So Much Happening, So Little News

The photo above is of Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch and Burisma owner who is now alleged to have passed a $5 million bribe to Joe Biden and kept tapes of the discussion. Before I finished yestereday's post, I went to Wikipeida to see what I might be able to glean. In my post yesterday, I credited Wikipedia and summarized the key points of the entry.

So this morning at Breitbart News, fully a day later, I found the headline on Breitbart Meet the Ukrainian Oligarch Who Allegedly Paid Joe Biden $5 Million by some guy named Wendell Husebø. Without crediting Wikipedia at all, he gives the same dates and details you can find there, as well as an April 2017 article at the Guardian, which he presumably found the same way I did, via a five-minute web search.

That's fine, of course, except that Mr Husebø is a Professional Journalist, while I'm an old guy on a 401(k) with a desktop, and I beat him to precisely the same story by 24 hours. This is what Conservative Inc is giving us. Beyond that, the guy is presumably making good money as a full-time Professional Journalist, but he doesn't have any better resources than I do, viz, a search engine and a desktop.

But this does lead me to one conclusion he doesn't seem to have drawn, that either potential sources in the FBI, the Comer committee, or Sen Grassley's staff have no confidence in Mr Husebø as a Professional Journalist, or those same people in the know are disciplined enough not to leak to anyone, least of all Mr Husebø. Take your choice. Either way, it says little for Conservative Inc media, but it does bolster somewhat my confidence in the people on the staffs of the Comer committee and Sen Grassley.

But let's tease things out a little farther. Chairman Comer said this about the interaction between Zlochevsky and the Bidens to Larry Kudlow on Fox News Monday:

Yeah, what the motive was, Larry, was they [Zlochevsky/Burisma] were wanting to enter into the US energy market through an IPO. They felt like they couldn’t conduct an initial public offering if they were under investigation for corruption in Ukraine. That’s what it all pertained to. That’s where the supposed bribe happened. That’s why it happened, because they wanted to get rid of the prosecutor and try to clear up their name and have a Biden on the board. . . . They also wanted to buy an existing energy company, and I believe it was in Texas, but I don’t know the name of the company. So that was their whole business model to get their foot in the door, buy a company and do an IPO.

But isn't that pretty small ball? This doesn't fit a reasonability check. You want to buy some Texas energy company and do an IPO, so what you have to do is bribe the Vice President of the United States? In addition, I've seen references to the idea that the IPO was an idea Hunter himself was pushing as a Burisma board member, and as part of that pitch, he was selling his services as an intermediary -- except that, like nearly every other castle in the air Hunter tried to sell, it never went through.

The one pattern we keep seeing throughout the Biden family frammis is that it's a con. Whether it's Hunter, Joe's brother James, his sister Valerie, or any other member of the family, they promote schemes that just happen to need Joe's coopration to work, so all you have to do is cross some Biden's palm with cash, Joe will look upon this scheme with favor, and you'll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Except that for some reason or other, the castles in the air the Bidens keep pitching never quite work out, and after all, you were trying to bribe Joe, weren't you? This is not an enforceable contract, sorry.

That's the long and the short of the Biden frammis. But let's delve a little deeper. Zlochevsky was last seen at all in Odesa in 2018. So he's been on the lam for five years, maybe living in Monaco, maybe in Cyprus, nobody's quite sure, but apparently some guy the FBI trusts knows how to get in touch with him, and it's being bruited about that he's either credibly got the Biden tapes, or he's already turned them over.

That suggests he's still alive, which for an oligarch with Russian connections on the lam for five years is something of an accomplishment. There've been an awful lot of Russian oligarchs on the lam in places like Spain or Monaco who haven't made it that far in the last couple of years, sudden illnesses, inexplicable falls from windows, suicides, all very tragic. What's Zlochevsky's secret?

Well, maybe it's this, which I've already pointed out:

Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky. . . is believed to be an asset of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) by the United States intelligence community, according to a national security source speaking to RedState on condition of anonymity.

This guy, a Russian agent, has tapes of himself paying bribes to Joe Biden and his son Hunter? Might that be a pretty good reason for Putin to want to keep him alive? Consider that playing those tapes would at minimum affect the reelection of Joe, who has been the primary funder of the Ukrainian side in the Russo-Ukrainian war, with an influential faction of Republicans much less enthusiastic about continuing that commitment should Biden be defeated in 2024.

Zlochevsky, as far as I can see, let Joe and Hunter walk right into a trap he'd laid for them. They thought they were playing a game of pretending to sell Joe's influence but never following through, what the Bidens had been doing for years. The problem was that they did collect the money, whether they ever meant to do what they were paid to do or not, and it's on tape.

Isn't that worth a whole lot more to someone like Zlochevsky, especially if he's a Russian agent, than a measly $10 million or an IPO? That's the one thing that's never fit for me in this story -- if Biden sold out for $10 million, he was still selling out for cheap. It's a price like $50,000 for the Brooklyn Bridge. The Bidens were selling the bridge but were never going to follow through. The problem was that Zlochevsky was one step ahead of them.

The project for Chairman Comer and Sen Grassly is still to nail down the money and paper trail of those payments. I feel pretty confident they'll do it, if they haven't done it already. Again, I have the feeling that the people behind the scenes here are highly disciplined, and every question they've asked has been one to which they've already had the answer.