OPINION:
The Biden family’s multimillion-dollar bribery and money-laundering operation has more moving parts than an 80-year-old grandfather clock. Even newsaholics find it tough to follow this scandal’s interlocking meetings, phone calls, trade junkets, wire transfers, and shady characters with unpronounceable names.
As just-appointed special counsel David Weiss soon will learn — unlike “White House aides break into Democratic headquarters” — capturing the Bidens’ shakedowns requires more than one bumper sticker.
Thankfully, the House Government Oversight Committee has ridden to the rescue. The Bidens’ influence peddling timeline vividly illustrates the assorted crooks who paid Hunter Biden, his associates, and eight of his relatives (including Joe Biden’s grandchild, niece and nephew) at least $21,342,300 for access to “the Big Guy,” the former vice president and now president.
Indeed, Fox News reports, the elder Mr. Biden met with at least 14 of Hunter’s hoodlums.
This online timeline makes it easier to track specific favors purchased from the Bidens with cash from China, Kazakhstan, Romania and Ukraine.
It specifically demonstrates how tightly the gears and springs were connected as Hunter Biden and his father defended their Ukrainian paymasters.
May 12, 2014: “Burisma announces Hunter Biden joined its board of directors,” the timeline explains. This Ukrainian oil and gas company paid Hunter $1 million per year. This far exceeded 2014’s median total board-member compensation of $31,500 at the 235 companies in 35 nations and 31 industries that Lodestone Global surveyed.
Hunter was a self-confessed crackhead with no experience in energy, Eastern Europe or Ukraine. He previously told his business partner Devon Archer that his added value “has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name.”
His father spearheaded U.S. policy toward Ukraine. How convenient! This explains why Burisma Holdings placed a drug addict on its board and paid him 3,174% of Lodestone Global’s benchmark.
March 20, 2015: “Hunter Biden organizes a business dinner at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C. where he has his father to stop by the dinner to meet a high-level Burisma official, Vadym Pozharskyi.”
Whether these two discussed business or the weather, the message was clear: Hunter could summon the vice president of the United States for a meeting, had his full attention, and was worth every hryvnya that Burisma paid him.
Nov. 2: “Vadym Pozharskyi suggests high-level U.S. officials come to Ukraine and talk with Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and President Petro Poroshenko about Mykola Zlochevsky’s investigations,” the timeline states. “Prosecutor General Shokin was investigating Burisma and Burisma’s owner, Zlochevsky, for fraud.”
This was precisely the heat from which Burisma wanted the Bidens’ shield. “He [Shokin] was a threat” to Burisma, Archer told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Nov. 6: “Amos Hochstein, a high-level U.S. government official working in the Obama-Biden administration, meets with Hunter Biden and discusses Burisma.”
Nov. 11: “Amos Hochstein meets with Vice President Biden in the West Wing.”
Nov.14: “Vadym Pozharskyi emails Hunter Biden confirmation that the Vice President will be traveling to Ukraine.”
Dec. 7: “Vice President Biden arrives in Ukraine, where he demands Prosecutor General Shokin be fired if Ukraine wants $1 billion in International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans.”
Jan. 23, 2018: “I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars,” the vice president recalled telling Mr. Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arsenyi Yatsenyuk in Kyiv on Dec. 9, 2015. As he bragged on camera at the Council on Foreign Relations: “I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
“I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the [Biden] brand attached to it,” Mr. Archer told House investigators on July 30.
As if pitching new business, Hunter once boasted that “the Bidens are the best” at delivering results for their high-dollar clients. Who could disagree? Even the president’s critics must admire the Bidens’ world-class customer service.
• Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.
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