DOJ Warned in 2018 About Potential Biden Bribery Scandal Involving Ukraine

... As Comer Promises Wednesday Report on Further Countries and Family Members Involved in Pay-to-Play

"Yeah, unmarked Benjamins are fine, son." (Okay, we made that up.)

By Al Perrotta Published on May 8, 2023

Just the News has a doozy about an alleged Biden bribery scheme from when he was VP. Is it the same scheme an FBI whistleblower says is detailed on an FD-1023 form that Congress subpoenaed last week? We don’t know. But here’s the details on this one, and it involves — surprise, surprise — Ukraine.

Retired Little Rock, Ark., U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins wrote then-New York U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman on Oct. 4, 2018 that then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko was willing to travel to the United States to present evidence about the Bidens and Burisma Holdings.

Lutsenko believes “VP Biden (and Sec State Kerry) exercised influence to protect Burisma Holdings in exchange for payments to Hunter Biden, (business partner) Devon Archer, and Joe Biden,” Cummins emailed Berman. Lutsenko had two witnesses who claimed Biden personally benefited from payments to Hunter and his partner.

(We should add that Kerry’s stepson was also in business with Hunter and Archer, though not on the Burisma deal.)

And what did DOJ do with this information? Not much, apparently. Or given DOJ’s politicization since 2016, should I say, “naturally”?

Strangely, Cummins says he got notice last year from Apple that federal prosecutors had obtained data from his iPhone in 2019 under a grand jury subpoena. So DOJ ignored the VP who allegedly took a bribe, but investigated the prosecutor, who brought the allegation forward?

“I can’t really imagine a legitimate reason for the DOJ not to follow up on an offer like that,” Cummins told Just the News and New York Post. “I felt like it was stonewalled.”

Biden Pressure on Ukraine is Well-Documented … It’s Even on Film!

A couple things we know for certain: Hunter and Archer joined the board at Burisma in 2014 as the energy giant was wrestling with corruption allegations. And we know Biden put high heat on Ukraine over Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who headed the investigation. According to an April 2019 article from John Solomon, half a dozen senior Ukraine officials confirmed Biden put the squeeze on for months on end in 2015 and 2016. Ukraine’s then-President finally gave in and fired Shokin after Biden threatened to withhold a billion dollars in aid.

Now, if we only had video of Biden talking about pressuring the Ukraine government to fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma. Oh wait. We do.

 

It’s interesting to note that it wasn’t Shokin who claimed to have evidence of a Biden pay-off, but his successor Yuriy Lutsenko. The guy Biden called “solid.”

Also interesting to note the timing of DOJ digging into Cummin’s phone. 2019. Were they spying to see if Cummins had been in contact with Trump associates like Rudy Giuliani? (Again we have the question: What had Obama-Biden been up to in Ukraine that had the administration, Deep State and Democrats pulling out all the stops to prevent from being made public? Then busting into a former prosecutor’s phone because Hunter had taken a bit of graft for his old man?)

Trump Was Right to Ask

Let’s re-set the scene:

In 2018 a respected former U.S. prosecutor goes to DOJ with allegations of bribery against Joe Biden from the then-Prosecutor General of Ukraine. Earlier in the year, Joe Biden publicly boasted about how he strong-armed Ukraine’s president into firing the Prosecutor General’s predecessor, who was investigating the company paying Biden’s son (read “family”) millions of dollars. In April of 2019, a news article details how Ukrainian officials had been pressured for months on end by Joe Biden to get rid of the investigator.

In July 2019, President Donald Trump calls to congratulate Ukraine’s new President Zelensky. Almost as an aside he asks Zelensky for the skinny on the Bidens and Ukraine.

Given the background, wasn’t this precisely what Trump should have done?

Instead, Trump was impeached for asking the question. The wagons were circled to protect Joe Biden, John Kerry … and we strongly suspect, Barack Obama. 

At some point as the House investigates and exposes the assorted Biden influence-peddling schemes — particularly this one involving Ukraine — they must vote to expunge and apologize for the Trump impeachment.

DOJ owes Trump an apology, too. During the impeachment, did the Department of Justice come forward to acknowledge they had been presented evidence a year earlier of a potential bribery scheme involving Ukraine and the Bidens? Think that might have helped Trump’s case?

What’s Coming Out Wednesday? More Payments, More Countries

As was reported last week, this same DOJ is weighing whether to charge Hunter on relatively minor tax and gun charges. House Oversight Chairman James Comer is begging DOJ not to file charges before Wednesday. Comer announced Sunday that his committee will be releasing a new report that day exposing more countries and more Biden family members involved in Biden Inc. kickback schemes.

Said Comer, “We believe there are a whole lot of tips that the IRS and the DOJ don’t know about because we don’t believe they’ve done a whole lot of digging in this, and we have.” (In fairness, the IRS may have been blocked. A senior IRS whistleblower alleges his investigation was pressured by the administration, “influenced by politics,” and normal procedures were not followed.)

Last week, as Just the News reports, Comer “revealed an FBI whistleblower filed a confidential human source report in summer of 2020 alleging a pay-to-play bribery scheme that directly involved Joe Biden.” 

Comer believes payments were routed to a web of limited liability corporations “in exchange for something that then-Vice President Biden and now President Biden would have done.”

History Set on Repeat

The White House is brushing aside the bribery allegations. On Friday, Biden himself told MSNBC, “My son has done nothing wrong.”

50 years ago, another president was also on TV. “People have got the right to know whether or not their president is a crook,” he declared. “I am not a crook. I’ve earned everything I got.”

“The Big Guy” will say the same. But do the facts bear him out?

 

Al Perrotta is the Managing Editor of The Stream, chief barista for The Brew and co-author, with John Zmirak, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration. You can follow him at @StreamingAl at GETTRGabParler, and now at TRUTH Social.

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