A famous clip from recent history: “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”
That was Joe Biden in 2016. He was relaxing among friends at a chummy event at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ha, ha, ha, tittered the appreciative audience. What a lark! Here was a former vice president of the United States bragging about how he (naughty word) blackmailed an official from a foreign government who was investigating the company on whose board Joe Biden’s son sat.
This is old news, of course. Yesterday, the Acme Democratic Under Carpet Sweeper had somehow managed to simultaneously distract the public from the gravity of Biden’s behavior while also pretending that it was no big deal, assuming he did it, which he probably didn’t, and anyway, what about Trump?
Senator Chuck Grassley unplugged that machine, threw sand into its gear box, and lit the crippled apparatus on fire when he made public a lightly redacted version of the FBI FD-1023 form detailing a host of damaging accusations from an FBI informant. The FBI had begun by stonewalling Congress about the document. Then they let a couple members of Congress have a peek at a redacted version, releasing to the public one of those comic heavily redacted playthings which is basically just a mass of black lines. Now, thanks the Grassley’s efforts, almost the whole document is available to public scrutiny. Quoth the senator: “The American people can now read this document for themselves, without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats, thanks to brave and heroic whistleblowers.” Yep.
Most damaging is in the claim that Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, said he had “seventeen recordings involving the Bidens; two of the recordings included Joe Biden, and the remaining fifteen recordings included Hunter Biden.” I wonder when those will be released for our listening pleasure.
Bottom line: the accusation is that Zlochevsky was coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure that Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was fired in 2016. How much? Joe and Hunter were each said to have made off with $5 million, plus Hunter was given a spot on the Burisma board and a stipend of between $50,000 and $80,000 per month. Nice work if you can get it. And the Bidens can and do get it.
Bottom bottom line: Burisma “hired Hunter Biden ‘to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.’” Do you believe it? I do. Will it matter? Hard to say. The wagons are circled but the Apaches are angry and getting angrier. I am looking forward to the day I can say, “Well, son of a bitch, the Bidens got fired.”