Burisma

It has become standard operating procedure for the Democrats and their allies in the media and the deep state (think: the intelligence services) to overplay their hand in their fevered efforts to destroy Donald Trump. The latest installment in their never-ending attempts to unseat a duly-elected president is yet another manufactured scandal that has backfired and ensnared a leading Dem contender for the 2020 presidential nomination. This one has an unnamed intelligence agency "whistleblower" reporting that Trump promised an unnamed "favor" to a Ukranian official that was "troubling." The Dem's trained hamsters in the media initiated their usual selective feeding frenzy, without realizing that their Dem masters had a few dirty dealings with the Ukraine during the Obama administration (recall the Joe Biden was Vice president at the time) and in the run-up to the 2016 election.

After obligatory leaks, it turns out the Trump is alleged to have asked the Ukraine's president to investigate dirty dealings between Biden's son, Hunter, and a Ukrainian natural gas company, all precipitated by alleged influence peddling by Biden himself. The horror!! A president asking that alleged corruption by a senior government official (Biden) and his offspring) be investigated in the country in which it occurred.

Unfortunately for the Dems, the true scandal may have to do with Biden and his son and their machinations in the Ukraine. Like the gang that can't seem to shoot straight, the Dems have opened the door to all of that and although the trained hamsters are trying mightily to close it, they may not succeed.

Roger Kimball reports:

As has been reported previously, but then swept under the proverbial tapestry and into the oubliette, in 2014, while Joe Biden—still the vice president—was overseeing America’s Ukraine policy, chip-off-the-old-block Hunter became involved with a “controversial” (code for “corrupt”) Ukraine natural gas company. President Trump’s critics are skirling that he is trying to collect “dirt” on Joe Biden for his own political advantage. But, Schweitzer asks, what sort of “dirt” would that be?

Therein hangs a tale and it’s name is “Burisma,” the aforementioned natural gas company that, until several months ago, employed Hunter Biden. Schweitzer explains:

In April 2014, Hunter Biden agreed to join Burisma’s board of directors, ostensibly to advise on legal issues, The New Yorker reported. Biden had no known expertise on the natural gas industry, but Burisma was certainly in need of help.

Earlier that month, British officials had frozen the London bank accounts of Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and soon after, Ukrainian officials opened their own corruption investigation into Burisma, the Kyiv Post in Ukraine reported.

Hunter Biden helped to recruit a legal team for Burisma, including former Obama administration Justice Department official John Buretta and several American consulting firms, the New York Times reported.

The younger Biden was well compensated for his efforts. Records obtained by the Government Accountability Institute show he was paid as much as $83,333 per month for his work at Burisma.

Nice work if you can get it, and good old Hunter Biden seems to be an ace at picking up that sort of work. I wonder how he does it?

It almost goes without saying that Hunter Biden denies any wrongdoing, says he had no role in the investigation, and that he and dear old dad never spoke about the company. But here (again, courtesy of Peter Schweitzer) are some thought-provoking, ah, coincidences:

On April 16, 2014, Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner, made a private visit to the White House for a meeting with Vice President Biden.

• Five days later, on April 21, Joe Biden landed in Kiev for a series of high-level meetings with Ukrainian officials.
• Soon thereafter, the United States and the International Monetary Fund pumped more than $1 billion into the Ukrainian economy.
• The next day, there was a public announcement that Archer had been asked to join the board of Burisma.
• Three weeks after that, on May 13, it was officially announced that Hunter Biden would join, too. Like Hunter Biden, Archer had no background or experience in the energy sector.
• In March 2016, Ukrainian officials fired Viktor Shokin, the controversial prosecutor general whose office was overseeing the investigation into Burisma.
• Six months later, the Burisma case was dropped entirely.
• According to Joe Biden himself, the former vice president played a key role in the prosecutor’s dismissal.

How? Easy-peasy. In March 2016, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loans if Shokin was not fired. This wasn’t just “reported” by a “source.” It came right from Biden himself. In a 2018 speech, he bragged, “I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
Will wonders never cease?

The trained hamsters want this "scandal" to be all about Trump. But the reality is that it's about influence peddling by Biden and corrupt practices that enriched his son. Yeah, I know, this is business as usual in Washington, but it seems to be that Trump was well within his rights to ask for an investigation in this episode, despite the hyperventilating by the Dems and their trained hamsters in the media.

UPDATE:
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David Catron puts an exclamation point on this episode when he writes:

he Democrats increasingly resemble those wannabe jihadis who blow themselves to rags by mishandling homemade explosives. Their animus for President Trump is such that they consistently underestimate the danger to themselves presented by “bombshell” revelations when managed with insufficient care. The already questionable credibility of Elizabeth Warren was recently damaged when, based on a now-debunked New York Times story, she precipitously demanded the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A similarly impulsive Democratic response to the “explosive” claims made by an anonymous intelligence official about a telephone conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will inevitably explode in their faces.

Joe Biden is particularly vulnerable on this score. The substance of the call involved Trump’s request for an investigation into the business dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter, according to the “whistleblower.” The erstwhile VP is extraordinarily foolish to draw further attention to a son who has long been suspected of improperly leveraging his father’s prominent role in Ukrainian relations with the United States. Biden, however, is not exactly renowned for his critical thinking skills. Consequently, he responded defensively to a reporter’s question about his son’s Ukrainian activities during at a Saturday event in Iowa by calling for an investigation into the whistleblower’s accusation: “You should be looking at Trump.… Why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader?”

This is rich, considering that Biden has bragged in public about using his own position in the Obama administration to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. In 2018, Biden spoke to a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations and boasted that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees from Ukraine if Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin wasn’t immediately canned: “I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’” The ostensible reason for this heavy-handed pressure to get rid of Shokin was the man’s corruption. Presumably, it was just a coincidence that this particular prosecutor was planning an investigation into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian company for which Hunter Biden worked as a “consultant.”

Like the dozens of other "bombshell" revelations/smears that the Dems have adopted as their own, this latest "revelation" has been timed suspiciously. The IG report that may very well demonstrate that the soft coup initiated by executives at the FBI and CIA was real is due out in a few weeks. The trained hamsters need something else to focus on so they can ignore the the biggest political scandal in our nation's history, so ... this latest faux "bombshell."