The dust jacket of Peter Schweizer's latest book makes the following claim: "Washington insiders operate by a proven credo: when a Peter Schweizer book drops, duck and brace for impact."
It's not hyperbole.
Historians may well join modern pundits who point to 2015's Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich as a tipping point, the final factor in independent voters' decision to embrace the political newcomer Donald Trump, or at the very least, to reject the unquestionably corrupt Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Further, the more recent Secret Empires: How Our Politicians Hide Corruption and Enrich Their Families and Friends (2018) is a primary document in our current impeachment fiasco. Without Schweizer's findings--uncovering Joe and Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine and China while Joe was a sitting Vice President--Trump's impeachment might never have come to pass. For it was Trump's allusion to the Democrats' Ukrainian cookie jar that triggered the CIA's Eric Ciaramella into blowing his cynical whistle.
So it was with great anticipation that many conservatives pre-ordered Schweizer's latest work, Profiles In Corruption. I received mine two nights ago, and just finished it this morning. What follows, I hope, is more than a cheap distillate of the work, a couple of salacious "bombshells." The book is so much more than that.
What it IS: an excellent work of research which meticulously categorizes and uncovers the sins of eight Democratic Party leaders. Nearly a third of the book is citations. 101 pages of notes.
What it is NOT: the mother of all political takedown books.
It's not as devastating as Clinton Cash or Secret Empires, if only because most of the base-level material in Profiles in Corruption is already known: Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and others are corrupt. What isn't known is how deep their corruption runs. Profiles is best seen as "Part II" to Secret Empires. It is a deep dive into how several key Democratic leaders are not just guilty of a few familiar crimes, but a deep pattern of corrupt, self-enriching behaviors.
But how, in the day of the internet, can officials escape judgment over even the slightest crime? From the first chapter: "Part of the problem is that is that political figures have become increasingly masterful at 'appearing to be scrutinized without revealing anything significant.' We are fed tantalizing trivial matters, but little of investigative substance."
Schweizer's point (in which he quotes Jim Bettinger) is fair. Most political news is indeed slapdash, hot takes cranked out to get clicks, an endlessly repeating cycle of what Sarah Palin once called "gotcha journalism." Profiles is anything but that.
Schweizer breaks down political corruption into five categories:
Through these lenses, Schweizer begins his investigation into eight crooked politicians. I will look at just one of them today, the most germane to the Senate trial, Joe Biden. Hopefully it will shed light on why the root cause of the sham-peachment, Hunter Biden, should be made to answer for his role. (As should Eric Ciaramella, but that's a different article.)
The tendrils run deep in Biden family corruption. Schweizer implicates Biden's son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie. As Hunter is quoted as saying, "Family comes first. Over everything."
Indeed, for the Bidens, to a fault.
The destructive, drug-addled, and highly questionable business dealings of Hunter Biden are well-known to many CD Media readers. In short order, they include:
And that's just the big stuff. Say what you will about Hunter, he has lots of energy.
Scandals aside, Hunter Biden--not Joe--is the fulcrum of Trump's impeachment. Had Hunter not taken the wildly overpaid seat on corrupt energy company Burisma's board, Adam Schiff and disgruntled intel agents would have had to create a different narrative to pursue.
Senator Biden, Schweizer notes, was "only one of five Democrats" to vote against a bill seeking to require credit card companies to advise customers about interest rates on their unpaid balances. During this time, from 2001 to 2005, "Hunter was receiving consulting fees from the MBNA Corporation, a major Delaware bank and credit card company."
Same with Beau. Biden "worked hard on legislation to deal with asbestos-damage lawsuits. It just so happened that son Beau was working for a Wilmington, Delaware, law firm that was handling asbestos litigation cases."
They started small, subtly using "Blue Collar" Joe's influence, but their collective familial appetite grew. Hunter got into appropriations law, "which meant shaking money loose from the federal government for their clients." In 2006, an ethics bill prohibiting family benefit from spending items or earmarks that [senators] were pushing."
Hunter abruptly quit his job.
He went on to lobby for a PartyGaming, a Gibraltar-based online gambling company. He represented them for two years while his father "was a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with oversight of the Department of Justice."
Months after Hunter quit his role due to Joe announcing his candidacy for president in 2008, Party Gaming was forced to plead guilty to "violating the Wire Act, [agreeing] to pay a $300 million fine to the U.S. government."
After Biden was swept into the executive branch on Barack Obama's coattails, the scope of his family grift grew commensurately. Schweizer reports that "the countries in question, including Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, had highly corrupt political cultures...not Japan or Great Britain, where disclosure rules and corporate governance might require greater scrutiny. These were deals in the truly dark corners of the world."
This is the infamous era of Burisma, and the whopping $1.5 billion deal with the People's Bank of China--the Chinese government, not a private bank. Part of the deal was the formation of a liaison corporation linked to the Chinese government, Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). Hunter was given a seat on the board, "supposedly unpaid while his father was vice president. His actual compensation cannot be known; it is confidential."
In all of this, it must not go unstated that Hunter had no experience in the countries or industries in which he worked, formed corporations, and was compensated disproportionately.
In one of BHR's first deals, "the firm took an ownership stake in China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGNPC)...The company was charged in 2016 with espionage in the United States...BHR also helped to buy out the American precision machining company Henniges...They bought the company in a join t deal with Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a military contractor owned by the Chinese government. Because Henniges's technology has military application...the deal had to be approved by...Obama-Biden administration officials." [emphasis added]
How utterly creepy that the VPOTUS's own flesh and blood was working with our greatest geopolitical rival to assist in their acquisition of American technology with military applications. This role alone should be enough to satisfy any doubters that Trump needed to investigate Hunter's actions. The requisite approval required by the Obama-Biden administration should be enough to charge Biden with treason.
President Trump knows as much, as the tweet below darkly implies.
One of Hunter's firms went on to strike another multibillion-dollar deal with China, this time with government-linked Gemini Investments, whose director, Li Ming, has "corporate and political ties in Beijing [which] go to the highest levels of the Communist Party." He served in the party, in the "elite People's Political Consultative Conference." With Hunter on board, Gemini was rechristened "Gemini-Rosemont [and] announced its plans for $3 billion worth of new acquisitions."
Concurrent with all his son's deals, "Biden's attitude toward China seemed to soften." This shift came concurrently with Obama's "Asia Pivot," a moment when the U.S. recognized that her greatest geopolitical concerns now sprung from Asia, specifically China. Yet Biden was quick to say, "They're not bad folks, folks, but guess what. They're not competition for us."
As for Ukraine, I won't detail Hunter's dealings there, CD Media has written extensively on the subject, even uncovering hard evidence of Hunter's payoffs. Suffice it to say, under Obama/Biden, the U.S. gave $3 billion in aid to Ukraine--but not the weapons and ordnance they so desperately sought in their war with Russia: Obama was terrified of Vladimir Putin.
$1.8 billion of the $3 billion went missing. Trump was rightfully concerned about both Joe and Hunter's Ukraine dealings.
To those who think Hunter's deals began and ended with Ukraine and China, take note. "Hunter was also deeply involved with a troubling entity called Burnham Financial Group...as they had with Rosemont, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer used Burnham to make foreign deals with governments and oligarchs".
Among those were deals with Kazakhstan. And while "financial data remains undisclosed,...emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [show] that there was back-channel communication between Kazakh officials and then-Secretary of State John Kerry via Devon Archer. Recall that Kerry's stepson Chris Heinz was a business partner with [Hunter] Biden and Archer".
An otherwise banal email in the book reveals direct communication between Kerry and Archer which "makes clear that Archer had direct access to the secretary of state, without the knowledge of his chief of staff, and that Archer acted as a liaison for the Kazakh foreign minister...all while receiving funds for his and Hunter's private deals."
Stateside, Burnham was also the focus of a $60 million fraud scheme involving the Oglala Sioux tribe. Devon Archer was arrested in May of 2016, but in the waning months of Biden's vice presidency, Hunter escaped charges, despite his name being all over the case.
Additional stories of Biden family members benefitting from Biden's position and influence abound. Daughter Ashley saw her husband's medical consultation firm, StartUp Health, go viral after White House exposure. Co-founder Unity Stoakes claims she felt "the wind to our backs" after a formal introduction to Obama and Biden in the Oval Office. For five years, Air Force Two was used to put StartUp officers in front of investors, "highlighting the fact that you can score a meeting with the president of the United States certainly helps prove a strategic company asset: high-level contacts."
Biden's brother James joined construction company HillStone International in 2010, "just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, they announced a contract to build 100,000 homes...HillStone also received a $22 million U.S. federal contract to manage a construction project for the State Department.
The Iraq project "was expected to 'generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years'...three times the revenue the company produced in 2011."
HillStone went on to "accumulate contracts from the federal government for dozens of projects...in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mozambique, and elsewhere."
Biden's younger brother Frank is the black sheep of his generation of Bidens. Not as flashy as his younger dark-wooled nephew Hunter, Frank nevertheless has blood on his hands and misbegotten funds in the bank.
In 1999, Frank ran from a vehicular manslaughter charge--first leaving the scene of the accident, and then disappearing, refusing to show up in court. His victim was a father of two adoring girls. They have yet to be paid for his crime, a judgment debt that, "With interest...is now more than $900,000.
Biden later visited Costa Rica, a rare stop for such a lofty U.S. official. Frank happened to be working on deals in the country and "had ambitions" there. "Just months after...Biden's visit,...Costa Rica News announced a new multilateral partnership 'to reform Real Estate in Latin America' between Frank Biden, a developer named Craig Williamson, and the Guanacaste Country Club, a newly planned resort." Other Costa Rican governmental agencies were subsequently aligned in the effort.
Guanacaste also contained a large solar park, and it was this stepping stone which led to other renewable energy projects assisted by Biden's influence, as in Jamaica, where "Obama's administration OPIC provided a $47.5 million loan [for]...a 20-megawatt solar facility in Claredon, Jamaica." Frank's Sun Fund America "later announced" it was the beneficiary.
Frank also got involved in charter schools in Florida in 2009, receiving millions in federal grants. They failed spectacularly, receiving the lowest grades possible in many cases. Graduation rates ranged from a high in Kissimmee of "43% in 2011...and in Largo...an astonishing 7.2%; in Homestead, it was an incredible 4.5%."
Indeed, it's all about family with the Bidens, but it's more like a crime family than the wholesome image they still flog so desperately.
I have only covered the basics in the Biden chapter, which, again, is one of several exposés concerning the leadership of the modern Democratic party. Buy a copy. You won't regret owning a record of our current times, written by one of the great political investigators of his time.
Subscribe to our evening newsletter to stay informed during these challenging times!!
