Devon Archer testifies: promoting the “brand”; firing Shokin
Yesterday the big news was that Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer testified before Congress and said that Joe Biden talked to Hunter’s business associates at least 20 times, but they all just chatted about stuff like the weather.
And of course, the left and the MSM are busy claiming that Joe Biden’s getting on the phone with these people sent no message whatsoever about the possibilities of doing business with any company with Hunter on the board, and how that might affect US policy towards that company. Nope; it was just about the weather, which after all is very important to us all. Hey, Joe didn’t even know who he was talking to – he was just being friendly old Joe.
We don’t have the transcript yet, although it’s been promised soon. But here are some of the comments on the testimony:
Goldman [a Democrat] claimed Archer had said Joe and Hunter’s business partners only exchanged ‘niceties’ like talking about ‘the weather, “what’s going on?”‘
But Republicans had a different retelling of Archer’s account.
Oversight member Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told DailyMail.com in an interview Archer testified that ‘the Bidens were in the actual business of influence peddling.’
‘It’s extremely damning,’ she said, claiming that the 20 phone conversations Archer referred to were directly about business deals.
‘We have Devon Archer coming out and telling the truth that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden spoke over 20 times about his business deals, not about the weather, not about what was for lunch about his business deals,’ she said.
I don’t even know whether the Democrats think any of their disclaimers are believable to anyone but the most stalwart Biden voters, or whether they’re just thumbing their noses and laughing at the lot of us. It helps that Biden is so foggy. But that’s not what you’d call reassuring.
Or was all this weather talk a ploy to maintain plausible deniability about what the effect of putting Joe on the line would be? Can we believe that Joe, even when he was Obama’s VP, would talk to just anyone, knowing that his son was in business in places like Ukraine and China, and not caring who might be on the other end of the line? Is he so very stupid and unaware that he doesn’t realize that there would be the potential for misuse of the Joe Biden connection?
Joe’s pretty stupid. But I don’t think he was ever that stupid. Perhaps Biden’s defenders think that we’re that stupid, though.
Here are Joe’s previous disclaimers about knowledge (or lack thereof) of Hunter’s business dealings, to refresh your memory.
Archer also said that Hunter and Joe were selling “the brand”:
Joe was there to add value, said Archer, to “the brand” of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma — which paid Hunter $83,000 a month while his father was VP, after which it cut his salary in half …
As Uncle Jim told Tony Bobulinski, another former business partner of Hunter’s, Joe is big on “plausible deniability,” a term coined by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to describe the practice of keeping the president only vaguely informed about illegal or unsavory activity so he can plausibly deny he knows anything if it becomes public knowledge.
And then there was the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor, Shokin. Remember him? I wrote many posts about him way back when. Here’s what Archer had to say yesterday:
Archer, a former business partner at the Rosemont Seneca firm who was convicted in 2018 in a tribal bond fraud scheme, also told lawmakers that Hunter Biden was pressured in late 2015 to help deal with Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s corruption investigation as Joe Biden was preparing to travel to Ukraine.
“In December 2015, Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, an executive of Burisma, placed constant pressure on Hunter Biden to get help from D.C. regarding the Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin,” the committee explained, recounting Archer’s testimony. “Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption. Hunter Biden, along with Zlochevsky and Pozharski, ‘called D.C.’ to discuss the matter. Biden, Zlochevsky, and Pozharski stepped away to take the call.”
A few days after that meeting, Joe Biden visited Ukraine as vice president and began an effort to force Ukraine’s president to fire Shokin, eventually threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if the termination did not happen. Biden’s defenders have long maintained the firing was not related to Burisma and was a result of U.S. policy because the Obama administration felt Shokin was corrupt.
Shokin has denied being corrupt and claims his firing was a result of his probe of Burisma.
That was all quite apparent long before Archer’s testimony, but it’s interesting that he actually said the pressure did occur. One of the most interesting things of all is that Joe Biden actually bragged about it. Apparently he felt completely insulated from ever getting into trouble for this:
Solid. Translated: solidly behind Burisma.
Ah, but it was Trump who was impeached.
“I don’t even know whether the Democrats think any of their disclaimers are believable to anyone but the most stalwart Biden voters, or whether they’re just thumbing their noses and laughing at the lot of us.”
Answer: both. They think (correctly or not) some people are that gullible and in any case they don’t care.
And more charges against Trump – totally not a distraction from Devon Archer testimony…
https://nypost.com/2023/08/01/trump-says-hell-soon-be-indicted-by-special-counsel-jack-smith-over-bid-to-overturn-2020-election/
Democrats indict Trump on totally ridiculous charges. Because they are evil.
They prove they are evil more and more every day.
At the time, I thought that the Biden interview where he brags about getting Shokin fired was fairly unseemly. As in, I’m not just an ineffectual VP. I have real power. Of course, Biden’s claim that Shokin was corrupt or a loose cannon lent a facade of legitimacy to it.
Not long after, came the news items that Burisma was corrupt, Hunter was paid ridiculous sums working for Burisma, and Shokin was going after Burisma. And Joe bragged about this firing??
The problem for Republicans is that it is so hard to prove that a specific government action was caused by a bribe. The Shokin firing might possibly be an exception, though I doubt it.
______
The Democrat media is now spinning the story that Joe and Hunter were selling the illusion of influence. Not actual influence. Well, the latter is criminal bribery, but isn’t the former the very definition of a confidence game.
Trust us! We’re just liars, not criminals.
I can’t shake my cynicism here.
That this testimony wasn’t public just smells of cover up. Ds & Rs walk out spinning their tales and all us rubes can’t go to the video for verification.
As the Boss noted yesterday…The Big Guy will suffer no loss here & The Bag Man may get a less sweet sweetheart deal.
Alot of harrumphing on both sides and POTUS Trump gets the lash.
A pox on the whole damned lot of ’em
Adam Smith famously observed, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”.
How much more road can there be down which to kick the can?
If the prosecutor was not being active enough, would the US government say anything other than “light a fire” under him, and make him go after the guilty?
You wouldn’t demand his resignation unless he was clearly targeting innocent lambs for political purposes. Or someone you wanted to protect.
But I’d suggest you look at the Atlantic Council postings which surely obfuscate in their views on Shokin.
The corruption seen in these stories is enough to make me want a shower after reading them. This is banana republic stuff.
“The illusion of influence” is influence if you can use it to get a prosecutor fired. Isn’t influence always dependent on whether people believe you have it? So much of it is bluff, and if people believe your bluff you can get them to do what you want. Until somebody calls your bluff you have influence. And if you’re the president’s “point man” for Ukraine isn’t that real influence?
I did sort of accept Team Biden’s explanation for the Shokin firing at first, but think about it. Foreign governments are full of corrupt officials. Ukraine and Russia certainly are. US politicians don’t usually do anything about them unless somebody complains — somebody who has clout with a US politician. It’s not like there were humanitarian concerns involved. One way to get clout is to pay for it: bribery.
As far as I know, the VP’s constitutional powers to not go much beyond presiding over the Senate and casting a tie-breaking vote. Where does he get the power to withhold aid from Ukraine? Why would anyone bother to influence/bribe the VP unless the President was involved? So was Obama in on the deal?
There may very well be Biden supporters who are so delusional that they actually believe that foreign oligarchs paid millions of dollars to the Biden family to hear old Joe say hello and deliver weather updates, but this is certainly not true of Democrats in Congress. They all know that Biden took millions of dollars in bribes and there is not a one of them that is willing to speak out against it. Their only interest is to protect their leader until such time as they are told he is expendable.
I still believe that there is a persuadable portion of the American public who are still ignorant of the depths of the Biden corruption but will turn against Biden if they know the truth. Republicans should be doing much more to put the facts before the public.
The Democratic Party has become the American Communist Party, totalitarian, corrupt and evil.
Re: The Brand
I love that Hunter and the Big Guy are up on the latest marketing concepts!
I was once at some entrepreneur workshop where we were instructed to consider our personal selves as a Brand and act accordingly.
What I continually find interesting is the total abandonment of appearances. Normally an upstanding politician or executive in the private sector will go the extra mile to avoid the appearance of impropriety. When one has an ethics class, or is taken through a corporate policy course on the company’s requirements, unethical decisions or choices are used as examples, but a substantial amount of time is also spent on choices and decisions that are not, in and of themselves, unethical – but they might be interpreted as being suggestive of unethical behavior, and therefore are discouraged or even prohibited (in corporations).
Not here, though – Not with Biden, Inc. Nobody has made any mention of the preponderance of evidence that establishes an appearance of impropriety. Over and over again, the Biden Crime Family has made public choices that reek of ethical failure, that show a reckless disregard for what we would normally call, ‘unimpeachable’ conduct. In other words, standards and behavior geared toward preserving reputation. And time and time again, these events, these Red Flags, pass unremarked.
There must be a lot of corporate trainers out there, shaking their head and wondering what they’ve been busting their butt for, all these years. Legal and Contracts/Procurement executives, too. Why bother? Take the gift, man.
As to what Hunter was selling, Mollie Hemingway explains.
https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/01/evidence-of-biden-burisma-corruption-is-overwhelming/
@ Geoffrey > Have we gone from “slowly at first” to “suddenly” yet?
@ bof > “So was Obama in on the deal?”
Don Surber thinks so.
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/bidens-crime-family-is-all-of-dc
“Where does he get the power to withhold aid from Ukraine? …was Obama in on the deal?”
Biden claimed he had Obama’s backing, in his “son of a bitch” remarks.
Many people voted for Obama to prove that they were not racist. Now he is Untouchable, for the same reason.