Ana Navarro whipped out the tiny violins on ABC’s “The View” this week, declaring that the Biden corruption scandal “is a story of a father’s love, and Joe Biden has never and will never give up on his son Hunter . . .
“That is part of his heart.”
The “View” co-host was simply echoing the spin from the White House to get out from under the latest avalanche of damning evidence about the Biden family grift machine during Joe’s vice presidency: Honest Joe is guilty of nothing more than loving his wayward son.
The New York Times’ Nick Kristof echoed the sentiment in a cringeworthy piece titled “The Real Lesson From the Hunter Biden Saga: It isn’t about presidential corruption but a determined parent battling his son’s addiction with unconditional love.”
But the allegations against the president and his family are too credible to be wiped away by a secondhand sob story.
Every defendant has a hard-luck tale and it’s a little much from a family that has been the epitome of privilege for decades when they don’t even try to provide an explanation.
Nor will Biden’s on-brand defiance fly this time.
The optics of his son and Joe’s brother Jim Biden — who still is under federal investigation — at the White House in bow ties for a state dinner last week was so in-your-face that even the Times raised an eyebrow.
It was just two days after Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal, and Attorney General Merrick Garland was preposterously in attendance.
Very funny, Joe!
Ana Navarro said that Joe Biden is only guilty of trying to help his son. ABC News
Another ruse to downplay the ballooning allegations was evident when the president joked last week during a meeting with the Indian prime minister that he had “sold a lot of state secrets.”
What, me, worry?
That’s why he laughs in reporters’ faces when they dare to shout a snatched question as he hurries by.
But the questions keep coming, nonetheless.
“President Biden, how involved were you in your son’s Chinese shakedown text message?” he was asked as he emerged from the White House Wednesday morning.
The question from Post journalist Steven Nelson was about a WhatsApp message, subpoenaed by the FBI from Hunter’s iCloud, that IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley had given to the House Ways and Means Committee as part of his damning testimony about DOJ interference in the five-year tax investigation into Hunter.
In the July 30, 2017, message released last Friday, Hunter threatens a Chinese business partner who owes his family money that his father “and every person he knows” will retaliate unless their directions are obeyed: “I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.”
Photographs on Hunter’s abandoned laptop place him at his father’s Delaware estate that Sunday.
So reporters have been asking the White House if Hunter was telling the truth; was his father in the room when he was shaking down an executive from Chinese energy company CEFC who would transfer $5.1 million to him over the next nine days?
It should not be a hard question to answer, one way or the other, but deflection, indignation and anger have been the only response.
Hunter Biden got a please deal from the Justice Department after tax and gun charges.AP
At first, Biden responded to Nelson with derisive laughter, but the reporter kept pestering: “Were you sitting there? Were you involved?”
Biden: “No, I wasn’t.”
Nelson pressed: “Were you?”
Biden leaned in and barked “No!” in a telling outburst.
But Biden bullying reporters will not make the evidence disappear — and it leads to the president.
Shapley, the IRS agent in charge of the criminal investigation of Hunter in Delaware, told CBS Tuesday evening that DOJ obstruction served to protect Joe from exposure.
Blocked by the DOJ
“There were certain investigative steps we weren’t allowed to take that could have led us to President Biden,” Shapley said.
Shapley has testified that his team was blocked by the DOJ from asking questions about Joe or other family members who received money from Hunter.
They were not allowed to ask about the “big guy” or “dad,” were refused search warrants and denied access to Hunter’s laptop, which the FBI had authenticated by February 2020 as genuine and untainted and having “likely contained evidence of tax crimes.”
In the end, Shapley’s team of 12 elite criminal investigators was removed from the case before Hunter’s sweetheart deal.
Joe Biden is accused of being protected by the DOJ, FBI and perhaps the CIA.REUTERS
Protecting Joe has been the hallmark of the DOJ, FBI and perhaps the CIA over both the Trump and Biden administrations, during which time damning information has flooded in from a variety of sources alleging a foreign bribery scheme.
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For example, in January 2020, the FBI was offered bank-account details and other evidence of alleged bribery related to the Biden family from a woman in Ukraine who had worked for the corrupt energy company Burisma that paid Hunter $1 million a year to sit on its board.
She is the widow of the former business partner of Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.
The fact that her name came to the FBI via Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s then-attorney, should not have ruled out her claims, but Giuliani’s lawyer Bob Costello says she still is waiting to hand over her evidence, despite fake reports that she has died.
In fact, Costello says that two assistant US attorneys cut off a Ukrainian-American witness they were interviewing in Florida in September 2020 when he “volunteered that he had spoken to [the woman. They] said ‘we don’t want to talk about her.’ ”
The prosecutors were more interested in asking questions about Giuliani’s alleged foreign lobbying violations, an investigation that led to an FBI raid in April 2021 on the former mayor’s home in New York but never resulted in charges.
The case was closed in November 2022 and his seized devices were returned.
Informant was ignored
Just as happened to former federal prosecutor Bud Cummins, who reported bribery allegations involving Joe Biden and foreign nationals to the DOJ in October 2018, the informant became the hunted.
Cummins found out last year that in December 2019 federal prosecutors had secretly obtained data from his iPhone, but he says they did not investigate the allegations he brought to them.
Cummins’ report was just one of many received by the DOJ between 2016 and 2020 about Biden family influence-peddling overseas.
Israeli professor-turned-fugitive Gal Luft provided detailed information to six FBI and DOJ officials about payments to Biden family members by CEFC during a meeting in Brussels on March 28 and 29, 2019. But the only visible action was when he was arrested on foreign-lobbying and gun-running charges in Cypress earlier this year.
All this information seems to have fallen into the same black hole as the evidence about the CEFC deal that Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski gave to the FBI before the 2020 election.
The material Bobulinski handed over, including WhatsApp messages, documents and emails, bolstered evidence the FBI had authenticated almost a year earlier from Hunter’s laptop. Now we know that fresh evidence uncovered by Shapley and his IRS team further corroborates Bobulinksi’s story.
The jigsaw puzzle put itself together. But the lack of curiosity when it comes to Joe Biden is par for the course.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/06/28/allegations-against-biden-and-his-family-are-too-credible-to-wipe-away-with-fathers-love-sob-story/