Still at the top of Trump’s agenda: Sabotaging Ukraine to benefit Russia

Over the weekend Donald Trump held a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was noteworthy for a few reasons: It got Donald to actually leave his house, which was an impressive feat by his aides considering that Trump has been obsessively toilet-tweeting insults about his current indictments, expected future indictments, and everyone even tangentially involved with his indictments.

Also of note was his usual grifting podium sign, one telling the crowd to "Text PENNSYLVANIA -----" to give him money. This means Trump's campaign team genuinely believes Donald's rally crowds have the attention span to phone-thumb their way through all the letters of “Pennsylvania” without losing interest, so you can't say they've lost their optimism.

Then there was the part where he demanded all of the Republicans competing for the nomination besides him should drop out so that all the money they spent on their own campaigns could instead be given to him. Ah, classic Trump. I imagine he thinks he's being charitable by not demanding they all hand him the keys to their homes as well.

But the weirdest part was probably when Trump once again pressed his bizarre crusade against Ukraine, the same one he got impeached over the first time around, the same one that turned out to be a Rudy Giuliani snipehunt backed by crooked European oligarchs boosting crooked Russian disinformation. Trump once again really, really wants Republicans to block all military help to Ukraine—and this is apparently urgent enough that Trump doesn't think it can wait until his own theoretical second term. It's got to happen now.

"He's dragging into a global conflict on behalf of the very same country, Ukraine, that apparently paid his family all of these millions of dollars," Trump alleged. "In light of this information," Congress, he said, "should refuse to authorize a single additional payment of our depleted stockpiles ... the weapons stockpiles to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden crime family's corrupt business dealings."

Oh. My. God. See, what's amazing about Trump is that the man's brain is impervious to new information. It might be laziness, or he might just have too much grass and dirt lodged up there from all the holes he's knocked out of golf courses in his lifetime, but that could be a direct quote from any one of his speeches from his first two campaigns. It's only the fact that he's ranting about Joe Biden and not Hillary Clinton that gives it any context at all.

Trump was going on about "depleted stockpiles" throughout his 2016 campaign. It was his version of the Republican talking point that's been used without fail by each of their candidates of the past 40 years. Every time, the Republican says that our troops are suffering from a lack of readiness, or that the Navy doesn't have enough ships, or the Army doesn't have enough tanks, and it's because a stupid jerk not-Republican is in charge and only a Republican can fix the problem.

Then, if the Republican wins, the problem magically goes away and we don't hear about it again until the next time a Democratic president appears. Trump was very big on the "our troops have no bullets" nonsense. It vanished when he won, and we're possibly supposed to believe it was because he chipped in bullet money out of his own pockets or something. Eight years later, the problem has subtly changed: Now it’s that we're giving Ukraine all our bullets and missiles and phased-out stockpiled vehicles, which means we're not going to have any bullets or missiles or mothballed vehicles left over for ourselves, and our troops will have to train using water pistols and tactical assault bicycles.

What might be most on Trump's mind, however, is that he still really, really wants to build a new hotel in Moscow or God knows where, and it's very hard for him to suck up to Russian mob boss Vladimir Putin when he is unable to stop the United States from arming Ukraine.

So what does he do? Well, this is Donald we're talking about, so he repeats the same bullshit-premised propaganda Giuliani delivered to him the very first time around. It’s a theory about how Russia was completely innocent of both conducting espionage operations against the United States with the aim of making Trump president, and of attempting to seize control of Ukraine.

In the Giuliani-Russia retelling, it was Trump's political enemies who did the real "hacking," and they did it with the help of "Ukraine” (because sure why the f--k not), and Russia was framed for all the rest of it by Hillary Clinton. And, uh, then-Vice President Joe Biden's shiftless adult son. And the former comedian-turned-new-Ukrainian-president.

And Trump is still pushing this completely insane counternarrative, one in which the Democratic National Committee apparently hid (?) a secret server in Ukraine and leaked their own information to frame Russia. Then Hunter Biden got a consulting gig in Ukraine. He claims that unlike Paul Manafort and Giuliani's aggressive humping of European strongmen and criminals, that was actually the real scandal here. And when you say it all at once, it's so painfully stupid that you can see why the masterminds of these theories would find themselves accidentally booking press conferences in the Four Seasons Landscaping driveway just a few effing months later.

That is what Donald Trump has on offer as the seditionist coup leader scrapes together a post-treason, post-indictments second act: retreads. The man is still clinging to the original, Giuliani-authored plan that resulted in his damn impeachment!

Donate to help those escaping Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine.

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It’s Year 5 Of The Biden Crime Family Coverup

By Frank Miele for RealClearWire

A truism that came out of the Watergate scandal is that often the coverup is worse than the crime. But that is not the case in the unraveling Bidengate scandal. The alleged crime here is so bad that it is probably the worst ever committed by an American president.

Yet the coverup should be studied, too. It deserves superlatives for its longevity, inventiveness, and sheer audacity. The strategy has been simple: deny, deflect, destroy. Deny the facts. Deflect with distractions, and when all else fails, work tirelessly to destroy Trump, who was among the first to raise questions about the Biden family’s shady dealings. At Year 5, it may be the most successful coverup in modern history, especially since so many of the facts have been in plain sight for the entire time.

So what exactly is Bidengate? A decade-long influence-peddling scheme that saw Joe Biden, the former vice president, using his son Hunter as a conduit for millions of dollars in payoffs from foreign entities in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere in exchange for favorable treatment. The most famous instance of this scheme was the millions of dollars paid to Hunter Biden for his role as a board member of the corrupt Burisma energy company in Ukraine. Even Hunter acknowledged that his only qualification for being on the board was his last name.

Trading on one’s name to gain employment is not a crime in itself, but using your father’s public office to influence U.S. policy is definitely against the law – especially when the clout is used to protect your corrupt foreign employer.

That’s just what happened in March of 2016 when Vice President Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine if prosecutor general Viktor Shokin were not immediately fired. Biden even bragged about this escapade a few years later when he told the story to the Council on Foreign Relations.

It’s hard to know whether Biden’s threat to withhold aid was approved by the State Department or whether it was “on the fly” diplomacy, but we do know that Shokin has publicly stated that he was fired because he was investigating Burisma’s alleged corruption, and that after he was fired there was no further substantial investigation of Burisma. Quid pro quo.

Another famous mantra from the Watergate era is “Follow the money.” It almost makes you think Biden was taunting his accusers, quipping to a reporter on June 8, “Where’s the money?” when asked about allegations of corruption.

“That’s what we want to know,” the reporter should have demanded, but of course there was no follow-up question. There never is.

Biden’s cheeky response suggests he had reason to think that he could count on the source of any ill-gotten wealth being kept private. And he may have had good reason for that belief.

On July 20, a little more than a month after Biden asked “Where’s the money?”, Sen. Chuck Grassley released an unclassified FD-1023 FBI informant form alleging that Biden and his son Hunter had split a $10 million payment from Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma. Among the many intriguing breadcrumbs in that document was the informant’s claim that the payment to the Bidens was so well disguised that it would take years to uncover:

Zlochevsky responded he did not send any funds directly to the “Big Guy” (which [the FBI source] understood was a reference to Joe Biden). [The source] asked Zlochevsky how many companies/bank accounts Zlochevsky controls; Zlochevsky responded it would take them (investigators) 10 years to find the records (i.e. illicit payments to Joe Biden).

So that’s one possible answer to Joe Biden’s taunt: “Where’s the money?” Perhaps it’s well-hidden.

Related: Jill Biden’s Ex-Husband Comes Back To Haunt Her – ‘I Can’t Let Them Do What They Did To Me To President Trump’

There are so many flashing red warning lights in the Biden scandal that a casual observer would be forgiven for assuming he was in Amsterdam. Case in point: The FBI informant reported in his June 2020 statement that Zlochevsky had called Joe Biden the “Big Guy” in 2019.

That’s the same gangster nickname that one of Hunter Biden’s business associates used to refer to Joe in an infamous email on the “Laptop from Hell” when discussing what percentage of capital equity was being held by Hunter for Joe in a Chinese investment scheme. The laptop was in FBI hands since December 2019, but the email in question wasn’t circulated in public until the New York Post published it on Oct. 15, 2020. The informant’s use of the phrase prior to that time is strong circumstantial evidence that the FBI’s trusted human source was indeed privy to confidential and damning information about Biden.

But what’s truly maddening about the Biden coverup is just how long it has lasted while more and more evidence has mounted. Recent congressional hearings unearthed a trove of detail about bank payments to Biden family members, and IRS whistleblowers have laid bare the protection racket that the FBI and DOJ have been running for the Bidens. Most of that is just confirmation of what we already knew.

Remember, the first time most Americans heard about the Bidens’ bribery schemes was in September 2019 when the transcript of a phone call between President Trump and then-new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was released. In it, Trump raised the issue of former Vice President Biden’s alleged corruption and asked Zelensky to cooperate with U.S. authorities by “looking into” rumors of criminal activity by the Bidens.

Imagine if Congress had opened an inquiry then into the question of Hunter Biden’s huge salary for sitting on the board of Burisma Energy, the company controlled by oligarch Zlochevsky. Hunter Biden might be in prison now, and his father would have retired to Delaware to live out his final years in shame.

Instead, Democrats in Congress put Trump on trial for daring to notice that which must not be named – the influence-peddling scheme run by Joe Biden and his kin. The impeachment was America’s crash course on Ukrainian corruption, but somehow the mainstream media missed the story and tried to convince the public that Biden was the victim. They hid the evidence then, just as they did last week when Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal fell apart.

Related: Hunter Biden Pleads Not Guilty After Plea Deal Falls Apart

The Democrat-adjacent media seem to have a hard time understanding the case against Hunter Biden – and Joe Biden – even after five years. It’s not uncommon to hear cable news anchors lamenting that the Republicans are persecuting Joe and that they haven’t proven the president did anything wrong.

Either they don’t understand the meaning of the word proven, or they don’t understand our system of justice. It is not the job of Congress or reporters to prove anything, but rather to investigate and unearth evidence. For anyone who has eyes to see, there is a mountain of evidence against both Hunter and Joe Biden. But what we are still waiting for – what the nation is waiting for – is justice. To get that, we need a prosecutor who will present the evidence to a jury and ask for a verdict. Then and only then will the president’s guilt be proven or unproven.

How many more years do we have to wait?

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

The post It’s Year 5 Of The Biden Crime Family Coverup appeared first on The Political Insider.

Trump demands rivals quit presidential race, and more Biden investigations

By JILL COLVIN

NEW YORK (AP) — At a moment of growing legal peril, Donald Trump ramped up his calls for his GOP rivals to drop out of the 2024 presidential race as he threatened to go after Republican members of Congress who fail to focus on investigating Democratic President Joe Biden.

Trump also urged a halt to Ukrainian military aid until the White House cooperates with congressional investigations into Biden and his family.

"Every dollar spent attacking me by Republicans is a dollar given straight to the Biden campaign," Trump said at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night.

The former president and GOP front-runner said it was time for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others he dismissed as "clowns" to clear the field, accusing them of "wasting hundreds of millions of dollars that Republicans should be using to build a massive vote-gathering operation" to take on Biden in November.

The comments came two days after federal prosecutors unveiled new criminal charges against Trump as part of the case that accuses him of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and refusing to turn them over to investigators. The superseding indictment unsealed Thursday alleges that Trump and two staffers sought to delete surveillance at the club in an effort to obstruct the Justice Department's investigation.

The case is just one of Trump's mounting legal challenges. His team is currently bracing for additional possible indictments, which could happen as soon as this coming week, related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election brought by prosecutors in both Washington and Georgia. Trump already faces criminal charges in New York over hush money payments made to women who accused him of sexual encounters during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Nevertheless, Trump remains the dominant early figure for the Republican nomination and has only seen his lead grow as the charges have mounted and as his rivals have struggled to respond. Their challenge was on display at a GOP gathering in Iowa Friday night, where they largely declined to go after Trump directly. The only one who did — accusing Trump of "running to stay out of prison" — was booed as he left the stage.

In the meantime, Trump has embraced his legal woes, turning them into the core message of his bid to return to the White House as he accuses Biden of using the Justice Department to maim his chief political rival. The White House has said repeatedly that the president has had no involvement in the cases.

At rallies, Trump has tried to frame the charges, which come with serious threats of jail time, as an attack not just on him, but those who support him.

"They're not indicting me, they're indicting you. I just happen to be standing in the way," he said in Erie, adding, "Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it actually a great badge of honor.... Because I'm being indicted for you."

But the investigations are also sucking up enormous resources that are being diverted from the nuts and bolts of the campaign. The Washington Post first reported Saturday that Trump's political action committee, Save America, will report Monday that it spent more than $40 million on legal fees during the first half of 2023 defending Trump and all of the current and former aides whose lawyers it is paying. The total is more than the campaign raised during the second quarter of the year.

"In order to combat these heinous actions by Joe Biden's cronies and to protect these innocent people from financial ruin and prevent their lives from being completely destroyed, the leadership PAC contributed to their legal fees to ensure they have representation against unlawful harassment," said Trump's spokesman Steven Cheung.

At the rally, in a former Democratic stronghold that Trump flipped in 2016, but Biden won narrowly in 2020, Trump also threatened Republicans in Congress who refuse to go along with efforts to impeach Biden. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said this past week that Republican lawmakers may consider an impeachment inquiry into the president over unproven claims of financial misconduct.

Trump, who was impeached twice while in office, said Saturday that, "The biggest complaint that I get is that the Republicans find out this information and then they do nothing about it."

"Any Republican that doesn't act on Democrat fraud should be immediately primaries and get out — out!" he told the crowd to loud applause. "They have to play tough and ... if they're not willing to do it, we got a lot of good, tough Republicans around ... and they're going to get my endorsement every singe time."

Trump, during the 2022 midterm elections, made it his mission to punish those who had voted in favor of his second impeachment. He succeeded in unseating most who had by backing primary challengers.

At the rally, Trump also called on Republican members of Congress to halt the authorization of additional military support to Ukraine, which has been mired in a war fighting Russia's invasion, until the Biden administration cooperates with Republican investigations into Biden and his family's business dealings — words that echoed the call that lead to his first impeachment.

"He's dragging into a global conflict on behalf of the very same country, Ukraine, that apparently paid his family all of these millions of dollars," Trump alleged. "In light of this information," Congress, he said, "should refuse to authorize a single additional payment of our depleted stockpiles ... the weapons stockpiles to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden crime family's corrupt business dealings."

House Republicans have been investigating the Biden family's finances, particularly payments Hunter, the president's son, received from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that became tangled in the first impeachment of Trump.

An unnamed confidential FBI informant claimed that Burisma company officials in 2015 and 2016 sought to pay the Bidens $5 million each in return for their help ousting a Ukrainian prosecutor who was purportedly investigating the company. But a Justice Department review in 2020, while Trump was president, was closed eight months later with insufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

Trump's first impeachment by the House resulted in charges that he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on the Bidens while threatening to withhold military aid. Trump was later acquitted by the Senate.

GOP Rep. John James slams DeSantis for curriculum comments on slavery: ‘You’ve gone too far’

Rep. John James (R-Mich.) criticized Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Friday for his response to Republican lawmakers who called him out on his state’s new Black history education standards Friday.

“@RonDeSantis, #1: slavery was not CTE!” James posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Nothing about that 400 years of evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors. #2: there are only five black Republicans in Congress and you’re attacking two of them.”

Both Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) have criticized the new standards, which indicate that American slavery helped enslaved people develop “skills” that benefited them, in the past few days.

Scott rebuked the language during a campaign stop in Iowa on Thursday, claiming "there is no silver lining in slavery."

“Slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives," he said. "It was just devastating."

DeSantis responded to the lawmakers by saying they were falling in line with Vice President Kamala Harris, who called the guidelines "propaganda."

“They dare to push propaganda to our children,” Harris said earlier this week in Jacksonville, Fla. “Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother.”

James pleaded with DeSantis to change course.

“My brother in Christ… if you find yourself in a deep hole put the shovel down,” he wrote. “You are now so far from the Party of Lincoln that your Ed. board is re-writing history and you’re personally attacking conservatives like [Scott] and [Donalds] on the topic of slavery."

"You’ve gone too far. Stop," he added.

Trump and Putin need each other more than ever. It’s a matter of survival for both

Last week, Donald Trump lost a critical motion to keep a grand jury in Georgia from hearing evidence about his efforts to strong-arm Georgia election officials into overturning the state’s 2020 election results. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis also indicated that her office has developed evidence of what The Guardian characterizes as a “sprawling racketeering indictment” against Trump for those alleged criminal acts. At the same time, Trump confirmed that he has been designated as a target in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury investigation of Trump and his cohorts’ activities in instigating, among other things, the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Coupled with his indictment last month on charges of mishandling, appropriating, and then lying about his possession of classified government documents, these recent developments put Trump in serious jeopardy of a potential—and perhaps quite lengthy—prison sentence.

The character and timing of these multiple prosecutions, all of which will likely be instituted or pending at least a year prior to the November 2024 election (for which Trump continues to be the presumptive Republican nominee), provide Trump with very few realistic options to legally avoid or escape them. They are weighty, serious, and by all appearances, not subject to any quick or summary dismissal. If Trump follows his usual pattern, however, he will make every conceivable attempt to delay the trials until after Jan. 20, 2025, which will afford him an opportunity to resume his occupancy of the White House and have at least the federal charges dismissed by a compliant, hand-picked Justice Department seeded by his own sycophantic appointees.

But before any of those efforts, he absolutely must get himself elected. For Trump, winning in 2024 is now quite literally an existential imperative.

Meanwhile, in Russia, Vladimir Putin is facing his own crisis. Like Trump’s, it is one of his own making. For Putin’s sake, getting Trump reelected is also something of an existential imperative.

These two need each other now, and they’ve never needed each other more desperately since their own survival is literally at stake.

RELATED STORY: Trump's plan to expand presidential powers isn't just the daydream of a Putin fanboy

Putin’s war on Ukraine is going very badly, the Russian economy is being decimated, and his kleptocratic, authoritarian regime is starting to show obvious cracks. One reason is the sheer fierceness and bravery of the Ukrainians in defending their land, but Putin can’t do much about that one. The other factor, however, is the unexpected resilience of NATO and its successful, fairly unified strategy of heavily arming and advising the Ukrainian military forces. Absent some radical change of military fortunes on the battlefield in Russia’s favor, NATO is the one circumstance that Putin has the power to change in order to salvage his misguided war, and probably his regime as well.

Trump has already publicly provided Putin with implicit assurances that if he is reelected, Trump will disparage, defund, and ultimately seek disengagement from NATO, thus crippling that alliance. Part of Trump’s rationale for his pro-Putin and pro-Russia sentiments is doubtlessly payback for the assistance that Russian intelligence provided in helping Trump get elected in 2016. Should Putin again oblige Trump with the full power of Russia’s intelligence and disinformation apparatus in 2024, it is practically certain that Trump will do everything in his power to gratify his Russian patron, including abandoning Ukraine and NATO. Despite some recent Senate backlash, he appears to have a significant degree of support among like-minded members of the Republican Party. Without U.S. leadership propping up NATO, Russia stands a decent chance of reversing the war’s course, and Putin’s survival chances along with it. 

Despite the Republican Party’s best efforts to obfuscate or ridicule it through their own media outlets, the magnitude of Russia’s assistance to Trump in 2016 and the complicity of Trump’s campaign in soliciting and accepting that assistance is as unquestionable as it is damning. The treasonous implications of that relationship are, in fact, the reason why Trump so vigorously pushed his insistence that the Mueller investigation found “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, neatly sidestepping the fact that determining “collusion” (not a legal term) was never the subject of that investigation. It is also the reason why both Trump and his allies invariably followed the word “Russia” with the word “hoax” in their public statements to foster a reflexive reaction of disbelief in the minds of supporters.

In 2016, Trump’s campaign apparatus operated to solidify his Russian contacts through a network of go-betweens and intermediaries, such as then-campaign advisers Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos, and various Russian private citizens with ties to Russia’s intelligence services. It is possible that Trump’s precarious legal position will prompt him to reestablish or reinvigorate those same ties, albeit with a brand new cast of characters for 2024, or at the very least establish some lines of communication with the Putin regime (assuming one is not already in existence). Or the understanding between Trump and Putin may, at this point, be implicit and no such contacts or conversations are even necessary.

Either way, the prospect of another such mutually beneficial collaboration is simply too attractive a proposition to ignore. For both Trump and Putin, the downside is negligible while the potential benefit is incalculable. Both will be able to reap the benefit of a gullible and credulous Republican voter base, one that has already demonstrated its susceptibility to external influence. Both will also have the advantage of a compliant right-wing media juggernaut already predisposed to regurgitate both pro-Russian and anti-Democratic propaganda.

But regardless of whatever “alternative universe” of facts with which Republicans sought to delude themselves and the American public about the interplay between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence surrounding the 2016 election, this country’s intelligence agencies shouldn’t be operating under the same delusion. They should prepare themselves for an even greater onslaught of such interference in 2024 given that sordid history and the fact that the actual, real-life stakes right now for both Trump and Putin are literally unprecedented.

That preparation must extend beyond simply beefing up our existing capabilities to thwart actual, physical election interference, but should include a far more robust public accounting, where possible, of Russian (or any foreign) efforts to directly or indirectly benefit any political candidates in this country, through social media or otherwise. It is not necessary for the Trump 2024 campaign to be singled out, even though it makes the most sense that they would benefit from such meddling. But the simple fact is that Americans have an inherent right to know what hostile foreign influences are working to influence or sway the decisions of any political officials, party, or constituency.

RELATED STORY: Putin issues laughable new MAGA-approved sanction list

Trump’s return to the White House is no longer an aspirational goal for Putin, but an operational necessity: If he is to survive his Ukraine debacle, he has to find a way to weaken NATO. His only way to do that effectively within the limited time he has available is by getting Trump reelected. Likewise, despite Republican pronouncements to the contrary, Trump’s own path to reelection must now find a way to circumnavigate the existence of multiple messy indictments and two prior impeachments. He needs an assist that no one except Putin, with his vast and proven disinformation networks, can provide.

And that is simply too glaring a fact for any of us to ignore.  RELATED STORY: Remember how Putin helped Trump get elected? Republicans are trying to make you forget

How far can McCarthy bend for extremists? Not far enough

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had a steep learning curve when he got hold of the gavel in January and so far, he seems to have learned nothing about negotiating. Specifically, he seems clueless about the most important lesson: Don't negotiate with terrorists.

Whatever he does to appease the extremist members, it’s not enough. They simply come back with more demands. A strong leader might recognize that he would have numbers on his side if he chose not to let a dozen or so House members dictate what the rest of the 435 can do, and that he could work with the majority to shut the Freedom Caucus down. Kevin McCarthy, however, is not a strong leader.

At the moment, the biggest challenge he faces is finding a way to keep the government from shutting down, which at this point seems nearly impossible. McCarthy bowed to the extremists on government funding levels, reneging on the deal he made with President Joe Biden to resolve the debt ceiling crisis. He and his leadership team agreed to make sharp cuts to the previously agreed-upon numbers, and the Freedom Caucus came back with a demand for more cuts, leading to a delay in committee work on the spending bills that are required to fund the government.

With the House ready to attempt passage of two of those appropriations bills this week, Freedom Caucus ringleader Chip Roy of Texas is upping the ante. The congressman’s demands: “1) Return Federal Bureaucracy to Pre-COVID, 2) End Border Invasion & fed attack on Texas, 3) End FBI Weaponization, 4) End Racist DEI Govt Policies, 5) Make Europe Handle Ukraine, 6) End War on Reliable Energy.”

There’s so much nonsense to sift through, but don’t miss the part where he’s threatening continued U.S. aid to Ukraine.

That would be on top of the wide-ranging culture war matters the extremists are forcing into every spending bill, with a particular focus on abortion. It’s just like what they did with the National Defense Authorization Act after McCarthy insisted to the rest of the Republican conference he was going to make sure they had a clean bill and not a “Christmas tree” of a bill, chock-full of poison pill amendments on every branch. He didn’t stop the extremists from adding extraneous amendments to that bill, so now they’re proliferating through every appropriations bill.

While the Freedom Caucus is itching for a showdown in order to get what they want, McCarthy’s trying to keep his head above water on these spending bills and he’s fighting the hard-right wing of his party over a promise he may or may not have made to expunge Donald Trump's two impeachments. This just might be the lamest thing McCarthy has done to date, all to appease Trump’s fury after mentioning that the indicted former guy might not be the strongest presidential candidate.

McCarthy denied making that promise, which only gave the story more legs and also made the MAGA crowd in the conference even more intent on forcing that expungement vote. For what it’s worth, expunging an impeachment isn’t a real thing. Trump was impeached—twice. There were votes. They were recorded. They were put in the Congressional Record. There are no take-backs. There aren’t going to be thousands of people hired to go through every copy of the Record with their bottles of Wite-Out, erasing the evidence. But here’s McCarthy, setting up what is quite possibly the most absurd legislative push ever, and getting himself in a jam over it.

Whatever McCarthy does, it will not be enough to appease the extremists. They have no reason to back down—not when they’re getting what they want and being rewarded mightily for it. Now the Club for Growth is backing all the rabble-rousers who have opposed McCarthy all these months. The conservative organization says it is planning to spend millions to reelect the 20 members who opposed McCarthy’s bid to be speaker through 15 rounds of balloting. That, the group insinuated, is to keep McCarthy and his allies from backing any of their primary opponents.

McCarthy is going to bumble the country into a shutdown, making the House of Representatives look more ridiculous and dysfunctional along the way. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi nailed it this weekend on CNN when she said, “These people look pathetic.”

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Democratic memo takes aim at GOP-released FBI form with Biden-Burisma allegations

Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee are poking holes in GOP arguments that President Biden is corrupt, claims that are founded on unverified allegations from an FBI form released in controversial fashion last week.

The uncorroborated allegations of Biden corruption and bribery are related to his son Hunter's business relationship with Ukrainian energy company Burisma and were part of an FBI form released by by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) last week.

The form documents information that a confidential human source relayed to an FBI agent, but does not assess that information.

While the GOP sees the document as key to its investigation of the Biden family’s business dealings, Democrats view the release as a stunning move that jeopardizes the FBI’s ability to work with confidential sources while offering no proof of any wrongdoing.

The FBI last week admonished Comer and Grassley for releasing the form.

“Chairman Comer’s and Senator Grassley’s decision to publicly release the form is in brazen disregard of the safety of FBI human sources and the integrity of its investigations,” House Oversight Committee Democratic staff wrote to Democratic lawmakers in a memo obtained by The Hill.

“Contrary to Republican messaging, the form provides no new or additional support for their corruption allegations against the President or Hunter Biden. Instead, its release merely seeks to breathe new life into years-old conspiracy theories, initially peddled by Rudy Giuliani, that have been thoroughly debunked.”

Republicans pushed back on the Democratic memo.

“The Democrats’ latest memo is another piece of garbage that should be thrown in the trash. Senator Grassley acquired the unclassified FD-1023 form through legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers,” a GOP Oversight Committee spokesperson said in a statement. “The record is based on a trusted confidential human source’s conversations with a Burisma executive, and it has nothing to do with Rudy Guiliani.”

The tipster, dubbed CHS as short for confidential human source, relayed conversations he had with Mykola Zlochevsky, the CEO of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Zlochevsky thought that having Hunter Biden on the board could help insulate the company from its problems with being investigated by Ukrainian authorities.

The crux of the unproven bribery allegation has been pushed by allies of former President Trump for years: that then-Vice President Biden's threat to withhold funding to Ukraine unless Prosecutor Viktor Shokin was removed was intended to benefit Burisma, which was paying his son.

But Democrats point to numerous facts and comments — including from the FBI source, from congressional Republicans and from a man who was involved in pushing these theories — that severely undercut that theory.

Some reports say that the investigation into Burisma was, in fact, dormant by the time Biden called for Shokin’s ouster. Shokin was also criticized for failure to prosecute corruption, and his ouster was supported by numerous U.S. officials as well as other European allies far beyond Biden. 

The Democratic memo also quoted numerous Republicans — including Grassley — casting doubt on the veracity of the claims in the memo. 

“Last month, Senator Johnson, who led Senate Republicans’ 2020 investigation into the allegations involving Burisma, conceded the issues with the Form FD-1023: ‘That’s what this person says, but again, take that with a grain of salt. This could be coming from a very corrupt oligarch who could be making this stuff up,’” the Democratic memo said, citing a June podcast.

“Senator Grassley also tacitly questioned the truthfulness of the allegations in the Form FD-1023 when he admitted he was ‘not interested’ in whether the accusations in the form ‘are accurate or not,’” the memo continued, pointing to a Fox News interview in June

Grassley has argued that his interest in the FBI form rests more with whether the FBI and Department of Justice adequately investigated the tip rather than in the bribery allegations themselves. 

“What did the Justice Department and FBI do with the detailed information in the document? And why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long?” Grassley said in a statement alongside the memo’s release last week.

But Democrats push back on that reasoning.

“Under U.S. Attorney Brady, the DOJ and FBI thoroughly investigated the allegations as part of an eight-month formal assessment, which included interviewing Mr. Giuliani and the CHS, and reviewing suspicious activity reports (SARs) from banks,” the memo said. “The FBI also confirmed to Chairman Comer and Ranking Member Raskin during the June 5, 2023, briefing that Mr. Brady’s assessment was closed in August 2020 because his team found insufficient evidence to warrant escalating the probe from an assessment to a preliminary or full investigation.”

A GOP committee spokesperson, though, pointed to public comments from Attorney General Bill Barr refuting a previous claim from Raskin that an investigation into the claims had ended. Barr told the conservative website The Federalist in June that “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”

The memo also notes that the FBI source could verify the veracity of Zlochevsky’s claims, explaining that “it is extremely common for businessmen in post-Soviet countries to brag or show off” and to make “bribe” payments to government officials.

Democrats focus heavily on a recent letter to Comer from Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian who was later convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to Trump, and whom Guiliani relied on to dig up dirt about the Bidens in Ukraine ahead of the 2020 election. Parnas urged Comer to abandon efforts to uncover wrongdoing by the Biden family in Ukraine.

“Never, during any of my communications with Ukrainian officials or connections to Burisma, did any of them confirm or provide concrete facts linking the Bidens to illegal activities. In fact, they asked me multiple times why our team was so concerned with this idea,” Parnas wrote in the letter to Comer last week. “The truth is that everyone [involved in this effort to discredit the Bidens] knew that these allegations against the Bidens were false. There has never been any actual evidence, only conspiracy theories spread by people who knew exactly what they were doing.”

The memo also points to information collected during the first impeachment effort, including a conversation purported to be with Zlochevsky that contradicts the FD-1023 claims of communications with President Biden.

“No one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden’s engagement,” Zlochevsky says in the exchange, which appears to be with Vitaly Pruss, whom the letter describes as “another long-time associate of Mr. [Rudy] Giuliani, who was a close friend of Mr. Zlochevsky.”

Democrats also take the Republicans to task for sharing information the FBI expressly asked them not to release publicly. 

Raskin (D-Md.) says the publicly released form does not include all the same redactions as the version first shared with lawmakers, disclosing names of individuals in Ukraine as well as some specific locations referenced during the conversation.

“Chairman Comer and Senator Grassley chose to expose those additional details despite repeated cautioning from the FBI about the critical need to protect the safety of its human sources and its ability to conduct investigations effectively,” Raskin wrote.

Indeed, a June 9 letter obtained by The Hill shows the FBI warned Comer about GOP members’ handling of the record just the day after offering a briefing to the full committee.

“The Committee and its Members were specifically told that ‘wider distribution could pose a risk of physical harm to FBI sources or others.’ The full text of this admonishment is included below for your reference. We are concerned that Members disregarded the Committee’s agreement that information from the document should not be further disclosed. Several Committee Members publicized specific details regarding their recollection of confidential source reporting purportedly referenced in the document,” the bureau wrote in the letter.

But Republicans defend the release of the FBI form and refuted claims of it endangering a source.

“Before publicly releasing the document, redactions were made to protect the identity of the confidential human source. The FD-1023 is also unclassified and is not marked law enforcement sensitive,” a GOP Oversight Committee spokesperson said, pointing to statements from Democrats and information shared with the press that linked the document to Ukraine before it became public. “Those early public statements, based on apparent FBI or DOJ leaks, exposed the source well before the document became public.”

Despite the Democratic pushback, Republicans signal that the FBI form will fuel its investigations; Comer said in a statement last week that the form backs up his committee’s investigation of the Biden family’s business dealings.

“That sounds an awful lot like how the Bidens conduct business: using multiple bank accounts to hide the source and total amount of the money,” Comer said.

A GOP Oversight Committee spokesperson also defended release of the FBI form by linking it to another aspect of the committee’s probe into the Biden family business dealings.

When asked about the FBI form, IRS whistleblowers who looked into Hunter Biden said they had never heard of it. The GOP spokesperson said the form was “was kept from them” even though the whistleblowers had “potentially had corroborating evidence”

This story was updated at 6:13 p.m.

Pelosi Has A Case Of The Sads: Claims Kevin McCarthy Plan To Expunge Trump Impeachments Is ‘Playing Politics’

Nancy Pelosi really, really doesn’t think House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s plan to expunge Donald Trump’s impeachments is a good idea.

Speaking with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union,” Pelosi repeatedly criticized the plan and even resorted to personal insults, referring to McCarthy as a Trump puppet and denouncing GOP hearings on government censorship as a “clown show.”

Reports claim that McCarthy told Trump that he would have the House vote on expunging the Democrat-led impeachments. There is no vote currently scheduled and the reports indicate he is simply trying to gauge support for the idea.

When asked about the idea, the Republican House Speaker said it would have to “go through committee like anything else.”

RELATED: Pelosi Threatens Trump: ‘One Way or Another’ We Will Remove Him

Pelosi Doesn’t Want McCarthy To Expunge Trump Impeachment

In the eyes of the public, those impeachments are already expunged. An honest person can’t say that impeaching Trump for asking Ukraine to investigate corruption was a worthy and bipartisan endeavor.

Nor can anybody who understands what actually happened on January 6th think that these clowns in Congress were putting forth a serious effort in impeaching Trump over his speech.

McCarthy’s efforts, while symbolic and a definite slap in the face to Democrats, seem unnecessary. Trump was acquitted twice, incidentally, proving those impeachments to be little more than a perpetual witch hunt.

That said, Pelosi is clearly upset by the idea, meaning it’s probably a good thing for the country.

“Kevin is, you know, playing politics. It is not even clear if he constitutionally can expunge those things,” she told Bash. “If he wants to put his members on the spot, his members in difficult races on the spot, that is a decision he has to make. But this is not responsible.”

“Go ahead, you’ll be sorry” is usually the last resort for somebody who is trying to use reverse psychology to stop something.

Pelosi wasn’t finished, however, and was clearly riled up.

“This is about being afraid. As I have said before, Donald Trump is the puppeteer. And what does he do all the time but shine the light on the strings?” she said. “These people look pathetic.”

RELATED: ‘The View’ Audience Cheers As Joy Behar Compares Trump To Mussolini – Says He Could Be ‘Hung Upside Down’

Pelosi: Efforts To Stop Censorship Are A ‘Clown Show’

Oof. Just watch that video again. You can even put it on mute and tell that Pelosi seems a little worried. The eyebrows almost sailed clear off her grill.

It’s almost as if McCarthy’s plan to expunge Trump’s impeachments would negate the only thing she ever accomplished as House Speaker from 2016 to 2021.

And by “accomplished,” we mean for the Democrat party, not for America. Both of Trump’s impeachments were designed to protect Joe Biden, nothing more.

Pelosi also took umbrage with House hearings on censorship. Censorship that interfered in the 2020 presidential election which, according to Democrats’ own comments, is a threat to democracy, an insurrection.

But because the censorship again protected President Biden, Pelosi isn’t a big fan of trying to expose it.

“What a ridiculous clown show, again, on the part of the Republicans, she said while misidentifying Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Back in 2020, Pelosi seemed to think her impeachment dreams would last forever.

“This president is impeached for life, regardless of any gamesmanship on the part of Mitch McConnell,” she bragged. “He will be impeached forever.”

We’ll just have to see about that, Nancy!

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Sen. Chuck Grassley put American lives at risk to spread a document he knew was a lie

 Sen. Chuck Grassley released an FBI FD-1023 form related to the Hunter Biden investigation. These forms are not intended to be public documents and it is highly unusual to release them publicly. These are the forms that the FBI uses to “record raw, unverified reporting from confidential human sources.” They do not represent the results of investigations, and “recording this information does not validate it or establish its credibility.”  

These forms are not classified, but they are kept in confidence for a number of reasons that are mostly connected with protecting sources. The FBI has made it clear to Grassley repeatedly that releasing the form would have a negative impact not just on this case, but on every case that depends on confidential human sources.

Grassley released it anyway because he has placed what he sees as a momentary opportunity to hurt President Joe Biden over the needs of the FBI and the good of the nation. More than that, Grassley is doing this to forward a story that he knows is a lie.

The form, which is dated June 2020, claims to be sourced from a businessman who was introduced to leadership at Burisma energy in Ukraine in “late 2015 or early 2016” to help the company find a U.S. company to purchase. During a meeting with Burisma leadership, the source claims that he was told Hunter Biden was put on the company board to "protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” Asked why it isn’t Hunter doing the job of locating a U.S. form to purchase, he’s told that “Hunter is not that smart.” Finally the source is told by Burisma executive Mykola Zlochevsky that the company has to pay $5 million to Joe Biden and another $5 million to Hunter Biden because they are being investigated by Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, and Burisma needed Biden to “deal with Shokin.”

The story then jumps to a phone call in 2016. Or maybe it was 2017. As with the original meeting, the source can’t recall the year, though he recalls the dialogue word for word. This time Zlochevsky complains that Burisma was forced to pay Biden, using a term that the source describes as “Russian-criminal-slang,” and now that Trump has been elected their investment is worthless. However, Shokin has been fired, so there was no investigation and no one would ever know about the money they paid the Bidens.

Jump forward to 2019 when CHS again meets with Burisma executives and Zlochevsky brags to the source about how clever they were in hiding the payments to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, and how no one will ever find those payments. According to the source, this is the kind of thing Ukrainian businessmen like to brag about in casual conversation.

Finally, it comes down to this bit where one of the Burisma executives tells the source:

"... he has many text messages and 'recordings' that show he was coerced to make such payments … he had a total of "17 recordings" involving the Bidens; two of the recordings included Joe Biden, and the remaining 15 recordings only Included Hunter Biden. … These recordings evidence Zlochevskiy was somehow coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired.”

If any of this sounds slightly familiar, it’s because it’s the exact story that Rudy Giuliani told to The New York Times in May 2019. In that story, Hunter Biden was placed on the board of Burisma in 2014 not because he was clearly a well-placed American with years of experience in lobbying, investment banking, and corporate governance who might be essential to an energy company looking to expand internationally, but because his father could get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired.

And Shokin was fired in 2016. The Ukrainian parliament voted him out after Joe Biden made it clear that the United States was very concerned about Shokin and might withhold or delay assistance to Ukraine unless he was removed. That’s a real thing. Biden even bragged about it later, telling a group of foreign policy advisers that he confronted the Ukrainian president and demanded Shokin’s firing.

Except the reason that Shokin was fired was because he was not investigating cases of corruption and was instead either turning a blind eye or an outstretched hand when dealing with Ukrainian oligarchs who were making off with billions. Both the U.S. and the U.K. governments had been pressuring Ukraine about Shokin for over a year before Joe Biden’s visit. In fact, the thing that upset the U.K. government most was that Shokin was refusing to investigate one firm in particular: Burisma.

As the head of a Ukrainian anti-corruption organization told Radio Free Europe, Shokin had dumped the investigation of Burisma when he took office.

"Ironically, Joe Biden asked Shokin to leave because the prosecutor failed [to pursue] the Burisma investigation, not because Shokin was tough and active with this case," Kaleniuk said.

When The New York Times ran Giuliani’s version of the story in 2019, it took Bloomberg News just one week to rip it apart.

… at the time Biden made his ultimatum, the probe into the company—Burisma Holdings, owned by Mykola Zlochevsky—had been long dormant, according to the former official, Vitaliy Kasko.

“There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” Kasko said in an interview last week. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”

From the beginning of this whole affair, and in fact from the moment Giuliani set foot in Ukraine, it’s been obvious that in getting Shokin fired Joe Biden wasn’t protecting Burisma, he was taking action that put the company under renewed scrutiny. And in fact prosecutors did reopen their investigation of Burisma, reviewing multiple instances in which Zlochevsky was suspected of crimes.

All of this—all of it—was thoroughly covered just two years ago, including just how Giuliani generated his claims against Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in the first place.

Giuliani made a personal visit to an outgoing prosecutor, tried to convince him to play ball, and even called Trump directly while in the prosecutor’s office so that Trump could explain how excited he was about the “investigation” into Biden. The prosecutor even went so far as to add some new false claims, asserting that Joe Biden personally took a payment to act as an agent of a Ukrainian company.

That moment when Giuliani was making calls directly to the White House from the office of an outgoing official is the genesis of the idea that Joe Biden took some kind of payment from Burisma. Until that moment, it had come up nowhere. From no one.

Over the following months, Giuliani assembled a group of known criminals and former members of the pro-Russian government who had been ousted with the election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He found several willing to play along with his growing story, but they had a price: They wanted Trump to get rid of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was too effective in fighting corruption. Trump gave them exactly what they wanted to get his false evidence against Biden, but even in 2019 the holes in the story were so big that the whole scheme was obviously a … scheme.

Now it’s back again and nothing has changed. The document that the FBI held was clearly authored by someone who was part of Giuliani’s plot, and it was clearly Giuliani himself who pointed out this document to Grassley and others. The document contains exactly the same false, easily disproved claims as the story the Times printed up for Giuliani and was obviously written with the sole purpose of providing some faux documentary evidence for the story Giuliani and Trump were pushing at the time. It’s all part of what Trump was trying to get Zelenskyy to say when he made his impeachment-worthy phone call to the Ukrainian leader.

The content of the FD-1023 form is a lie. What’s more, Grassley knows it is a lie. He knows this has all been investigated and found to be baseless accusations. And he knows that releasing this document causes real, genuine harm.

Protecting this type of information from wider disclosure is crucial to our ability to recruit sources and ensure the safety of the source or others mentioned in the reporting. CHSs are critical to cases across all FBI programs—whether it’s violent crime, drug cartels, or terrorism. It would be difficult to effectively recruit these sources if we can’t assure them of their confidentiality. And without these sources, we would not be able to build the cases that are so important to keeping Americans safe.

Grassley was sent a letter reminding him of exactly this issue and asking him expressly to remind everyone involved to keep in mind the importance of keeping these documents secure. Instead, Grassley did the opposite: He published the FD-1023 in blatant defiance of the FBI’s request.

Why did he do it? He did it for the same reason that Republicans had been seeking release of the document all along, and that was because they knew it would generate headlines like this:

Bidens allegedly 'coerced' Burisma CEO to pay them millions to help get Ukraine prosecutor fired: FBI form

Bidens allegedly 'coerced' Burisma CEO to pay them millions to help get Ukraine prosecutor fired: FBI form

Grassley purposely released a document that he knew was a lie for the purpose of attacking Joe Biden even though he knew it would put Americans in danger and damage the FBI’s ability to investigate actual crimes of all sorts.

To gain a moment of political attention, Grassley is creating an immeasurable risk. How can witnesses come to the FBI to make a confidential statement knowing that their identities and claims can be revealed for political expediency by someone who has no real interest in the truth?

There is a genuine broad streak of corruption in this case, and it runs right through Iowa.

Sign the petition: No more spending taxpayer money on frivolous GOP hearings.

Oversight Dems argue GOP overlooked information undercutting Biden allegation

A Ukrainian oligarch who ran the energy company that hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board told associates of Rudy Giuliani that Burisma never had any contacts with then-Vice President Biden while his son worked at the company.

The conversation with Mykola Zlochevsky, part of the package of information received by lawmakers during former President Trump’s first impeachment, was highlighted by the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee as evidence undercutting a GOP-led probe into an alleged bribery scheme.

“Mr. Zlochevsky’s statements are just one of the many that have debunked the corruption allegations against President Biden that were first leveled by Rudy Giuliani and have been reviewed by former President Trump’s own Justice Department,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote in a letter to House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.).

The clash between the panel’s two parties rests on a series of unverified tips.

Under the Trump administration, the FBI and Justice Department were unable to corroborate a tip from a confidential source relaying a conversation heard secondhand that alleged Biden, while vice president, accepted a bribe. Comer has based much of his investigation on this tip, memorized in a FD-1023 form used by the FBI to document such interactions.

Raskin’s letter resurfaces a conversation with Zlochevsky — one arranged through a series of Giuliani associates in which the oligarch speaks of his decision to hire Hunter Biden.

“No one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden's engagement,” Zlochevsky says in the exchange, which appears to be with Vitaly Pruss, whom the letter describes as “another long-time associate of Mr. Giuliani who was a close friend of Mr. Zlochevsky.”

However, the conversation was turned over to Giuliani by Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian who was later convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to former President Trump. 

Zlochevsky also answered “no” when asked if then-Vice President Biden or his staff “assisted you or your company in any way with business deals or meetings with world leaders or any other assistance.”

Raskin argues the information shows that Zlochevsky “squarely rebutted” allegations that are at the core of the GOP probe.

“As part of the impeachment inquiry against then-President Trump, Congress learned that Mr. Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch and the owner of Burisma, whom Republican Committee Members appear to have identified as the source of the allegations memorialized in the Form FD-1023, squarely rebutted these allegations in 2019,” he wrote.

“Despite being interviewed as part of a campaign by Mr. Giuliani and his proxies in 2019 and 2020 to procure damaging information about the Biden family, Mr. Zlochevsky explicitly and unequivocally denied those allegations.”

Raskin, however, also pointed to comments from Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr that there "are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, there are a lot of cross-currents, and we can’t take anything we receive from the Ukraine at face value.”

Comer has called on the FBI to release the form that lawmakers reviewed in a secure location weeks ago.

“If Ranking Member Raskin thinks there is nothing to the FD-1023 form, then he should join us in calling on the FBI to make it public,” Comer said.

“This unclassified record stands on its own and memorializes a confidential human source’s conversations with a Burisma executive dating back to 2015. The Burisma executive claims then-Vice President Biden solicited and received a $5 million bribe in exchange for certain actions.” 

In the conversation, Zlochevsky also says that they never asked Hunter Biden to make any outreach to the State Department.

“We never approved or asked him to conduct those meetings on behalf of Burisma,” he says.

Still, he makes clear that Hunter Biden’s hiring, as well as that of his former business partner Devon Archer, was part of an effort to help strengthen ties between Burisma and the international community.

“We wanted to [b]uild Burisma as international company. It was very important to have strong board. So when we review resumes of biden and archer they both had great resumes. We also thought it would help in Ukraine to have strong international board figures with great relationships in the United States and Europe,” Zlochevsky says.

“We believe it was worth it. It had it own advantages and disadvantages. But it general we believe our company benefited greatly from this relationship.”