Durham Report’s Cautionary Tale About Abuse of Power
A glimpse inside the cover-up of the Biden family influence peddling business.
May 23, 2023 by Joseph Klein 3 Comments4
[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Joseph Klein’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Special Counsel John Durham released his detailed final report following a four-year probe of the FBI’s mishandling of its investigation into former President Donald Trump’s and his 2016 presidential campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. He concluded that the FBI rushed ahead with this investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, based on “seriously flawed information” that showed up in the infamous Steele Dossier. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign funded the Steele Dossier as part of its scheme to invent ties between Trump and Russia. Driven by political bias against Mr. Trump, the FBI’s senior echelon proceeded with its investigation despite the lack of any corroborating information.
The report criticized senior FBI personnel for displaying “a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities.” The report noted their “significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents.”
The ex-FBI officials responsible for the bogus FBI investigation, together with the Democrat politicians and their allies in the mainstream media who perpetuated the Russia hoax lies, decided to shoot the messenger. Instead of eating humble pie and apologizing to all those whose lives were upended by their reckless actions, they attacked the Durham investigation as politically biased and characterized Mr. Durham’s findings as a “nothing-burger.”
Hillary Clinton, her accomplices in the campaign who used deceptive tactics to interfere in the 2016 election, and the senior ex-FBI officials who staged an attempted coup against the Trump administration escaped any punishment for their actions. However, that does not exonerate their gross abuses of the public trust.
The Durham report is a cautionary tale of how powerful people with malicious intent can operate to undermine America’s constitutional republic and manage to get away with it. As Daniel Greenfield noted in his May 17th FrontPage article entitled The Russiagate Players Got Rich and Escaped Consequences, “The lack of any meaningful consequences means that Russiagate will happen again.”
It is already happening, but this time it is happening to protect a president whom the deep state and mainstream media like rather than to destroy a president they hate.
Many of the same players in and out of government who are still part of what Mr. Greenfield called “the Washington D.C. network” have stepped in to cover up the Biden family’s pay-for-influence schemes.
The cover-up started in earnest with a public letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials that candidate Joe Biden used as a talking point during his presidential debate with Donald Trump. The letter was a crass attempt to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story published prior to the 2020 election by the New York Post as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The New York Post story, which has been proven to be entirely true, detailed how Hunter Biden used the position and influence of his father for personal gain.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee has described the unseemly lead-up to the former intelligence officials’ public letter. The House committee reported that “former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell testified before the Committees that Secretary Blinken, then serving as a senior Biden campaign advisor, was the impetus of the public statement…Additionally, evidence suggests that senior Biden campaign officials, including now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, now Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates, and now Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, took active measures to discredit the allegations about Hunter Biden by exploiting the national security credentials of former intelligence officials and coordinated efforts to disseminate the statement with members of the media.”
Moreover, the House committee referenced testimony from a former CIA official that an employee of the CIA at the time “may have helped in the effort to solicit signatures for the statement.”
With the encouragement of FBI officials, Big Tech suppressed the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. Mainstream media also did its part to suppress or discredit the story as Russian disinformation. They played defense for the Biden campaign. And they continue to protect President Biden from the growing evidence of the Biden family’s sprawling pay-for-influence business enterprise, which the president’s son Hunter spearheaded.
Months after the 2020 election, the left-wing New York Times and Washington Post finally acknowledged that the Hunter laptop and its contents were real. But then they switched gears and downplayed the significance of the information that the laptop has revealed.
Meanwhile, the federal law enforcement investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business dealings, which goes back to 2018, has slowed to a crawl. No charges have yet been filed. Compare this with how the Department of Justice took just a few months to indict House Republican Representative George Santos for multiple felonies.
An IRS special agent has come forward recently to provide information on why the Hunter laptop investigation has taken so long. This IRS special agent supervised the Hunter Biden tax-related investigation at the IRS since early 2020.
According to the attorney for the IRS special agent who wrote a letter to members of Congress seeking whistleblower protection for his client, the IRS special agent wants to disclose “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.” The “subject” is Hunter Biden.
The deep state did not take long to retaliate for the IRS special agent’s willingness to share his concerns with Congress that a cover-up was underway at his agency. The IRS removed this agent and his entire investigative team from the probe, reportedly at the direction of the Department of Justice.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee is providing some checks and balances with its investigation into the Biden family influence peddling business enterprise. It has presented detailed evidence into how various foreign entities have funneled money into shell corporations that were set up as vehicles to distribute chunks of these funds to multiple Biden family accounts. Some of these distributions occurred during Joe Biden’s vice presidency. These foreign entities included companies in Communist China.
Democrat politicians and their allies in the mainstream media have used the same denialist playbook as they have done with the Durham report. They have vilified or simply dismissed the House Oversight Committee’s findings. Their party line is that Republicans are conducting a politically motivated vendetta against President Biden’s family to embarrass the president.
Moreover, Democrats and the media outlets carrying President Biden’s water say that congressional Republicans have not produced any evidence that Joe Biden himself has benefited financially from any of his family’s business dealings.
The FBI is stonewalling the House Oversight Committee’s investigation. It has refused to turn over a subpoenaed unclassified FBI generated form that a whistleblower alleged could implicate then-Vice President Joe Biden in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.
“It’s clear from the FBI’s response that the unclassified record the Oversight Committee subpoenaed exists, but they are refusing to provide it to the Committee. We’ve asked the FBI to not only provide this record, but to also inform us what it did to investigate these allegations. The FBI has failed to do both,” said the committee’s chairman Rep. James Comer.
This document itself could lead to proof that Joe Biden was directly involved in a bribery scheme relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions. If it turns out that the FBI failed to follow up on the allegations of such a bribery scheme, the most plausible explanation is that its upper echelon has been engaging in a cover-up to protect the president.
In any case, there is ample evidence that President Biden lied when he said that he knows nothing about his son’s business dealings.
While then-Vice President Biden was the Obama administration’s point man in Ukraine and his son Hunter was serving on the Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings’ board for lucrative compensation, a Ukrainian prosecutor was investigating possible corruption at that company. Biden demanded during a trip to Ukraine in 2015 that this prosecutor be fired immediately, or the United States would withhold $1B in aid. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” Biden boasted a few years later.
Hunter introduced his father to a Burisma board adviser less than a year before then-Vice President Biden issued his demand to Ukraine’s leadership to get rid of the prosecutor investigating Burisma. Previously the advisor had asked Hunter to use his “influence to convey a message / signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions.”
Hunter traveled with his father in 2013 to China where then-Vice President Biden was conducting official government business. During the same trip, his son was seeking money from Chinese investors for a private equity fund that Hunter was forming. Joe Biden managed to find time to meet with Hunter’s business partners during the trip.
In 2014, then-Vice President Biden “hosted a White House meeting with two Chinese energy executives with ties to his son Hunter,” according to White House visitor logs referenced by the New York Post.
And let us not forget about the e-mail sent to Hunter Biden on May 13, 2017, referring to a possible business deal with CEFC China Energy Co. The e-mail outlined a potential split of equity in a business venture to be formed with CEFC that included the words “10 held by H for the big guy?”
Tony Bobulinski, one of the recipients of this e-mail, has identified Joe Biden as the “big guy” who was presumably going to receive a 10% cut from the venture. “Bobulinski gave the FBI a five-hour interview” on October 23, 2020, the New York Post reported, “as well as the contents of his three cellphones containing encrypted messages between Hunter and Jim Biden [Joe Biden’s brother] and their business partners, emails, and financial documents detailing the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation in foreign countries during Joe’s vice presidency.”
As far as we know, there have been no FBI follow-up discussions with Mr. Bobulinski nor has he been called to testify to the grand jury investigating Hunter Biden.
Just a few days ago, Fox News reported that Chinese donors to the University of Pennsylvania, which houses Joe Biden’s think tank, included donors who “have ties to previous Hunter Biden business deals” and others “linked to the Chinese Communist Party.”
The Biden administration, congressional Democrats, and their allies in the mainstream media are doing everything they can to insulate President Biden from any accountability for misconduct as he seeks reelection in 2024. The many Americans who care about preserving the principles upon which the United States was founded must know the complete truth about President Biden’s knowledge of and involvement in his family’s pay-for-influence business before the 2024 election. Otherwise, if the cover-up continues, Joe Biden may be reelected under false pretenses.
Joseph Klein
Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer, and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, The United Nations & Radical Islam.