"Where's The Money? I'm Joking."

The problem I keep seeing about the Biden boodle that won't go away for me is precisely the question Joe asked a week ago: where's the money? What we've seen, at least since 2019, is the appearance of multimillion-dollar expenditures on Hunter's debts and legal problems, followed since last year by other multimillion-dollar legal expenditures for Joe's own classified document issues, yet I'm about the only one out there asking where all this money comes from. High-power, partner-level lawyers don't work for free, and being lawyers, they know how to get paid.

This story came out on Breitbart yesterday, but it was buried almost immediately: Exclusive: GOP Lawmakers Question Who Gave Joe Biden’s Corporation Nearly $10M in 2017.

Republican lawmakers are demanding transparency from President Joe Biden regarding his 2017 tax returns in which his entity, “CelticCapri Corp,” listed nearly $10 million without specifying revenue line items, raising concerns about who paid the entity and for what in the wake of Joe Biden’s alleged link to a $5 million Ukrainian “bribery” scheme.

. . . “Now that we know there are recordings of conversations Joe Biden and his degenerate son had with a Burisma executive, it’s becoming more and more obvious how the indictment of President Trump is meant to be a distraction,” [Rep. Eli] Crane added. “It would shock no one in this town if Joe Biden received millions of dollars from selling out the country in a bribery scheme and then hid that money in shady shell companies.”

The implication in the story is that the "nearly $10 million" on Biden's 2017 tax return roughly corresponds with the total of $10 million, $5 million to Joe himself and $5 million to Hunter, that's allegedly discussed in the tapes Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky apparently claims to have made of his discussions with Hunter and Joe.

However, as best we can surmise for now -- the FBI's FD-1023 forms in question haven't been made public, and we have no assurance that the alleged Zlochevsky tapes even exist -- the bribes, if they were paid, were paid in return for Joe's alleged insistence that prosecutor Victor Shokin be removed from a Burisma investigation in March, 2016.

Biden did demand that Shokin be removed. At an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 2018, Biden seemed to boast about it, saying that during a visit to Kyiv -- likely in December 2015 -- he told Ukrainian officials: "We're leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money."

"Well, son of a bitch," Biden continued. "He got fired."

Shokin was indeed fired, but not until March that year [2016?].

But the vagueness of the timing, mixed with Joe's well-established tendency to fabricate, puts the precise date of any discussion, and any resulting payment from Zlochevsky to the Bidens, into question. If Biden spoke with Zlochevsky during a December 2015 visit to Ukraine, as the story suggests, we've got to assume the money was paid even before Shokin's 2016 removal and would have needed to be covered up in a Biden tax return earlier than 2017.

And of course, the tale of the fired prosecutor could simply be just another of Joe's routine fabrications, that he's Greek, was raised by Puerto Ricans, went to shul as a kid, or maybe went to black churches then instead.

The problem for Joe overall, even if the story of Zlochevsky's 17 recordings turns out to be the purest moonshine, is that the numbers have never added up. For ibnstance, I have a hard time with the idea that Zlochevsky ever paid $5 million to Hunter; he never had that kind of money, and the money he had appears to have come in large part from stiffing his employees and partners over much smaller payments. The Bidens overall seem to have obtained lines of credit or debt forgiveness simply on the basis that they were Bidens, but that sort of thing goes only so far.

As well, Rep Greene's account of the 1023 has Zlochevsky referring to Hunter as "stupid", which has the ring of truth, but it does then raise the question of why Zlochevsky would give him $5 million. But that in turn raises the question of how much was enough to buy Joe, if in fact Joe was being bought.

I don't think $5 million alone was enough to buy Joe, nor would an additional $5 million to Hunter have done it. But let's just say Zlochevsky paid Joe-and-Hunter $10 million in December 2015, as the link above suggests. That dosn't account for the mystery "nearly $10 million" that appeared on Joe's 2017 tax return -- and $10 million won't buy you all that much these days, maybe a five-bedroom mcmansion in a leafy suburb. Joe needs more than that kind of money.

Where is it? That's not a joke.