Republicans have been desperately — absolutely desperately — trying to make something out of allegations of corruption involving the Biden family that center on claims both the president and his son Hunter were provided millions of dollars in bribe money. The reality is that they’ve got… essentially nothing.
Led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released new evidence from Republicans’ own source that directly refutes the case against Biden they’ve promoted. And although some members of the party have attempted to be somewhat more measured in their description of what’s happened, sometimes acknowledging the lack of evidence, that’s not the case for everybody! Predictably, Republicans like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene have run with the false idea of confirmed wrongdoing directly ensnaring President Biden himself.
In short, the allegations against Biden and his son trace back to an executive at the foreign energy company Burisma. That same executive told Rudy Giuliani and his goon squad that there was actually nothing there, and a document created by Rudy’s associate Lev Parnas that showed as much was evidently taken into possession by the FBI when authorities seized Parnas’s phone amid a separate matter. Republicans have been running on a secondhand account of what that Burisma official supposedly said in a separate context, which — if it even existed — seems like it was just bluster. And Republicans got suckered, though they obviously willingly jumped onboard with this hucksterism.
The foreigner in question is named Mykola Zlochevsky, and again, he didn’t even personally relay his alleged account of supposed bribery involving the Bidens to U.S. authorities. That came secondhand. “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 recently said. “Specifically, Mr. Zlochevsky denied (1) that anyone at Burisma had ‘any contacts’ with then former Vice President Biden or his representatives while Hunter Biden served on the Burisma board, and (2) that former Vice President Biden or his staff ‘in any way’ assisted Mr. Zlochevsky or Burisma.” And it’s not like Zlochevsky couldn’t have been honest with Rudy. The former mayor is a huge fan of this stuff. Read more at this link.
