by Dan Bongino
As I write this, Joe Biden is a leading candidate to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2020. So it’s no surprise that he and his son have their stories on Ukraine in sync with regard to denying this apparent self-dealing, policy-influencing-for-cash operation. Predictably, Joe Biden’s campaign spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, says the former veep pushed to oust the former prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, “without any regard for how it would or would not impact any business interests of his son, a private citizen.” And the younger Biden claims: “At no time have I discussed with my father the company’s business, or my board service, including my initial decision to join the board.”11
But that doesn’t mean Joe Biden didn’t know about his son’s deal—it was widely reported. So this is a ridiculous statement. The idea that Proud Papa Joe wouldn’t know about his son’s big score is a joke—on anyone who believes him.
As for whether or not Shokin was an ineffective prosecutor, it’s almost irrelevant because Joe Biden waited until after his son’s client got its frozen $23 million back from the U.K. to insist that Shokin get the heave-ho. So Biden was claiming to be a hero who forced the government to fire the guy who he claims wasn’t prosecuting Zlochevsky. But in reality, because Biden delayed his so-called hardball act, everyone, except maybe Shokin, got their money. Zlochevsky got his $23 million; more than $3 million flowed from Ukraine to an American firm tied to Hunter Biden in 2014 and 2015, bank records show;12 and the Ukrainian government got the billion-dollar loan.
P.S. All proceedings against Burisma Holdings and Zlochevesky were closed. In 2018, the former minister who had once fled, fearing the long arm of the law, returned to Kiev.
What a total scam!
The most disturbing thing, though, is that this is not the only instance of Hunter Biden’s cashing in on his old man’s prominence while Big Daddy turned a disingenuous blind eye.
Peter Schweizer’s book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, makes a strong case that Biden piggybacked on his dad’s negotiations in Beijing to broker a billion-dollar deal for Rosemont Seneca Partners—to work on behalf of America’s greatest geopolitical rival: China.
Schweizer reports that in early December of 2013, Hunter Biden accompanied his father on Air Force 2 to Asia. “For Hunter Biden, the trip coincided with a major deal that Rosemont Seneca was striking with the state-owned Bank of China,” Schweizer writes. “From his perspective, the timing couldn’t have been better.”
While the vice president was in talks with Vice President Li Yuanchao and separate talks with President Xi Jinping, Biden the younger was evidently fine-tuning a little business deal of his own. Writes Schweizer:
What was not reported was the deal that Hunter was securing. Rosemont Seneca Partners had been negotiating an exclusive deal with Chinese officials, which they signed approximately 10 days after Hunter visited China with his father. The most powerful financial institution in China, the government’s Bank of China, was setting up a joint venture with Rosemont Seneca.
The Bank of China is an enormously powerful financial institution. But the Bank of China is very different from the Bank of America…. The Bank of China is government-owned, which means that its role as a bank blurs into its role as a tool of the government. The Bank of China provides capital for “China’s economic statecraft,” as scholar James Reilly puts it. Bank loans and deals often occur within the context of a government goal.…
Rosemont Seneca and the Bank of China created a $1 billion investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR)…. In short, the Chinese government was literally funding a business that it co-owned along with the sons of two of America’s most powerful decision makers.13
The only appropriate response to this is: are you kidding me?
The vice president let his son hitch a ride to China to close a billion-dollar deal with, essentially, the Chinese government, and nobody has a problem with that?
This appears to be a new form of self-dealing. It’s called “son dealing,” and Joe Biden is the scam’s greatest proponent.
If the American people want any accountability from our leaders—and we should—Hunter Biden’s profiteering off the coattails of his politically connected dad should destroy Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. After all, the anti-Trump brigade just spent two years lecturing us all about the dangers of foreign collusion. Apparently, they meant only bogus collusion hoaxes involving Trump. Biden’s insistence that his son is an independent businessman is beyond disingenuous. It insults the intelligence of the American electorate. It also displays utter disregard for good governance. I don’t want any family members anywhere making easy-money deals because they are close to our current president or to any future president or vice president. Anyone working with the U.S. government or the administration should recognize he or she is there to perform public service for the good of the country, not to make family members wealthy. And I especially don’t want to see a former vice president’s son getting $1 billion to make investments on behalf of China—a country that aims to supplant the U.S. as a global superpower and denies its own citizens freedom of speech, religion, movement, and pretty much every other liberty you can think of. That all evidence points to Hunter Biden’s profiting off his father’s position is, in a word, disgusting.
In March 2019, reports appeared with evidence suggesting that the U.S. State Department and FBI pressured Ukrainian authorities to aid in the prosecution of Paul Manafort prior to the November presidential election. It was reported that Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko had opened up an investigation into allegations that his country’s anticorruption wing intentionally leaked financial records—specifically the infamous “black ledger” that revealed millions of dollars in payments to Paul Manafort—in order to discredit the Trump campaign and help Hillary Clinton win the election.14
Lutsenko’s probe was prompted by a Ukrainian parliamentarian’s release of a recording purporting to quote a top law enforcement official as saying his agency leaked the Manafort financial records to help Clinton’s campaign.15
One month later, news broke that the FBI and State Department had held a series of meetings in Washington, D.C., with Ukrainian law enforcement agents and diplomats. According to Andrii Telizhenko, a former political officer at the Ukrainian embassy, American officials asked members of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) during a January 2016 meeting about locating new evidence regarding illegal payments made by Party of Regions—the pro-Russia political party of deposed president Yanukovych—and its dealings with Americans.
If this is true, it raises all kinds of questions. Manafort, at the time of this request, had not yet joined the Trump campaign and yet was seemingly back on the FBI’s radar, even though the bureau had finished a 2014 investigation into Manafort without pressing any charges against the lobbyist. What would have prompted the bureau to refocus on him? Did agents know he planned to join the Trump team and, if so, how did they know?
Multiple sources within the Ukraine government confirmed the gist of Telizhenko’s recollection.
Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general’s international affairs office, said that, shortly after Ukrainian authorities returned from the Washington meeting, there was a clear message about helping the Americans with the Party of the Regions case.16
Manafort, as noted earlier, joined the Trump campaign in March 2016. Ukraine’s NABU leaked the existence of the ledger on May 29, 2016. Coincidence? Kostiantyn Kulyk didn’t sound convinced at all. “Yes, there was a lot of talking about needing help and then the ledger just appeared in public,” he recalled.17
The handwritten ledger—which totals 400 pages and mentions Manafort’s name twenty-two times—reveals that $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments were designated for Manafort from Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according
to the NABU.18
Some of the payments were independently verified by the Associated Press, which matched at least $1.2 million in payments with bank records from Manafort’s consulting firm in the U.S.19 And while that finding confers some legitimacy on the black ledger, it still does not explain why the ledger was “discovered” only at that time.
In other words, five months after Obama administration operatives asked for help identifying Party of Regions corruption, Ukrainian investigators came out with allegedly damning evidence that pointed directly at the Trump campaign chairman. The leak seemed designed to damage the campaign’s credibility along with Manafort’s.
This is why I’ve been saying that the real conspiracy story isn’t only Trump-Russia. If the black ledger was released specifically to help Clinton and hurt Trump, Mueller and the FBI spent three years investigating the wrong collusion story.
How does this fit together? Let’s start with the fact that Manafort wasn’t the only American political operative toiling for cash in the Ukraine. Politico reports that Tad Devine, a top strategist for the Al Gore 2000 and John Kerry 2004 presidential campaigns, was also working for the same guy Manafort was—Viktor Yanukovych. So was Tony Podesta! That’s right! Tony, the brother of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, John Podesta, was working with Manafort and lobbying on behalf of Yanukovych along with former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig. There were more leftist Americans, too. One of Yanukovych’s rivals, incumbent president Viktor Yushchenko, had enlisted the firm run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist in her 2008 campaign.20 Just as with Clinton, Penn’s candidate failed to make it on to the final ballot, but the fact remains that there have been Democratic operatives—both consultants and diplomats—flooding Ukraine, making connections, spreading their tentacles, and scoring big paydays since Obama took over the Oval Office. Again, I thought the Democrats cared deeply about foreign “collusion”?
Tony Podesta was rumored to be under investigation for failing to register as a foreign agent, but Greg Craig has been indicted for making false statements to the Justice Department in connection with his work for Ukraine as a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP.21 (This is the same firm where lawyer Alex van der Zwaan worked. Zwaan copped a plea deal after Mueller’s team indicted him for lying to investigators about work he had done for Manafort and his partner Rick Gates.)
Craig, who also worked in the Clinton White House, insists he is innocent of any FARA violation. There is, however, one more disturbing fact about his work in Ukraine that demonstrates how much crazy cash-based influence peddling was going on in Ukraine. Manafort steered $5.2 million to Craig in 2012, when Hillary Clinton was still secretary of state, to research and write a brief justifying the arrest of one of Yanukovych’s rivals. The bulk of that payout was funded by Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Here’s the interesting thing about Pinchuk—besides the fact that he’s the fourth guy in this book named Victor/Viktor—he’s a steel magnate who donated $10–25 million to the Clinton Foundation “sometime before 2013, making him the top foreign contributor to the foundation,” according to one report.22
Let me summarize all this for you: Manafort arranged for a pal of Obama’s and the Clintons’ to earn a huge payday—for writing a report that glossed over political abuses of a pro-Russian president—from a billionaire who poured a record-setting amount of cash into the private foundation run by the U.S. secretary of state.23
In other words, Victor Pinchuk was paying to rehabilitate the reputation of the soon-to-be-booted Russia-loving president of Ukraine by forking over millions to a Democrat swamp insider and was showering the Clintons with cash.
Pinchuk, like an Eastern European swamp lord, seems to have been paying and playing both sides in this case—and everyone was too greedy to reject his money. And yet the only operative hit with big charges, the only guy to consistently generate front-page headlines, was Manafort. Why? Listen, there’s little doubt that Manafort’s personal financial activities put a target on his back—I’m not here to defend him—but he clearly wasn’t the only one putting profits ahead of principle in Ukraine. Look at this list: Craig, Podesta, Penn, Devine—a supergroup of Democratic operators. Just the guys you’d want if you were looking to align with U.S. political leaders in power.
Remember, Obama was president during this entire time. Hillary Clinton was the secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Obama and Joe Biden were, rightfully, Ukraine’s protectors in 2014, when the nation bounced its Putin-pal president for refusing to strike a deal with the European Union. It’s understandable, then, that in 2016 members of the Ukraine government must have felt some loyalty to Obama and Biden, who floated a billion-dollar loan to the country. If there was pressure from the Democrat-controlled swamp to produce evidence against the underdog Republican candidate who had some positive things to say about Moscow, why wouldn’t the Ukrainians curry favor and reveal the black ledger they’d known about for at least two years?
“Why Manafort?” you might ask. That was the answer right there!
None of this occurred in a vacuum. As I reported in my previous book, Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, and mentioned early on in this one, a number of pro-Clinton operatives were fanning the flames when it came to Manafort, including longtime DNC employee Alexandra Chalupa, who was fixated on Manafort and his relationship with Yanukovych and fed stories to the American press. She also reportedly spent significant time at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington.
John Solomon reports that Andrii Telizhenko, the former political officer at the Ukrainian embassy, claims that senior Ukrainian diplomats instructed him to “gather whatever dirt Ukraine had in its government files about Trump and Manafort.” Telizhenko says he subsequently met with Chalupa.
She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with [Russian president Vladimir] Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election.24
Meanwhile, Glenn Simpson, the man who subtly outed Paul Manafort in his 2007 Wall Street Journal article by noting he was not registered as a foreign lobbyist for Oleg Deripaska, was clearly monitoring the situation, at least via his employee Nellie Ohr, who testified to Congress that she had been on the lookout for “public source information” related to Manafort, Trump, and organized crime. And Ohr, as we now know, even forwarded some of her research to her husband and others at the Department of Justice.
It was about Ukraine.
And Manafort.
We’ve come full circle, haven’t we?
We started in Ukraine—the island stopover—but we’ve docked back in the swamp.
I hope you can see how shrewd, manipulative political operatives and deep-pocketed players created a toxic, divisive feedback loop of distorted and fabricated negative information about Donald Trump and steered it first to the FBI and the DOJ and then to the mainstream media.
The thing about this feedback loop is that it got louder and louder until it crippled the country. It was a hideous noise composed of lies and slander, driven by politics, thirst for power, and shrewd manipulative political operatives; it fed more lies, more fear, more poison into the air. It became impossible to hear the truth.
1Fox News, “Transcript: Rep. Maloney: Trump Has Been Appalling in His Conduct Regardless of Legality,” April 18, 2019, https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/rep-maloney-trump-has-been-appalling-in-his-conduct-regardless-of-legality.
2Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel, “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions that Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,” The New York Times, May 1, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html.
3Burisma Holdings, “Hunter Bide
n Joins the Team of Burisma Holdings,” press release, May 12, 2014, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5980032-Burisma-Announces-Hunter-Biden-s-Appointment-to.html.
4Solomon, “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian Nightmare: A closed Probe Is Revived,” The Hill, April 1, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/436816-joe-bidens-2020-ukrainian-nightmare-a-closed-probe-is-revived.
5Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019), 114.
6Andrew E. Kramer, “Ukraine Ousts Viktor Shokin, Top Prosecutor, and Political Stability Hangs In Balance,” The New York Times, March 29, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/world/europe/political-stability-in-the-balance-as-ukraine-ousts-top-prosecutor.html.
7U.S. Embassy Kyiv Ukraine, “Remarks by US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt at the Odesa Financial Forum on September 24, 2015,” Facebook post, September 24, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/usdos.ukraine/posts/10153248488506936
8Solomon, “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian Nightmare.”
9Richard N. Haass, “Foreign Affairs Issue Launch with Former Vice President Joe Biden,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 23, 2018, https://www.cfr.org/event/foreign-affairs-issue-launch-former-vice-president-joe-biden.
10Solomon, “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian Nightmare.”
11Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel, “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,” The New York Times, May 1, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share.
