Senator Grassley Exposes Recordings of Biden’s Influence-Peddling in Ukraine
June 13, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—An executive at Ukraine’s Burisma gas company, where Hunter Biden was paid over $50,000 a month while his father was Vice-President, evidently made 17 audio recordings of his conversations with both Hunter and Joe Biden. Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley said that the executive made the tapes “as a sort of insurance policy” in case he “got into a tight spot.” Further, a politicized FBI has apparently been doing all it can to hide the existence of the recordings.
Joe Biden has bragged in January 2018 about the muscle that he had applied to Ukraine’s government in December 2015 for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating corruption at Burisma. Biden related how he had threatened that the U.S. would cancel a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless the government submitted to his demand. Since the U.S. had spent $5 billion, as Victoria Nuland claimed, to overthrow Ukraine’s government in 2014 and install the new guys, Biden might have viewed it as the U.S.’s right to specify who should be in office and who should be pushed out.
The existence of the recordings was exposed by a “highly credible” confidential source of the FBI who had dealings with Burisma executives, beginning in 2015. The FBI reports of the source have been buried by the FBI for years. In May, Senator Grassley, and Rep. James Comer, acting in his position as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, cited an FBI whistleblower who had earlier this year reported that the FBI was deep-sixing any investigation into the charges that as Vice President, Biden had taken bribes. The FBI documents on the recordings, and a lot more, were known to the whistleblower. However, the FBI first denied the existence of the documents and then ignored a subpoena from the Congress. Only after Representative Comer explicitly threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress did the FBI deliver a redacted version last week.
Yesterday, Senator Grassley, who, along with a few select members of Congress, had been allowed to read the original, unclassified, documents, made clear that the redacted version omitted the reference to the recordings. He said that one key omission was the “reference that the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them. Seventeen total recordings.” He urged the Justice Department to release a full, unredacted copy of FBI files that allegedly outline a criminal bribery scheme between the Biden family and Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings. It would also, very likely, raise questions as to why the FBI failed to pursue the investigation.
Biden has called the bribery allegations “a bunch of malarkey,” and claimed that he had singled out Shokin for firing, actually because Shokin was not going after corruption. It should be recalled that Donald Trump was impeached for calling upon Ukraine’s cooperation in investigating the seedy affair. That was considered an abuse of foreign policy, while the overthrow of the legally elected government in Kiev, the selection of Ukraine’s next rulers, or the dismissal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor do not meet that standard.
