Ukraine, Michael Carpenter, who heads the Penn Biden Center, basically Biden’s think tank, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council.
So we’re told that Biden went to Ukraine and told them to fire the prosecutor, even though it would hurt his son, that he was so concerned about corruption in Ukraine. But here you have an institution in Washington very closely linked to the Biden campaign and Biden, which was, is taking as much as $250,000 a year from Burisma, this hopelessly corrupt company that’s at the center of the Ukrainegate scandal.
I think that it’s shocking that no one has even scratched the surface of this angle, and it’s because this is the way Washington works. As I said before, there are a million Manaforts in Washington and there are no prosecutors following them around.
AARON MATÉ: Alright, so we’re going to pause there and come back in part two and discuss the underlying issue here, when it comes to the US military assistance to Ukraine that Trump briefly froze, the apoplectic reaction in Washington to that and what is the actual impact of that military aid and the interests behind it.
there's nothing more on this planet that I want to do than read a conversation between Mate and Blumenthal.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and on that point you raised about Joe Biden, saying he’s never discussed Hunter’s business dealings with him, well, that’s contradicted by Hunter himself, in that long profile in The New Yorker about Hunter’s personal struggles, including drug addiction.
The article says, “As Hunter recalled, his father discussed Burisma with him just once,” and it quotes Hunter saying, “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do,’ ” unquote, so right there, even a contradiction from Biden’s own kid.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’m sure the conversations went further than that. I’m sure they did, and so Joe Biden is not telling the truth about that.
1. The exchange between Joe Biden and Hunter sounds realistic to me as a conversation between parent and grown son, especially if the dad is trying to avoid being involved in son's business because, you know, possible conflict of interest. The exchange is pretty much the definition of "not discussing business dealings," imo.
2. Where Blumenthal says "I'm sure the conversations [sic] went further than that" - What, he's psychic? Purest speculation, esp. since the NYer quote from Hunter says they discussed "just once."
There are certainly questions that can be asked about the U.S. involvement in Ukraine over the past decade. But Hunter Biden and his laptop are at most tangential to the story.
The piece about the Atlantic Council contains this paragraph near the top:
This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board.
Now, you see, this is flatly not true. Blumenthal just brazenly lies, and his fans just lap it up.
Blumenthal is a freaking embarrassment.
The other piece's premises is just ridiculous and really doesn't warrant any serious consideration.
I mean, c'mon.
1. Try reading your own quote:
This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board.
2. Look up the word allegations in the dictionary.
3. Admit that Blumenthal is NOT lying. You just don't know how to read.
3. Read the rest of the article again and take it seriously. Look for the parts about the prosecutor.
4. Notice it mentions key Biden advisor Michael Carpenter:
On January 12, 2017, the criminal probes of Zlochevsky and Burisma were officially closed under the watch of a new Ukrainian prosecutor.
At the January 23, 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event where Biden made his now-notorious comments about threatening the Ukrainian government with the withdrawal of a one billion dollar loan if it did not fire Shokin – “well son of a ****, he got fired!” Biden exclaimed – Carpenter was by his side, rattling off tough talking points about Russian interference.
. . .As the scrutiny of Biden’s dealings in Ukraine intensifies, Carpenter has thrust himself into the media limelight to defend his longtime boss.
. . .In an October 7 Washington Post op-ed denouncing Trump’s “smear campaign” against Biden, Carpenter insisted that Biden had gone to great lengths to remove the Ukrainian prosecutor, Shokin, for his failure to take action against Burisma. That evening, Carpenter took to Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC to reinforce the message that Biden moved against “corrupt players” in Ukraine, presumably referring to Burisma.
At no point did he mention that Burisma was funding the think tank that hosted him as a senior fellow.
5. At no point does Blumenthal say what you accuse him of. However, Biden's advisor is trying to make the case that Biden dumped the prosecutor BECAUSE he DID NOT prosecute Burisma. Now that is some "allegation." Then we see the new prosecutor had closed down all the investigations! Wow. Why was he so OK with the new prosecutor letting them off no problem?
6. And before you double down on your mistake, let's look at the other link I gave which CLEARLY states:
So what Giuliani has done, and I think maybe his mistake is he’s gone overboard and tried to allege that Biden, going in, in late 2015, early 2016, to Ukraine and demanding the firing of the general prosecutor, the attorney general of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, was related to an investigation Shokin was carrying out against Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that had hired Biden’s son Hunter Biden as a board member to the tune of $50,000 a month, in order to cover for his own son.
Now that may have happened, it may be true. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. The problem is there’s no concrete evidence to prove it, and so the Democrats are hammering Giuliani about that and saying it’s completely meritless. And right now, it is.
1. The exchange between Joe Biden and Hunter sounds realistic to me as a conversation between parent and grown son, especially if the dad is trying to avoid being involved in son's business because, you know, possible conflict of interest. The exchange is pretty much the definition of "not discussing business dealings," imo.
2. Where Blumenthal says "I'm sure the conversations [sic] went further than that" - What, he's psychic? Purest speculation, esp. since the NYer quote from Hunter says they discussed "just once."
I looked on those links and I did not see any quotes. I saw an article written by some guy and comments by Robert Roe. I did not see what Putin said. Where is the link or let me know what I'm supposed to comment on.
The piece about the Atlantic Council contains this paragraph near the top:
This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board.
Now, you see, this is flatly not true. Blumenthal just brazenly lies, and his fans just lap it up.
Blumenthal is a freaking embarrassment.
The other piece's premises is just ridiculous and really doesn't warrant any serious consideration.
I mean, c'mon.
1. Try reading your own quote:
This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board.
2. Look up the word allegations in the dictionary.
3. Admit that Blumenthal is NOT lying. You just don't know how to read.
3. Read the rest of the article again and take it seriously. Look for the parts about the prosecutor.
4. Notice it mentions key Biden advisor Michael Carpenter:
On January 12, 2017, the criminal probes of Zlochevsky and Burisma were officially closed under the watch of a new Ukrainian prosecutor.
At the January 23, 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event where Biden made his now-notorious comments about threatening the Ukrainian government with the withdrawal of a one billion dollar loan if it did not fire Shokin – “well son of a ****, he got fired!” Biden exclaimed – Carpenter was by his side, rattling off tough talking points about Russian interference.
. . .As the scrutiny of Biden’s dealings in Ukraine intensifies, Carpenter has thrust himself into the media limelight to defend his longtime boss.
. . .In an October 7 Washington Post op-ed denouncing Trump’s “smear campaign” against Biden, Carpenter insisted that Biden had gone to great lengths to remove the Ukrainian prosecutor, Shokin, for his failure to take action against Burisma. That evening, Carpenter took to Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC to reinforce the message that Biden moved against “corrupt players” in Ukraine, presumably referring to Burisma.
At no point did he mention that Burisma was funding the think tank that hosted him as a senior fellow.
5. At no point does Blumenthal say what you accuse him of. However, Biden's advisor is trying to make the case that Biden dumped the prosecutor BECAUSE he DID NOT prosecute Burisma. Now that is some "allegation." Then we see the new prosecutor had closed down all the investigations! Wow. Why was he so OK with the new prosecutor letting them off no problem?
6. And before you double down on your mistake, let's look at the other link I gave which CLEARLY states:
So what Giuliani has done, and I think maybe his mistake is he’s gone overboard and tried to allege that Biden, going in, in late 2015, early 2016, to Ukraine and demanding the firing of the general prosecutor, the attorney general of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, was related to an investigation Shokin was carrying out against Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that had hired Biden’s son Hunter Biden as a board member to the tune of $50,000 a month, in order to cover for his own son.
Now that may have happened, it may be true. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. The problem is there’s no concrete evidence to prove it, and so the Democrats are hammering Giuliani about that and saying it’s completely meritless. And right now, it is.
. . .
arghhhh, ya got me!
Actually, I got lazy writing the post and thought about but did not include a caveat about him using the word "allegations", which of course makes him technically truthful but still guilty of spreading bullsh!t, since the allegations are bogus.
I don't see anything in your linked articles that spell out an actual conflict of interest. Maybe you can point them out to me.
If Hunter has no active relationship with CEFC, can there be a conflict of interest?
For about the 3rd time, answer that. It shouldn't take more than a sentence or two.
I really question your ability to read sometimes. Those articles consist of nothing but criticism of Hunter's activities, which I have no argument with. They don't speak at all about conflicts of interest with Joe Biden.
Probably, again, because there are none.
You know, part of the reason these rabbit holes with you go on forever is because you avoid answering basic questions.
If in all the years you have lived on this earth (IDK, 50-60 I guess?), you haven't learned enough about ethics to recognize that the self-dealing of Joe Biden's family members was a fundamental conflict of interest for VP Biden, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to help you this afternoon here on this internet message board.
I suggest you take a class or something. I imagine you can find some good free stuff online.
Dude. They understand just fine. It's just that they won't apply that standard in this case, for what I'm sure are completely valid and even handed reasons.
This 2019 article discusses how Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election and there were more fishy activities related to Biden(s) and Birisma. As others have pointed out, it does not look good for Biden and he was called out for this by the New York Times. Still Biden did not get the scrutiny he deserved. Also notice how closely the Atalantic council was involdved.
Mate: . . .So let’s talk about Joe Biden here and his involvement with this story. One facet of this that I find striking is that once again, kind of like Russiagate, Democrats are centering a scandal that forces the highlighting of their own corruption.
So in the case of Russiagate, by talking about the stolen Democratic Party emails, that brought attention to the fact that those emails revealed corruption by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in their bias against Bernie Sanders.
Now again the victim, purported victim here, is Joe Biden, so now Democrats are in this awkward position where they have to defend the fact that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, got a $50,000 a month seat on a Ukrainian gas company’s board of directors, months after his father helped back a coup in Ukraine.
And Democrats have to defend that once again, and I guess my read on this, Max, is even if the suspicions from Giuliani, that the prosecutor that Biden got fired was fired because he was investigating Hunter Biden’s company, even if that’s not true, which I don’t have a reason to believe that at this point because it’s hard to trust what comes out of Ukraine.
But even if Giuliani’s suspicions are not true, just what is established is damning enough: the fact that Hunter Biden got this gig, I mean, imagine if one of Trump’s kids had gotten a comparable gig in Venezuela had, say, Trump’s coup in Venezuela had been successful, like Biden’s coup in Ukraine was.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, the Democrats, by driving towards impeachment, you know, they might help their prospects winning some Senate seats, they might impeach Trump in the House, who knows? But they’re going to keep this story out there, and it’s a story that is incredibly harmful for Joe Biden, because it is largely true, it is a case of legal corruption in Washington, and it’s something that Biden largely can’t deny.
So what Giuliani has done, and I think maybe his mistake is he’s gone overboard and tried to allege that Biden, going in, in late 2015, early 2016, to Ukraine and demanding the firing of the general prosecutor, the attorney general of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, was related to an investigation Shokin was carrying out against Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that had hired Biden’s son Hunter Biden as a board member to the tune of $50,000 a month, in order to cover for his own son.
Now that may have happened, it may be true. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. The problem is there’s no concrete evidence to prove it, and so the Democrats are hammering Giuliani about that and saying it’s completely meritless. And right now, it is.
What isn’t meritless is the fact that the same month that Joe Biden made his first big visit to Ukraine in April 2014 to raise the morale of this flailing government that had been installed by a coup that Biden personally midwifed, his son Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of this insanely corrupt company, by its oligarch founder Mykola Zlochevsky, who was currently under investigation in the UK and had $23 million of his assets frozen by the UK government because he was considered to be so corrupt.
So Zlochevsky wanted to not only get out from that UK investigation but also to improve his name in Washington, because he was associated with the previous government of Yanukovych, who is considered pro-Russian. And so he hires Hunter Biden, he brings on Devon Archer, who, you know, is close to the Heinz family, basically close to John Kerry, and he basically starts paying anyone he can to whitewash his corruption.
Hunter Biden then enlists a law firm, a powerful law firm run by David Boies, where he’s a co-counsel, to start advising Burisma on how to supposedly improve its ethics. And The New York Times, at the time, in an editorial board op-ed written by the whole editorial board, wrote this, “It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.”
So the issue is, you’re Joe Biden, the New York Times editorial board calls you out for your son’s intimate association with one of the most corrupt oligarchs in one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where you have just implemented regime change as a personal project that you deeply believe in, and you have never spoken with him about his business dealings once. I find that completely unbelievable. I find that totally unbelievable.
And the timing of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board is very fishy, so this is a real issue for Joe Biden, and for anyone to say “Oh, there’s nothing there. Let’s move on,” they’re not holding Biden up to the scrutiny he deserves. He’s running for president, and this is someone who I think is not trustworthy.
And Trump is doing what he did to Hillary Clinton, pointing to, using the Peter Schweizer Clinton Cash investigation, about all of the money that the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation was pumping in from the Gulf States. And then, you know, doing these arms deals that Hillary Clinton was authorizing as, as Secretary of State, to those very same theocratic monarchies in the Gulf, and it gets framed in a partisan way, but the fact is the Clinton Global Initiative was an influence peddling operation and it did great damage to public trust in Hillary Clinton.
And so this whole narrative is coming back on Joseph Biden, and it’s doing damage to him no matter whether no…whether or not Giuliani is able to come up with the evidence, that Biden fired Shokin to protect his son.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and on that point you raised about Joe Biden, saying he’s never discussed Hunter’s business dealings with him, well, that’s contradicted by Hunter himself, in that long profile in The New Yorker about Hunter’s personal struggles, including drug addiction.
The article says, “As Hunter recalled, his father discussed Burisma with him just once,” and it quotes Hunter saying, “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do,’ ” unquote, so right there, even a contradiction from Biden’s own kid.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’m sure the conversations went further than that. I’m sure they did, and so Joe Biden is not telling the truth about that.
AARON MATÉ: So, Max, speaking of Burisma, let’s talk more about this company and their influence in Washington. It’s just one more facet of all the ways in which corruption in Ukraine intertwines with corruption in Washington. Talk to us more about what you know about Burisma and its ties to the lobbying world in DC.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, this is another angle of this so-called Ukrainegate scandal that’s been completely ignored. And I think once we probe deeper into it we can maybe understand why it’s being ignored. It’s just another story about legal bipartisan corruption in Washington.
Basically, you know, Hunter Biden enlisted his law firm where he was co-counsel to quote-unquote improve Burisma’s corporate governance. And by January of 2015, the Burisma founder, who’s this corrupt oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky, who had had to flee Ukraine, flee charges that he was illegally enriching himself, his assets were unfrozen in the UK.
Now, later that year Geoffrey Pyatt, who was the US Ambassador to Ukraine, who was another person who was a key architect of the Maidan coup who was handing out cookies along with Victoria Nuland in Maidan Square, who was plotting who would be the successor to Yanukovych, goes and declares that the prosecutor general Viktor Shokin needs to be fired for corruption. They take him out and then they bring in this guy Leshchenko, who everybody says is discredited now, but Joe Biden, I think last year called him “solid,” very weird.
Leshchenko ultimately closes the criminal probes in Ukraine, of Zlochevsky and Burisma. And the date here is really important. Those criminal probes were closed by Leshchenko, who Joe Biden called “solid” on January 12, 2017.
Less than a week later, on January 17, Joe Biden travels to Ukraine and makes what is his final speech as vice president. Ukraine was so important to Joe Biden that he chose to make his final public appearance as vice president a speech to the Ukrainian Rada — the Ukrainian Parliament — and he calls for them to continue on this IMF-led path of austerity and mass privatization, and then he urges them to, quote, “press forward with energy reforms that are eliminating Ukraine’s dependence on Russian gas.”
This means a boon for companies like Burisma, that are domestic gas producers, because Ukraine and Russia are having all of this tension thanks to the US, which is funding and influencing this proxy war in the east of Ukraine. So Ukraine has to rely on domestic gas producers instead of Russian gas, so Burisma’s doing really well.
Exactly two days after Biden’s speech and about a week after the charges are dropped against its founder, Burisma announces a major cooperative agreement with the Atlantic Council, which is one of the major think tanks focusing on Ukraine and Eastern Europe and Washington.
It’s basically NATO’s unofficial think tank, and it takes money from the Gulf States, it takes money from the arms industry, it takes money from corporations like Chevron and Exxon Mobil and everyone else.
But now it signs a cooperative agreement with Burisma, which was, had been under investigation for years, its founder had had to flee Ukraine for illegally enriching itself, and it was so corrupt that even at that time, after the charges were dropped against it in Ukraine, the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine rejected Burisma’s application for membership.
A western financial institution told the Financial Times that, you know, “we’ve never worked with Burisma for integrity reasons.” But the Atlantic Council was willing to do so, and you know who inked that deal was John Herbst, who was a US ambassador to Ukraine under Bush, who testified to Congress a year before in support of all of these reform measures and said he was against corruption.
So the point is, well, let me make another point. The Atlantic Council is very closely connected to Joe Biden. Biden has rolled out his foreign policy vision while he was vice president at the Atlantic Council, given several speeches there, and Joe Biden’s top adviser, his top foreign policy adviser, his point man on Ukraine, Michael Carpenter, who heads the Penn Biden Center, basically Biden’s think tank, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council.
So we’re told that Biden went to Ukraine and told them to fire the prosecutor, even though it would hurt his son, that he was so concerned about corruption in Ukraine. But here you have an institution in Washington very closely linked to the Biden campaign and Biden, which was, is taking as much as $250,000 a year from Burisma, this hopelessly corrupt company that’s at the center of the Ukrainegate scandal.
I think that it’s shocking that no one has even scratched the surface of this angle, and it’s because this is the way Washington works. As I said before, there are a million Manaforts in Washington and there are no prosecutors following them around.
AARON MATÉ: Alright, so we’re going to pause there and come back in part two and discuss the underlying issue here, when it comes to the US military assistance to Ukraine that Trump briefly froze, the apoplectic reaction in Washington to that and what is the actual impact of that military aid and the interests behind it.
there's nothing more on this planet that I want to do than read a conversation between Mate and Blumenthal.
you still haven't described either what the conflict of interest is, or what Biden could possibly do to avoid it.
Especially if it's the case that Hunter has no active investments with CEFC (the China company)
These are fundamental questions, which you continue to avoid. Probably because you have no answer
The conflict of interest regarding Thomas is as clear as day.