Are the Walls Closing in on Joe Biden?

The president's apparent corruption is not just a domestic issue.

Ever since the days of the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, I’ve thought that Joe Biden, who then served as the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was a vicious, unprincipled partisan who would do or say anything in order to advance his career.  Character assassination was certainly not beneath him.  In short, I thought he was just another politician.  He might be guilty of a  little “honest graft,” as William L. Riordan put it Plunkett of Tammany Hall generations ago, or perhaps a bit of electoral cheating, but I never thought he would descend into outright corruption.  When conservative critics referred to the “Biden crime family,” I thought that was a bit over the top. I could hardly believe that a U.S. Senator, or a vice president, could be a crook.  Yet evidence abounds.

Appalling as this is, if true, what bothers me most about the continuing revelations is not the evidence of the president’s venality, or even that it appears to have been widespread, but that the corruption extended to the direction of American foreign policy and raises the question of whether we are supporting a proxy war in Ukraine, which could spiral into nuclear conflict, to cover up Joe Biden’s corruption.  Put simply, are we risking the thermonuclear destruction of this country and much of the world, because Joe Biden and his family are crooks?

So how did Joe Biden get to this point?  We don’t know for certain, but we can speculate. 

By the time the Obama Administration took office, Ukraine was deeply divided along ethnic lines between two major factions:  a pro-Russian faction located in Crimea and the Donbass region to the east, and a pro-western faction located west of the Dnieper River.   Meanwhile, the country was among the most corrupt in the world.  As some have observed, Ukraine was like an ATM for corrupt foreign investors looking to make money quickly.   In Joe Biden’s case we may speculate that once he became vice president, and the Obama administration’s “point man” for Ukraine, if not before during his Senate career, the opportunity to become rich by selling his influence to Ukrainian and other oligarchs was too much to resist.  After all, he might never advance beyond the vice presidency so, the opportunity to exploit Ukrainian corruption might be “the big guy’s” last chance to get rich and live like Al Gore, who made a fortune selling his “global warming” scam to the credulous. 

Biden’s degenerate son Hunter may have seemed like the perfect conduit.  Neither Joe nor his son had anything of value to offer aside from influence at the highest levels of government, and Hunter’s business connections could serve as the perfect cover for the sale of his father’s influence to foreign businesses and governments abroad seeking favorable decisions by the United States government.  Putting it this way, raises the question of whether Joe was using Hunter, or Hunter was using Joe.  Regardless of who was using whom, the businesses and governments anxious to do business with the Bidens were not limited to those in Ukraine.  They seem to have been eager to work with our leading geopolitical rival, China, as well. 

The big problem with this plan was that Ukraine increasingly became the fulcrum not only of local rivalries but of great power, post-Cold War competition.  Each side had a powerful patron to which it might turn for protection against its bitter enemy.  The United States and NATO sympathized with the pro-western faction, and pushed for NATO membership—a foolhardy policy well described in Ted Galen Carpenter’s  NATO: Dangerous Dinosaur.  If successful this policy would benefit the anti-Russian faction and increase western influence in Ukraine.   Meanwhile Vladimir Putin supported the pro-Russian faction, a) because he is a nationalist, and b) because NATO expansion threatened Russian influence in a region that had been Russian since the reign of Catherine the Great.  This situation is eerily like the relationship between Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the summer of 1914 when those two rivals each had a great power patron, Germany, and Russia in their respective corners.  That rivalry triggered the outbreak of the First World War.  What might happen a century later when two such rivals are armed with thermonuclear weapons?  Let us pray we don’t find out.

So, Hunter was appointed to the board of the natural gas company Burisma  apparently, according to the FBI’s FD-1023 form released by Senator Chuck Grassley, because, as Burisma’s CFO Vadim Pojarskii explained “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” 

 According to the “confidential human source,” cited on the FD-1023 form, among those problems posed was that Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky hoped to acquire an American oil and natural gas company that would trade on an American stock exchange.   The problem was that Burisma was being investigated by the Ukrainian prosecutor Victor Shokin, and would never be approved for listing on the American exchanges while an investigation was underway.  Accordingly, Zlochevsky needed to get rid of Shokin.  That’s where Joe Biden came in.  We’ve all seen the video where Joe boasts about leveraging a $1 billion American loan guarantee to Ukraine to demand in March 2014, that Shokin be fired to root out corruption.  But Zlochevsky tells a different story.  He explains that he paid Joe and Hunter $5 million each for Biden’s successful intervention to remove Shokin.  In short,  according to the confidential human source—whose identity remains unknown, the vice-president of the United States accepted a bribe.  He then pretended he was cleaning up Ukrainian corruption and boasted about it on video! Of course, Hunter’s very presence on the board was probably a bribe disguised as an innocent business deal.

This might have remained another example of private corruption with no greater significance than its impact on the domestic politics of Ukraine,  but two other events then took place.  First, in 2014, the pro-Russian government in Kiev was overthrown in a coup known as the Maidan Revolution, and second, in response, Russian troops took over Crimea.  While many politicians in the U.S., especially Republicans looking for a reason to criticize the Obama Administration, demanded a vigorous American response, the administration limited itself to diplomatic protests and supplies of blankets and warm meals.  Presumably, in a wise decision, Obama wanted to avoid escalating tensions with a nuclear power. 

One of the problems with accepting bribes from a foreign business, especially one connected to a foreign government, is that you are now subject to extortion by that business, government, or anyone who knows about the bribery.  Of course, I’m speculating here, but it is almost impossible to believe that the Ukrainian government was unaware of how compromised the vice-president was.  If the Ukrainian government knew, it is almost certain that Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence services also knew.  It is also likely that China was aware of this—after all, there seems to be ample evidence that Joe was compromised by Beijing as well as Kiev.

If all these foreign intelligence services knew of Joe’s corruption, American intelligence services also knew about it.  That, in turn means that President Obama, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton along with CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and many others in the White House knew about Joe’s corruption.  It appears that only the American people were kept in the dark. 

Under the circumstances, the question the administration faced was, what would they do about it?  They could force him out of office, or even prosecute Joe for bribery, but then they might have to divulge all the sordid details to the public.  That, or they could hide his corruption and hope it never saw the light of day.  It’s the same dilemma that the Nixon White House faced when it became aware of the Watergate burglary during the 1972 election. We now know which course the Obama White House chose.  One wonders whether any of the thousands of emails that Hillary Clinton obliterated—and that Donald Trump joked about in 2016—might have revealed Joe’s corruption.  In any case, if they could get through 2016 without a major public scandal, Hillary Clinton would be president, Tim Kaine would be the new vice-president, and the Democrats could bury the entire sordid affair without the public becoming any the wiser. 

But then the unimaginable happened:  Donald Trump was elected president.  Members of the Obama Administration had to wonder how long would it be until the new administration stumbled upon the evidence of Biden’s corruption, and the Obama administration’s coverup?  Trump had to be destroyed.  The Trump “Russian collusion” hoax was already underway as Hillary ran for president and was hyped by the media for the next two years until it finally was put on life support by the failure of the Mueller investigation.  But by then Trump suspected that Biden had been compromised by Burisma officials and made his famous “perfect” phone call to Zelensky.  Democrats who were in the know realized that Trump might be onto Biden—and Obama, and Clinton.  So, they launched the first ludicrous impeachment of Trump.  No sooner did that collapse than COVID came along to rescue Joe’s campaign.

Then the next incredible thing happened.  Joe Biden was elected president, and now the president himself was vulnerable to extortion demands by foreign governments such as those in China and Ukraine.  When, a little over a year after Biden was elected, Putin invaded Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky was in a position to demand maximum support for its war effort from the United States, for “as long as necessary.”

I’ve never understood how it was in the interests of the American people to deplete their stockpiles of ammunition to protect Ukraine against a nuclear armed Russia when our primary rival is China, five thousand miles away in the Pacific.  While much of the American public understandably sympathizes with Ukraine in its resistance to Russia’s brutal invasion, and many stupid politicians invoke the “lessons of Munich,” to justify American support for Zelensky’s war, I’ve never thought it made much sense. Now it looks as though there are entirely different reasons the Biden Administration is willing to court nuclear war to defend Ukraine—to hide his own corruption. 

The Constitution specifically mentions “Treason, Bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors” as grounds for impeachment of a president.  If any of the forgoing speculation is true, and we may find out soon, then the president’s behavior is certainly impeachable, and borders on treason.

So, will the most corrupt president in American history be removed from office through the impeachment process?  Who knows?  Republicans have been chary of such proceedings since their disastrous impeachment of Bill Clinton of 1998, especially when Democrats hold the majority in the Senate as they do now.  But, if the evidence continues to grow, and Biden’s popularity continues to collapse, as I expect it will, even Democrats may be driven to find a way to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, or somebody else, before the next election.  Whether Democrats find a way to dump Biden or not, it is becoming imperative for Republicans to, at a minimum, launch an impeachment inquiry into these matters.  It is imperative so the American people can evaluate the evidence for themselves. Such an investigation should afford the president every legitimate opportunity to defend himself in the House with attorneys to represent him and cross examine witnesses, and present witnesses of his own along with exculpatory evidence that might tend to exonerate him.  In short the president should be afforded all the prerogatives available to him in a court of law, including all those that were denied to President Trump in his two bogus impeachment trials.

That said, it is increasingly hard to believe that Joe Biden will run for reelection in 2024.  As the nation was told incessantly about President Trump by corporate media outlets for four years, “the walls” appear to be “closing in.”