We like this picture of Pinocchio. To us, it looks like he was just caught in a lie, and he is shrugging his shoulders, saying/thinking something like you caught me and so what. To us, Pinocchio is showing absolutely no remorse. Unfortunately, with one caveat, this picture reminds us of President Joseph Biden. The difference is that Joe Biden shows no remorse because he still claims he did nothing wrong. To the contrary, we believe that President Biden has repeatedly lied to the American people. Among the many lies, we note the following:
In his 2020 debate with then President Trump, he claimed that his son Hunter never made any money from China. Oops! Hunter has since admitted in court that he did make money from China sources, and that he did not pay taxes on it. Also, in a Hunter Biden’s WhatsApp message to Chinese businessman, Henry Zhao, Hunter threatened: “I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment ($5 million) made has not been fulfilled.”
President Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that he “never spoke to his son about foreign business dealings,” and that there was an “absolute wall" between his family’s foreign business schemes and his duties as Vice President. Oops! One of Hunter Biden’s foreign business partners, Tony Bobulinski, has testified that Joe Biden “was a willing and eager participant in a family scheme to make millions of dollars by partnering with a shady Chinese Communist firm.” Another former business partner of Hunter, Devon Archer, has testified that Hunter placed Joe Biden on speaker phone 10 to 20 times while with business associates, and that Mr. Joe Biden also attended multiple dinners where Mr. Hunter Biden, Mr. Archer, and other business associates were in attendance.
As we previously articulated in Corruption at the Highest Level?, charges have been made that Vice-President Biden and his son Hunter were bribed in order to orchestrate the firing of Ukraine prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who was then investigating the energy company, Burisma, the very same company that was employing his son for close to $1 million per year. President Biden has vehemently denied this, saying that in moving against Shokin, “I did nothing wrong. I carried out the policy of the United States government in rooting out corruption in Ukraine. Oops! A newly discovered State Department memo is undermining Biden’s justification for his action against Shokin. The Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizes the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee that was handling the anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine: “Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee.” In fact, one senior official even complimented Shokin on his progress in fighting corruption. In light of this memo, you have to ask: why did Vice President Biden disregard the recommendation of the State Department Committee, and threaten to withhold the promised aid unless the Ukraine fired Shokin?
Is the answer that the President was actually bribed? We’ll probably never know. Despite knowing about this charge of bribery since June 2020, the FBI has not seriously investigated the matter or questioned President Biden about it. We’re not going to hold our breath waiting for action on their part. Maybe the answer is that President Biden was then so immersed in the corruption of Ukraine and that of his son, that he didn’t know it when he saw it.
According to a report by the Washington Post (October, 2019), George Kent, a career State Department official overseeing Ukraine policy, told congressional investigators that he had raised concerns in early 2015 about then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, but was turned away by a Biden staffer, who said the vice president didn’t have the “bandwidth” to deal with the issue involving his son as his other son, Beau, was battling cancer. Furthermore, there had been discussions among Biden’s advisers about whether his son’s Ukraine work would be perceived as a conflict of interest, and that one former adviser had been concerned enough to mention it to Biden, though the conversation was brief.
In November 2016, Kent tried again, writing US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch: “The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter’s presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules.”
Whatever the answer to these charges of Biden corruption, we’d argue that you cannot trust what the President is saying. Does anyone really believe that the President only learned of Hunter’s position on the Burisma board when he read about it in news reports, or when he said “I never discussed with my son anything having to do with what was going on in Ukraine. That’s a fact.”
Not according to House Oversight Committee Chairman Representative James Comer. His committee previously discovered the $20 million plus payments made by foreign companies in Russia, Ukraine and China to various shell companies, which were then distributed to Biden family members. He has also discovered Emails on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop which showed that Joe Biden’s vice-presidential staff looped Hunter Biden into his father’s private schedule on days that corresponded with significant moments in Ukraine relations. Comer also states that “Hunter Biden and his associates were informed of then-Vice President Biden’s official government duties in countries where they had a financial interest.” Representative Comer is now demanding access to records from the National Archives. Officials there have found as many as 5,400 records containing the pseudonyms President Joe Biden used while he was Vice President, some of which were sent to his son Hunter. Who knows what they will find there, but we’ll bet even money that it will not support the President’s claim that “he did nothing wrong.”
"Say it ain't so, Joe" is a phrase attributed to a young fan speaking to Shoeless Joe Jackson after Jackson's indictment for throwing the 1919 World Series. Likewise, if Joseph Biden is shown to have profited by the foreign payments to those shell companies, or other shell companies not yet discovered, there will undoubtedly be a number of young (Progressive) men and women lamenting – Say it ain’t so, Joe!
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