Friday, June 9, 2023

More Dribbles Out On The FD-1023 Form

As I've outlined over the past several days, my working hypothesis of the Biden boodle is simply that Hunter, a hopeless alcoholic all his life who'd also become addicted to cocaine by the time Joe was vice president, was never competent to operate a business enterprise and could never be trusted around money. The record we have, whatever we can make of it, is that the dozens of shell companies he set up with various cronies and partners could never, as some have alleged, have supported nine to 12 Bidens, plus the cronies and partners, several of whom were addicts themselves, and all of whom lived extravagant lifestyles.

Hunter's appointment to the Burisma board in 2014 had no effect other than to give Hunter an annual income of about $1 million, which prompted the start of an epic five-year binge of crack cocaine, incestuous affairs, hookers, fast cars, condos for girlfriends, luxury hotels, and phony rehab. According to Reuters, Hunter never even visited Ukraine while he was on the Burisma board. Hunter was too busy with everything else to spend any time on Burisma, and any actual advice he might have given them would probably have been worse than none at all -- and we may be sure the people behind Burisma recognized this fully.

On the other hand, Joe as vice president was Obama's point man on Ukraine, and unlike Hunter, he visited Ukraine fully six times as vice president. So if we apply some basic algebraic logic to this problem, Hunter got payments from Burisma totaling maybe $3 million between 2014 and 2017. In 2017, Joe left the vice presidency, and Burisma cut Hunter's payments roughly in half, so he got an additional $1 million or so between 2017 and when he left the board in 2019. So that's maybe $4 million total for doing nothing.

What's begun to dribble out yesterday is that there seem to have been at least two payments to Joe from Ukraine that are alleged in the FD-1023 form that was disclosed to the Comer committee. The first is referenced by Rep Bobert:

Rep Greene, also on the Comer committee, references a second $5 million payment, also covered on the FD-1023:

Biden sought to pressure Ukraine into firing top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been conducting an anti-corruption investigation into Burisma, by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees.

. . . Greene, who also goes by “MTG,” said she learned that Burisma hired Hunter Biden “to make the problems go away” and the owner said he was “stupid.” Ultimately, she said, the Burisma owner paid $5 million to one Biden and $5 million to another Biden in a bid to remove Shokin from office and end the investigation.

. . . “It was all a bribery to get Shokin fired and end the investigation into Burisma,” Greene said, adding that the Burisma executive told the informant that he has “two pieces of evidence showing proof of payment to Hunter and specifically Joe Biden.”

Naturally, we need to keep in mind that these are just allegations, but it sounds as though there may be a paper trail somewhere that could back them up. A couple things are notable here. We have what I think is a first allegation of a direct payment to Joe Biden himself, as well as a second $5 million to what sounds like another of the Biden shell companies.

The first thing that strikes me is that if a single $5 million payment went to Joe himself, we're just starting to get into a range where this exercise might be worth his time. The previous theory was the Biden deals carried a skim of "10% to the big guy", which in the context of a million here, three million there through shell companies to a dozen Bidens and their cronies, wouidn't be worth Joe's time, leaving aside that Hunter would steal most of that before it got to any of the others.

And if Joe went to Ukraine six times as VP, this leaves open the possibility that there were other deals besides just getting rid of that Shokin guy, so again, we're looking at the possibility of payoffs at a level that could actually start to interest a Vice President of the United States. We're at least starting to reach the level of passing a reasonability check. And that would actually put the amounts being paid to Hunter -- apparently the guy behind Burisma recognized Hunter was "stupid" -- in perspective. If there were multiple bribes to Joe of, say, $5 million, with more to other Bidens, then $3-4 million to Hunter would be just a lagniappe.

But this brings me back to my other point, that throughout his career as a putative Biden fixer, Hunter fixed nothing, while Joe, or someone other than Joe, picked up his debts starting at least in 2019. (Remember that by Hunter's own account in his tell-all, even the Burisma payments from 2014 to 2019 never covered his expenses.) After 2019, Hunter's expenses for alimony and child support alone amounted to more than half a million a year, to which we have to add what must be millions in legal fees to cover his child support, tax, and firearm cases -- and that leaves aside his expensive new wife and son.

I can only surmise that there is a Biden mother lode somewhere that's covering expenses at this level not just for Hunter, but it's apparently supporting up to a dozen other Bidens, as well as cronies, lawyers, retainers, and fixers. This must be a pretty big sum, but so far we know nothing about it. As Joe said with a smirk just yesterday, "Where's the money?"

That sounds like a dare.