Jim Jordan on Joe Biden: Obstruction, Cover-up and a Sweetheart Deal (Part 2)
By CHQ Staff
As with most lies, the story from the Bidens and the White House about Joe’s involvement in Hunter’s “business” has changed over time. On September 21, 2019, Joe Biden unequivocally said he had “never spoken” to his son about his business dealings. Then, on July 24, 2023, the White House walked it back, stating that President Biden had never been “in business with his son.” On December 13, 2023, Hunter Biden hedged even further, saying his father was “not financially involved” in his business. “Never spoken” became “never in business with,” which then became “not financially involved.” The President and the White House aren’t the only ones who have changed their statements.
Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who ran the Justice Department’s Hunter Biden investigation and is now the Special Counsel conducting the investigation, also couldn’t keep his story straight. For months, many in Congress had been urging Attorney General Garland to appoint a special counsel due to the obvious conflicts of interest in investigating the President’s son. In a letter to the Judiciary Committee on June 7, 2023, however, Weiss told us: “I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges” against Hunter Biden. In other words, Weiss, vowed, he’s got all the authority he needs, and no special counsel designation is needed.
But then, on June 30, 2023, we received a second letter from Weiss. In it he now stated, “I stand by what I wrote and wish to expand on what this means. . . . [M]y charging authority is geographically limited to my home district.”
Wow. In 23 days, David Weiss went from pounding his chest about his “ultimate authority” to, well, actually my authority is “limited.” Why? What happened between June 7 and June 30?
Here’s what happened: the testimony of two IRS whistleblowers, Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler, was published on June 22. Shapley and Ziegler were the agents who had worked on the Hunter Biden investigation. In the whistleblowers’ testimony, they told Congress that the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office slow-walked the entire investigation and prohibited standard investigative actions. Shapley and Ziegler were not allowed to interview certain witnesses. In the interviews they were allowed to conduct, they were prohibited from referencing the term “dad” or “the big guy.” The prosecutors notified Hunter Biden’s attorney about a pending search warrant, and they allowed the statute of limitations to lapse for the most serious criminal conduct.
All of this culminated in a proposed sweetheart plea deal with just two misdemeanor tax charges and a diversion agreement for a gun charge in Delaware. The sweetheart deal was so sweet that a federal judge refused to accept it. During the court proceedings, the judge asked the prosecutors, “[D]o you have any precedent for agreeing not to prosecute crimes that have nothing to do with the case or the charges being diverted?” Their response: “I’m not aware of any[.]” The judge then asked, “[H]ave you ever seen a Diversion Agreement where the agreement not to prosecute is so broad that it encompasses crimes in a different case?” “No” was the response from Weiss’s prosecutors. This type of plea agreement had never been done before—it was unprecedented and the judge was having none of it.
The sweetheart plea deal blew up, but the Biden-Garland Justice Department was not going to be deterred in its cover-up effort. It turned to plan B.
After months of insisting that Weiss had full authority and that no special counsel was needed, the Justice Department named a special counsel. And the man they chose for that important role was none other than David Weiss. The same David Weiss who couldn’t get his story straight. The same David Weiss who put together the sweetheart plea deal. The same David Weiss whose deal was laughed out of court.
The end result: Weiss can take his sweet time in completing the investigation. And, more importantly, Garland, Weiss, and the Biden-Garland Justice Department now maintain that they cannot answer Congress’s questions because there is an “ongoing investigation.” How convenient.
Case Study – The Bidens and Burisma
If there’s one case that best shows the Biden family influence operation, it’s Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. There are four key facts to this case study—four facts that will never change.
Fact #1: Hunter Biden gets put on the Board of Burisma and gets paid $1 million a year.
Fact #2: Hunter Biden is not qualified to be on the Board. He said so himself. In an ABC news interview in 2019, he was asked, “If your last name wasn’t Biden, do you think you would’ve been asked to be on the board of Burisma?” Mr. Biden responded, “I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect. . . . I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
Fact #3: Executives at Burisma asked Hunter Biden to alleviate the pressure coming from the Ukrainian government. Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner, gave Congress details. On December 4, 2015, Burisma executives Mykola Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharsky asked Hunter Biden if he could help them with the pressure they faced from the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin. What did Mr. Biden do after receiving the request from the Burisma executives? Mr. Archer replied, “I did not hear this phone call but he—he called his dad.”
Fact #4 – Three days later, on December 7, 2015, Vice President Joe Biden went to Kyiv and conditioned the release of the $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine on the firing of Shokin, the same prosecutor who was applying the pressure to the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Don’t take our word for it—Joe Biden said it himself. In a now infamous clip, he boasted about telling the Ukrainian President: “You are not getting the billion dollars. I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you are not getting the money.” And what do you know, Shokin got fired.
There was just one problem. Withholding the loan guarantee was contrary to the overwhelming consensus of the Obama-Biden State Department.
Six months before Vice President Biden’s trip to Ukraine, State Department Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland had written Prosecutor General Shokin, “We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government.” On October 1, 2015, two months before the Vice President’s trip, the Interagency Policy Committee in the Obama-Biden Administration announced, “Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third [loan] guarantee.” Even the preparation documents for Vice President Biden’s trip to Ukraine, dated November 22, 2015 stated, “You will sign our third billion-dollar loan guarantee . . . .”
So, what happened with the loan guarantee? As the Washington Post explained, Vice President Biden “called an audible.” Instead of just pushing for the firing of Prosecutor General Shokin—the same Prosecutor who a few months earlier the State Department and IPC said was doing a good job—Joe Biden decided on the plane ride to Ukraine that he would condition the release of American tax dollars on the firing of Shokin.
Why the sudden change? What caused the audible? Could it have been the phone call Hunter Biden made to D.C. two days earlier with Mr. Zlochevsky and Mr. Pozharsky by his side? Might the sudden change of U.S. policy have something to do with the fact that Hunter Biden was being paid $1 million a year, by the very company under investigation by the prosecutor who Vice President Biden bragged about getting fired?
It’s also worth noting the prosecutor general before Shokin had permitted the release of $23 million in seized assets back to Burisma executive Zlochevsky. The prosecutor general who followed Shokin, Yuriy Lutsenko—who had already been removed from office before for corruption—closed the case against Zlochevsky. The one prosecutor it seems who was actually investigating Zlochevsky, is the one who Vice President Joe Biden pushed to get fired.
Also in the background, leading up to Vice President Biden’s trip to Ukraine, Hunter Biden and his associates connected Burisma with Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat public relations firm in Washington. In a November 2015 communication to Burisma Executive Vadym Pozharsky, Hunter Biden wrote, “Devon and I do feel comfortable with [Blue Star Strategies] and the ability of [executives] Sally [Painter] & Karen [Tramontano] to deliver.” What were they going to deliver? Three days earlier, Pozharsky had told Hunter Biden and his business partners that Blue Star and Burisma needed to develop a “concrete course of actions” that included meetings with “US officials in Ukraine . . . and in [the] US . . . expressing their . . . support of [Zlochevsky]/Burisma to the highest level decision makers” with the “ultimate purpose to close down for any cases/pursuits against [Zlochevsky] in Ukraine.” Were they successful? In October 2016, Painter forwarded an article to Hunter Biden’s business partners Eric Schwerin and Devon Archer. The article’s title was “The Interior Ministry confirmed that Zlochevskiy is no longer wanted.” Ms. Painter wrote simply: “We won and in less than a year.”
Simply put, the Bidens were successful in firing the Prosecutor General investigating Zlochevsky and in getting the next Prosecutor General to take him off the wanted list. The Burisma case study shows the interconnected web of Joe Biden’s power, his family’s foreign business dealings, and foreign companies paying for access and influence.
It’s really a story as old as time. The question is—will Americans let the Bidens get away with it?
From conservativehq.com