Connecting the dots
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Give me Liberty
Rodger Williamson
From 2013 to 2018, Joseph Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is alleged to have attempted to sell influence to his father, and thus the United States government, in Ukraine with support from China. Over the course of his time there, Hunter Biden took in about $11 million in total.
Today, “We the People” of these United States now find our government, led by Hunter’s dad, sending hundreds of BILLIONS in taxpayer dollars to Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine, who are pitted in a war for their very survival against the actions of Vladimir Putin and Russia, along with the consent of Xi Jinping and the government of the People’s Republic of China. It’s always interesting to me when the dots start to connect together.
After being discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve in 2014 for testing positive for cocaine, Hunter Biden joined the Burisma Board in Ukraine, receiving compensation of up to $50,000 per month. Hunter Biden left Burisma in April 2019, coincidentally on April 25, 2019, Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, the former vice president of the United States, announced that he was running for president of the United States. In an October 2019 interview, Hunter acknowledged that he was likely given the board seat “because of his last name.” It’s always interesting when the dots start to connect themselves together.
An analysis of a copy of Hunter Biden’s now-famous hard drive and iCloud account do not show what, if anything, Hunter actually did to earn millions from his Chinese and Ukrainian partners. Expenditures compiled on his hard drive show he spent more than $200,000 per month from October 2017 through February 2018 on luxury hotel rooms, Porsche payments, dental work, and cash withdrawals.
In a 2017 email, Hunter Biden was warned by Eric Schwerin (one of Hunter’s closest friends and a business associate, who made at least 27 visits to the White House and other official venues during the Obama/Biden presidency) that he should amend his 2014 tax returns, so as to disclose the $400,000 in income that Hunter had received from Burisma, as a portion of the $1.2 million that Hunter Biden had netted that year.
Federal prosecutors in the state of Delaware have been scrutinizing Hunter’s business dealings with China as part of a tax probe that began in 2018, and in December of 2020 Hunter Biden acknowledged that he was also the subject of a federal investigation into his taxes.
In December 2015, while visiting Kyiv with his son Hunter still over at Burisma, then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden warned Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that if he did not fire Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor general of Ukraine, the Obama administration was prepared to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees. Shokin had begun an investigation starting in 2012, focusing on Ukrainian Oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma Holdings, regarding allegations of money laundering, tax evasion and corruption.
Joe Biden later said, “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’” In March 2016 the Ukrainian Parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove Shokin from office. Technically, Hunter wasn’t at Burisma at the time of the alleged corruption that occurred in 2010-2012 that was the focus of Shokin’s investigation, but that does not mean that Hunter Biden and his influential father didn’t play a role in shielding Burisma from later allegations.
Despite zero experience in the industry, Hunter Biden was being paid more than $50,000 per month to sit on Burisma’s board. The dots that want to be connected together sometimes seem to be awfully close, yet still somehow elusive.
After leaving Burisma, Hunter Biden took up being a painter and then selling his paintings for an exorbitant amount, which obviously created the potential to buy perceived influence to Hunter’s father, Joseph, with the purchase of an overpriced painting. The simple fact that Hunter Biden had no prior training as an artist raised enough concerns that Walter Shaub, the former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and now an ethics expert with the Project on Government Oversight, to speak up and condemn Hunter’s pursuits.
Amid the ethical concerns surrounding the $75,000 for a piece on paper to half-a-million dollars for a large-scale painting, Hunter Biden defended his overpriced paintings, saying, “F##k ‘em!” Hunter Biden’s paintings are literally a bunch of dots and some lines that still connect to his father.
A little more than year ago, on February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine, starting a war that continues to this day. Admittedly, the people of Ukraine are in a life-or-death struggle to retain their sovereignty, but with nearly $500 billion having been sent in just one year, including $196 billion from the U.S., and comparable amounts continuing to flood in with each passing month.
We must note that that huge amount of cash has little to no oversight, or accountability, and that huge portions of that money are undoubtedly being laundered. Is there anyone besides me connecting this dot to the others yet?
U.S. President Thomas Jefferson once stated that “where the press is free and every man is able to read, all is safe.” A free press matters. And yet our press in these United States is unable to do its job of overwatching our government, especially since our government is obviously neither open, or transparent, and that America’s news media companies themselves are bought and paid for by just fifteen billionaires.
Except for small local news organizations, whenever the dots appear as a recent national news report, you can rest assured that the story is being spun by the personal agenda of the agency’s owner. It was writer Mark Twain who once said that “if you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” (with an exception, of course, for “The Coosa County News”!)