Four years ago Thursday, Ray McGovern wrote Establishment media was in a frenzy about the hoped-for downfall of Trump, but if the facts came out, it could be Joe Biden’s downfall instead. The facts are now coming out.
Hunter Biden with his father and step mother at his father’s presidential inauguration, Jan. 20, 2021. (DOD, Carlos M. Vazquez II)
By Ray McGovern
Raymcgovern.com
First republished Sept. 21, 2019
The Joe Biden-friendly Establishment media has mounted a full-court press to “prove” that Biden is, well, not a crook.
The stakes are extremely high, Biden is vulnerable, and media players are using to a faretheewell the old adage about the best defense being a good offense. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are desperately trying to steal the ball and get ahead in the publicity game. But time is about to run out, and pre-emptive propaganda is unlikely to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. IF the facts do come out and IF they are reported, Biden’s presidential hopes may suffer a mortal blow.
Hunter and Joe Biden at Obama’s 2009 inaugural parade. (Wikimedia Commons)
When the corruption in which the former Vice President and his son Hunter were involved in Ukraine becomes more widely known, the press wants to be in position to “show” that it’s all the fault of President Donald Trump and his lawyers for trying to derail Biden’s candidacy by exposing him. If past is precedent, the media will largely succeed. The question is whether enough people will, nevertheless, be able to see through this all-too-familiar charade.
In an interview with The National Interest, Joe Lauria put this episode in context:
“’It was in February [2014] when Yanukovych was overthrown, and just a few months later (in May), Joe Biden’s son and a close friend of John Kerry’s stepson, they both join the board of this Ukrainian gas company. And the name of that was Burisma Holdings,’” said Joe Lauria, editor of Consortium News and a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. “’So just after an American-backed coup, you have Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and this John Kerry family friend joining the board of probably the largest private gas producer in Ukraine. They installed the new government, and as the bounty of this coup, Joe Biden’s son personally profited. He would not have gotten that job if Yanukovych was still in power,’” Lauria told The National Interest.”
Will U.S. voters have any way of putting these dots together, and also in discerning, for example, how much truth there may be in charges that Vice President Biden pressed hard for the ouster of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin, who was canned after investigating corruption at Burisma Holdings Ukrainian gas company of which Hunter Biden was a board member?
In this video Biden admits on the record to essentially using a billion dollar line of credit as a bribe to get the prosecutor fired.
If the truth does come out, no one will have to rely on remarks from the likes of Rudy Giulinai, one of Trump’s lawyers, who has called the episode “an astounding scandal of major proportions.” That may be hyperbole but, still, the damage to Biden could be fatal.
And so, damage control is in full swing today at the Times, the Post, the Journal and other “usual suspects,” with the Times winning the laurels with its Editorial Board, no less, weighing in with “What did Trump tell Ukraine’s president?” There have also been op-eds by Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Anne Applebaum, Greg Sargent and (my favorite), George T. Conway III and Neal Katyal at the Post, whose headline is: “Trump has done plenty to warrant impeachment. But the Ukraine allegations are over the top.”
That title is correct.
This piece was republished with the author’s permission.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. Ray was a CIA analyst for 27 years; in retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Always excellent. I have a question: Was it Joe Biden that scuttled the Minsk Accords?
I have sometimes wondered about Merkel and Hollande’s sudden attack of conscience or perhaps bravado in admitting to undermining the Minsk Accords that were meant to prevent the current outcome.
I wonder now if Merkel’s admission was in fact a small truth revealed to keep a bigger one hidden, to wit, was it Biden who ordered Merkel and Hollande to stand down and abrogate their legal requirement as guarantors to make sure that Ukraine implemented the Minsk Accords?
Of course, the Kiev regime was dead set against the accords. But the Minsk Accords were fully supported by the UNSC with Germany and France as legal signatories and guarantors. It was precisely their job to move a recalcitrant Kiev regime into compliance. Who stopped them? Did they decide that on their own? It was both of them that turned a blind eye to Kiev’s non-compliance after all.
Ukraine was Biden’s brief in the Obama admin. The Maidan coup was in 2014 and Biden was the “big guy” for Nuland, Blinken and Sullivan to call on. Biden was in full swing in Ukraine by 2014 if not earlier as well as in his personal payment shake down related to Burisma.
So, was it Joe Biden who effectively scuttled the Minsk Accords to which Merkel and Hollande admitted?
In fact, was it Obama and/or HRC in State who gave their approval for this?
I don’t know if this particular line of inquiry has been followed.
Amazing the state of denial which persists politically in USA… particularly public deafness to much repeated line: “Burisma Pipeline”
A few years ago, Consortium News ran an article and video by a French Journalist that did an extensive two part investigation of the Biden/Burisma affair.
I con’t seem to find it. Does anyone have the link to this story?
We will repost the entire series on Monday. Thanks.
While Biden is Vice President his government executes a coup to replace Yanukovych with arguably the most corrupt replacement possible Poroshenko.
Poroshenko’s game is to use his position of power to turn up the heat on businesses in order for them to bribe him to stop.
Against Burisma he held back lucrative licenses and also sicked the prosecutor’s office on them.
So Zlochevsky – CEO of Burisma hired Hunter Biden to help them get Poroshenko off their backs.
The top prosecutor Shokin freezes millions of dollars in Burisma assets.
Very soon after, Joe Biden shows up in Ukraine and demands they fire Shokin or they can’t have this $1 billion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money, quid pro quo.
Biden challenges them to call Obama if they don’t believe him.
Obama has given his word that he’ll back him on this.
Shokin is fired and replaced by Lutsenko, the most unqualified and corrupt replacement possible (he had done time in prison for corruption).
He has zero experience in law or as a prosecutor. It made no sense at all for him to be named chief prosecutor.
Biden declares “they replaced Shokin with somebody solid”.
Lutsenko then has Burisma pay pack a few token million of the $23 million they had obtained corruptly, then says they’re absolved of all crimes and free to go.
After 3 months they closed a very complex criminal investigation that had been going on for years and was very much active under Shokin.
Burisma was now free to continue its enterprise of corruptly obtaining gas licenses through bribes and making millions of dollars.
They were paying president Poroshenko $1 million per month (giving him $1 million in gas really).
So bribing the Bidens to get Shokin fired paid off many times over, it cost Burisma at least $1 million and possibly more than $10 million . The Republicans are still trying to track the money through more than 20 shell companies they shuffled it through.
It’s so ridiculous that any democrat voter thinks this all adds up to nothing.
And the Washington Post has to be the most blatantly shameless of them all.
There’s no way of course that the current president Zelensky does not have evidence of Biden’s corruption in Ukraine.
That’s what the impeached Trump for, for asking Zelensky about this.
And now we see Biden bending over backwards to give him everything he wants to ramp us up to WWIII.
Meanwhile your average democrat voter is so apathetic and uninterested that all they picked up about politics over the last three years is that Roe V. Wade was overturned and Trump has been indicted.
They’ll wake back up next year when they’re told to get busy pimping for Biden’s next term turning the world into a burning ember.
To me, the solo internet observer/searcher this just seems like another disinfo dike to keep pushing people back and forth and constrained to confusion and passivity. Gotta keep attacking Biden from the Left to make sure that even if they Left wins a moot victory they will not go crazy and really take over the government or push a real democracy.
That’s what you should be writing about and talking about, dissecting and inventing – this new system all Progressive appear to want before they get distracted by this back and forth gossiping BS.
Thanks as always Ray for your wonderful writings and speaking out honestly for peace. So sad that supposed peace wing of Democratic party on the left is silent, so support this war. Guess because led by a Democratic president! Your article says what needs saying.
Blessings
Even just perusing the article…I feel like throwing up!
if this stone (Ukr prosecutor) is removed the whole building will collapse being rotten to its very core
This article does not lay out the full extent of the evidence of bribe taking, which goes beyond Burisma and involves millions in influence peddling via Hunter Biden’s companies which appear to have done a 50/50 split with”Pop” Biden. Maybe with 2 ex-presidents in jail from the 2 criminal enterprises that comprise american politics, we may have a serious awakening.
This article was written four years ago before a lot of that evidence was known. In fact it warns if the facts come out what would happen to Biden, and the facts are coming out.
This article was written four years ago before that evidence emerged. It is republished here to show that Ray’s warning is coming true as the impeachment inquiry begins.
Or does it all date back to the conflicts the Clintons had with Russia years ago, concerning their (the Clintons) business interests in Ukraine? We’ll probably never now.
Maybe Trump and Biden can be cellmates! Seriously, both factions of the Property Party have been seriously corrupt for a looooong time.
To me the video of Biden speaking of his use of $1 billion in federal monies to Ukraine to bludgeon the Ukes into firing the prosecutor who was Hunter’s tormenter in itself proves Biden was committing a crime.
What right did Biden have to interfere in Ukraine’s affairs that way? Does he think the US is an Empire and Ukraine a vassal state? (Rhetorical query for the sake of irony.)
And then when it became clear that the billion dollar bludgeon was for a member of the Biden Crime Family, it became a crime under US law so far as I can tell.
If Trump had appeared in a video like that to help out Ivanka, it would have been grounds for at least a couple impeachments.
Yes, this video speaks volumes. And one more foolish slip by Biden in that video. He announces that Ukraine was his….and then immediately catches himself and becomes defensive saying – ohh… it wasn’t my decision, I didn’t take Ukraine, it was assigned to me…something to that effect.
And since he had been so boastful and then tried to sound modest and not in control , he convinced me that he had something to hide.
I believe that Obama picked Biden and Clinton for VP and State, respectively, based on the old adage “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. They were the most aggressive in the debates and were the greatest threats to come after Obama in the next election.
And, I guess it’s possible that the deal Obama cut with Biden could have been to “give him Ukraine” and with Hillary, ‘god knows what’…..this is all so sickening given what these people did on their watch – don’t forget Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo
We have criminals running things I’m sorry to say.
Larry Wilkerson on “Dialogue Works” today is extremely upset with the people who are running things and mentions the movie “1900” about the rise of Mussolini in Italy because the NEOCONS in charge have been profiting from their hate mongering:
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXpztMFA6lE
How about, if Biden falls down one more time , then the DNC will just have to keep him down. So would Kamala become President and how would she do? She would no doubt be the place holder until the next male Dem came up. Why? Women are still discriminated against—-although it might be interesting, or at least entertaining if Trump had to do his campaigning from jail.After all Eugene Debs ran for president from jail and he racked up a lot of votes too. But Biden, I’m sorry he does have to go—but then so does Trump and it’s difficult to see who would be good at the job. But please, No more Biden and no more Trump
I wish I could believe that this is the end of the road for this very poor example of leadership ,( that word is putting it mildly) as a US president but I have a hard time seeing the end soon .The media is that strong in driving the narrative ,as faulty , as lying and corrupt as it is .Good luck to the American people ,it will take a miracle to reclaim what it once was.
At the same time, some members of the MSM, including CIA stenographer David Ignatius, are calling for Biden to step down as President. I think there’s a decent chance that he will do so. That will put “What’s Her Name” in the White House, which won’t result in any policy changes, as she will be controlled by the exact same people who now control Biden. Someone once said that in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. Biden/Harris/Trump is proof of that statement.
The USA does not even resemble a democracy, and I do not believe that the people of the USA deserve such “leaders” and actually did vote “freely and fairly” for any of their alleged representatives. Check out the system.
Just overthrow this corrupt U.S. federal government and re-instate the Constitution as originally intended.
Unfortunately the Constitution, as originally intended, applied to white male property owners only.
The corruption and criminality does not stop at the Bidens or Trumps. The US is institutionally corrupt.
The oligarchy openly bribe Congress, SCOTUS and the Executive branch. It is not just a few “bad apples”. SCOTUS formalized unlimited bribery ffs.
No mater if Biden/Trump are politically finished, two more amoral, mendacious crooks will take their place.
BTW, instead of putting the perpetrators of the largest financial crimes in US history in prison, and clawing back billions (See. prof. William K., the TBTF (above the law) banksters were rewarded with public funds. They were allowed to commit more fraud by foreclosing on junk mortgages. That fact alone should underline the problem of institutionalized corruption. Yet these facts are forgotten and ignored.
I don’t think it will matter. Republicans support Trump no matter what, Democrats support Biden no matter what, and they have the backing of their respective committees. Those of us who see that both are full of s— are basically powerless until and unless we reach the point that we are ready for drastic action, but barring unexpected circumstances, we are far from that yet.
The Biden crime family isn’t going to make it unscathed to the next election, no matter how much propaganda the Corporate Owned News pumps out. Too many people know about their corrupt dealings, and you can’t just put that genie back in the bottle. The trouble for the DNC is that they have no alternatives that can easily beat Trump in the general election, so they are going to hang on to Uncle Joe as long as they can.
The Justice Department has been slow walking the Hunter Biden corruption and tax charges for over five years. They intentionally let the statute of limitations run out on many clear-cut crimes. Unlike Trump, where the federal government in DC worked tirelessly, with the Russiagate conspiracy, to undercut him and his Presidency, Joe Biden is the Establishment’s Golden Boy. The UniParty wants to get rid of Trump (lots of Never Trumper Republicans in DC) and will protect Joe Biden “to the Last Ukrainian”.
Remember Trump was impeached for trying to uncover former VP Biden’s Ukraine corruption. Painted by the media as a Trump attack on a political opponent, Biden looked an unlikely candidate at the time.
I found this originally on Consortium News: ukrainegate.info . These videos detailed much of Biden’s corruption in Ukraine and the Ukrainians’ reactions to it. The facts involved were totally ignored.
As I believe Vindman pointed out during his first impeachment, President Trump was interfering with consensus US policies in Ukraine (evidently the Citizen Genet Affair, which established the President as the Decider of Foreign Policy, is no longer a part of American history).
GOOD. Another one bites the dust.
Surely no one believes Biden paid a billion dollars to have Shokin fired because his Burisma prosecution wasn’t aggressive enough? It smelled bad then and has had years to rot in the barrel.
Congressman James Comer has the goods on Joe Biden. There is enough evidence already to convict Biden of crimes including bribery, corruption, influence peddling and extortion, as well as treason. If you have not already done so, please look at Comer’s presentation ‘the Bidens influence peddling timeline.’
hxxps://oversight.house.gov/the-bidens-influence-peddling-timeline/
Rep. Comer has done a fine job presenting this case. The next step is to obtain bank records for Hunter and James Biden. Joe Biden’s son and brother. We need to examine where the $20 million, which was laundered through a web of 20 or so shell companies, ends up. Eventually, Comer will want access to Joe Biden’s bank records as well. As we saw with Trump, the Congress and/or the Courts can and will eventually demand the bank records opened. Even if the defendant is the President. There is a process that it takes to get there, but over the next year, we will see the release of this incriminating information, by drips. Joe Biden has mocked the investigation saying ‘Where is the money?’ No doubt the Biden crime family has taken evasive measures to hide the income. It might be in offshore accounts or some commodity such as diamonds or gold. But Joe’s bank records will likely show that money or payments came to him through Hunter’s many shakedown deals with foreign interests. Those deals are already documented on Comer’s website. For the next 12 months, Joe Biden can run, but he can no longer hide.
Some Republicans are now accusing Biden of committing the same crimes that the Democrats accused Trump of doing and impeached him for it: Using government taxpayer funds to black mail Ukrainian officials to get them to do their political dirty.
Hear this Democrats: People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Projection is always the core of deep state Psy-Ops. The DNC always stages a pre-emptive strike, accusing their opponents of their own crimes. The Clintons were in bed with Russia before concocting to the Trump-Russia hoax. Pelosi impeached Trump over extortion in Ukraine when it was Biden who bragged in public about doing precisely that. The DNC are racists and misandrists always accusing their opposition of racism and sexism. When Biden crows that ‘Putin has already lost the war in Ukraine’ it is plainly clear that it is Biden who has already lost. NATO rails about Russian imperialism, while it is NATO that arms Russia’s neighbors with ever more nuclear-capable missiles pointed solely at Russia. The Western world cries about defending Democracy from Autocracy while snuffing out freedom of speech and jailing their opposition.
Agree that this is where the impeachable and perhaps Jail-able crimes are ( Joe was VP at the height of this corruption) .
Can these media outlets really recreate the War on Terror and call it The War on Biden? It seems they are trying to accomplish this feat. Didn’t Jefferson point out that the media is more important than the government? I hope someone can tell these propaganda experts that if you don’t question power, you are the means to that power being badly used against us all. We won’t forget.
Yup. The title is correct. Biden is a swamp dweller.