There's A Great Deal We Aren't Being Told About Ukraine

There've beern several stories over the past week about Hunter Biden being broke, for instance:

According to court filings in California, Hunter's attorneys claim he "has suffered a significant downturn in his income and has significant debt in the millions of dollars range." Imagine that; when daddy's no longer pulling the strings from the Oval Office, the money well runs dry faster than Hunter can say "Where's my crack pipe?"

Like most of these stories, this one misses a much bigger point:

Remember Hunter's illustrious "art career"? You know, the one where anonymous buyers totally weren't paying for access to the White House? Those sales have crashed harder than Hunter after a bender. From selling 27 pieces at an average of $54,481.48 each, he's now managed to sell just one piece for a measly $36,000.

The art career comes very late in the saga. Hunter's connections with his then-senator father almost certainly got him into Yale Law, and after graduating, jobs with the MBNA bank, for which his dad had done a great deal to facilitate its move to Delaware. His subsequent career was based entirely on his connections with Joe, but there wasn't much of an overall direction -- he had a job in the Clinton Commerce Department, then he founded a lobbying firm, then Joe put him on the Amtrak board.

In 2006, he and Uncle Jim struggled to take over the international hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors, but that didn't turn out well. It wasn't until Joe was elected vice president in 2008 that things began to turn around; in 2008-2009, he began his dealings through Seneca Global Advisors and Rosemont Seneca Partners. However, it appears that his addictions always stood in the way of success; by 2013, Joe had to get him a job in the US Naval Reserve, but he failed a drug test on his first day of work.

Here's where Ukraine enters the picture, and things start to get puzzling. I've brought up the 2014 Maidan Revolution here, in the context of allegations that it was a coup sponsored by the US intelligence community:

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible US mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”

I've never seen a good explanation for how quickly the Bidens got involved after these events:

Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma in May 2014, less than three months after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was pushed from power and fled to Russia in the culmination of the massive, monthslong Euromaidan protests over official corruption and his decision to scrap plans for a trade agreement with the European Union and pursue closer ties with Moscow.

Hunter Biden's business partner, Devon Archer, had joined a month earlier, when the U.K. froze a Burisma bank account holding $23 million amid suspicion of money laundering.

At the time, Joe Biden was the U.S. vice president and President Barack Obama's point man for Ukraine, which was battling Russian and Russian-backed forces in a war fomented by Moscow in the eastern Donbas region following Yanukovych's departure. Russia had also seized control of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.

According to NPR, European governments and international institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were concerned about the country's endemic corruption:

Obama made then-Vice President Biden the point man, and he became a frequent visitor to Ukraine. By his own count, Biden says he went there about a dozen times from early 2014 through early 2016.

. . . In the spring of 2014, as Joe Biden began his trips to Ukraine, Hunter Biden took a position on the board of the country's largest private gas company, Burisma. He was reportedly paid up to $50,000 a month.

The question of a possible conflict of interest — with Hunter Biden profiting in a country where his father was actively working with the government — was raised publicly at the time.

Joe Biden said that he followed government ethics regulations and that his son was a private citizen who made his own decisions.

This brings up the question, another one that hasn't been much pursued, of what Obama actually thought of Joe. It looks as if Ukraine was a front-burner issue for the intelligence community, and eliminating the appearance of corruption was at least theoretically high on the priority list in order to maintain the prestige of the new regime. And it looks as though Joe's dozen trips to Ukraine as "point man" over the two years between the revolution and his departure as vice president reflect that apparent urgency.

But what did he actually accomplish? And what was he actually doing on all those trips? We've never had a good account. All we know is that Hunter and his partner were on the Burisma board and making big bucks, at least until Joe left office as vice president and Ukraine point man:

The Ukrainian energy company that was paying President Biden’s son Hunter $1 million a year cut his monthly compensation in half two months after his father ceased to be vice president.

From May 2014, Burisma Holdings Ltd. was paying Hunter $83,333 a month to sit on its board, invoices on his abandoned laptop show.

But in an email on March 19, 2017, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi asked Hunter to sign a new director’s agreement and informed him “the only thing that was amended is the compensation rate.”

The only reasonable conclusion is that Hunter was paid by Burisma as a kickback to Joe, who was there to control the corruption, or something like that. But then we have the whole issue of Trump's call to Zelensky:

The scandal came to light when a whistleblower report revealed that President Trump had asked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in July 2019 to investigate Joe Biden, Trump's political opponent in the 2020 presidential election, his son Hunter Biden, and company CrowdStrike, to discuss these matters with Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr. . . Trump acknowledged he had told Zelenskyy "we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son [contributing] to the corruption already in the Ukraine." According to the whistleblower, the call was part of a wider campaign by Trump, his administration, and Giuliani to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens, which may have included Trump's cancelling a scheduled trip to Ukraine by Vice President Mike Pence, and Trump withholding $400 million in military aid from Ukraine.

It's hard for me to avoid thinking Trump was aware of the degree of the Bidens' involvement in Ukraine corruption, and in fact I suspect that as president, he knew much more than has ever been publicly revealed. In fact, I would go so far as to wonder if what Trump knew then has been behind Trump's current Ukraine policy -- among other things, curing the corruption will involve getting rid of the whole post-Maidan regime. There's a reason Joe pardoned Hunter for any “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

But what got me started on this train of thught was the story that Hunter is broke. Let's get real, Hunter has always been broke. Only months before he got the Burisma deal, Joe had tried to get him a job with the Navy, but he failed the drug test. We're talking desperate straits; given his addictions, Hunter was useless to anyone, and I've been saying all along that none of the Biden family's get-rich-quick schemes ever seem to have paid off.

Except Ukraine. That had at least a chance. But two things killed even that: Joe was apparently told not to run for president in 2016 in favor of Hillary -- but when Hillary lost, that cut off any sort of gravy train. By 2020, Joe was too out of it to try to cash in, Hunter was too much of a basket case to help out, and then Putin invaded. It isn't just Hunter who's broke, it's the whole family at this point.

I'm convinced that what's been revealed so far is just the tip of the iceberg.