So When Will They Be Punished? Don’t Hold Your Breath
If the Pinocchio story were true, then former CIA Directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would have such long noses that they would take up entire city blocks.
In October 2020, the four habitual liars, along with 47 other top intelligence officers, signed a public statement claiming that emails and correspondence found on an abandoned laptop belonging to Hunter Biden “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Such an operation, the former spooks claimed, would be “consistent with Russian objectives…to create political chaos in the U.S. to deepen political divisions here” and “undermine the candidacy of Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump.”
A comprehensive new study by Garrett Ziegler, a former White House staffer, published by Marco Polo—a research organization dedicated to exposing government corruption—combined with Miranda Devine’s book, Laptop from Hell (2021), shows that Brennan and company appear to have been deceitful.[1]
It should be noted that Ziegler is a conservative who worked for Peter Navarro, a former Trump adviser, and some might argue that his report is biased.
However, if they read the report along with Devine’s book, they will see that the evidence is incontrovertible: the hard drive copy of the laptop is authentic and that Hunter Biden was a drug-addicted playboy—something Biden himself wrote about in his memoir Beautiful Things—and should be in jail for serial drug and prostitution offenses.
Hunter further was involved in influence-peddling business arrangements that helped skew U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Ukraine, and cast a pall of corruption over the Biden White House.
Legal Trouble and a Historical Pattern
Federal prosecutors are currently considering charging Hunter Biden with three tax crimes, including tax evasion and a charge related to a gun purchase.
A separate congressional inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs by the House Oversight Committee, headed by James R. Comer (R-KY), has combed through bank records to substantiate claims of influence peddling, uncovering that the Biden family had set up over a dozen companies while Joe Biden was Vice President, has received over $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies, and engaged in many intentionally complicated financial transactions to hide these payments and avoid scrutiny.[2]
Concern was further raised about the Biden family’s pattern of courting business in regions of the world in which Vice President and now President Biden has had an outsized role and influenced U.S. foreign policy.
During a news conference in May, Comer acknowledged that Hunter Biden would have been far from the first relative of a President or Vice-President to try to make money off the family name.
Comer invoked Billy Carter, the brother of former President Jimmy Carter, who visited Libya and received a $220,000 loan; and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose firm has received billions of dollars from Persian Gulf nations.
“This has been a pattern for a long time,” Comer said. “Republicans and Democrats have both complained about presidents’ families receiving money.”
What is different about the Bidens, however, is their brazenness—Joe Biden bragged at an event before the Council on Foreign Relations that he blackmailed the Ukrainian government into firing the prosecutor of an energy company, Burisma, that paid Hunter as much as $5 million after appointing him to his board of directors, and which appears to have functioned as a CIA front for financing right-wing militias fighting a proxy war for the U.S. in eastern Ukraine.
The Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine—like Kushner’s in the Gulf Arab States—epitomizes the interconnection between capitalism and U.S. imperialism, which is leading us toward a potential world war.
Since he became Vice-President, Biden has been a super-hawk on Ukraine and pushed for escalation of the war with Russia at the same time that members of his families profited financially in Ukraine and gained access to new business opportunities.
Numerous theorists of imperialism have detailed the influence of private industries under capitalism in hijacking governments and driving imperialistic foreign policies among Western nations, including those that resulted in World War I.[3]
Today, we see the same phenomenon combined with heightened levels of profiteering by U.S. Presidents and their families for whom control over government offers an opportunity for obscene levels of personal enrichment along with impunity from prosecution for criminal acts.
Rosetta Stone of White and Blue-Collar Crime
Over a 13-month period, Ziegler carried out a forensic examination of every email and file on the copy made of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive. The laptop had been abandoned in a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop in April 2019 and turned over to the FBI by its owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who believed it contained evidence of felonies. The FBI at this time did not launch any formal criminal investigations.
The forensic analysis was commissioned by Ziegler and produced by a former federal investigator, a retired U.S. Secret Service agent Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, and Maryman Associates, founded by Brad Maryman, a 29-year veteran of the FBI.
Ziegler’s examination determined that there were approximately 459 violations of state and federal law on the laptop, including tax evasion, money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), as well as drug and prostitution-related offenses.
The report is an embarrassment not only for Hunter but for the entire Biden family, as it reveals severe problems with drug and alcohol abuse and unethical business practices whereby family members individually got rich by playing off the Biden name.
Ziegler calls the laptop the “Rosetta Stone of white and blue collar crime under the patina of the ‘Delaware Way.'” This “way” is basically a form of crony capitalism where corrupt businessmen around the world provide high-paying jobs and covertly bribe Joe Biden and members of his family in return for political favors and protection from prosecution.
In Laptop from Hell, Miranda Devine wrote that Delaware was named “American Lichtenstein” in the Financial Security Index, which “crowned Delaware the world’s most opaque jurisdiction, attracting capital from around the world, with no questions asked, and where legislation beneficial to financial services interests is worked out with lawmakers behind closed doors.”[4]
Back in 2001, Hunter was given a lucrative job right out of law school with MBNA Corporation, a major bank and credit card company that was his dad’s largest donor.
Senator Joe Biden in turn championed legislation favorable to MBNA, including a law that made it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy and write off credit card debt, and helped block a bill that would require credit card companies to provide better warnings about the perils of making only minimum monthly payments.[5]
The classic example of the “Delaware Way” applied on the global stage was Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Board of Directors of Burisma as part of a scheme that was designed to protect the company from prosecution for tax evasion and to save it from paying millions of dollars in fines.
According to Ziegler, Hunter and his partner Archer Devon, who was later convicted of swindling a Native American tribe out of $60 million in bonds (a scam Hunter was deeply involved with), acted as unregistered foreign agents by intervening on behalf of Burisma’s titular head, Mykola Zlochevsky, at the State Department and organizing a dinner for Vadym Pozharskyi, a key adviser to Burisma, with Joe Biden at Café Milano in Washington, D.C.
Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told the Senate on June 12 that the Burisma executive who allegedly paid Joe Biden and Hunter Biden kept 17 audio recordings of his conversations with them, which the FBI has been informed about.
In January 2018, Joe bragged in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations about how he had pressured the Ukrainian government into firing prosecutor Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee because Shokin was intent on prosecuting Burisma and holding them accountable for white-collar crimes.
Burisma was controlled by Ihor Kholomoisky, a billionaire oligarch and Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in 2015 who financed private militias that were used to fight pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.
The likelihood that Burisma was a CIA proprietary corporation used to clandestinely finance the war in eastern Ukraine—which began after the 2014 Maidan coup—is enhanced by the fact that Cofer Black, the former number three man at the CIA and director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center after 9/11, was appointed to its Board alongside Hunter.
Besides the Burisma affair, Ziegler’s report on the laptop includes more evidence of war profiteering in Ukraine: Jimmy Biden, Joe’s younger brother, secured more than half a million dollars in private mortgage loans for a vacation home in Florida from John Hynansky, a donor to Joe, immediately after Hynansky was granted a multi-million dollar loan from the U.S. government to sell luxury cars in Ukraine.
In the summer of 2014, Hunter was given a fully loaded Porsche valued at $129,000 for his involvement in illicit back-channel communications with the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan, Karim Massimov, who was trying to strengthen his ties to the U.S. State Department (Hunter was trying to get an oil and gas deal for Burisma in Kazakhstan and, according to Ziegler, acted as an unregistered foreign agent for both Massimov and Kazakh banking oligarch Kenes Rakishev).[6]
According to Ziegler, Hunter also acted as an unregistered foreign agent for Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian real estate tycoon charged with bribery and abuse of power involving commercial development in Bucharest.
