Late last week, the House Oversight Committee asked the National Archives for unredacted communications involving three pseudonyms Joe Biden apparently used during his vice presidency: Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware.
That’s right, Biden used pseudonyms when he was vice president.
Among the documents committee Chairman James Comer is requesting from the National Archives is an email sent to a “Robert Peters” — that is, Biden — with the subject line “Friday Schedule Card,” which included an attachment that had details about a scheduled phone call between then-Vice President Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in May 2016. The only person copied on the email was Hunter Biden.
Isn’t that interesting? Why would Biden use an alias to convey this information to his son? And why, if there was “an absolute wall” between Hunter’s foreign business schemes and his father’s duties as vice president (as Biden has repeatedly claimed), would he have told his son about a phone call with the Ukrainian president? Especially since at the time Hunter was sitting on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that had recently been under investigation.
You know why. The whole country knows why. It’s the same reason Biden had coffee and went to dinners with his son’s foreign business associates when he was vice president. It’s the same reason Hunter would call his father and put him on speakerphone during business meetings. It’s why the Bidens created a network of shell companies to receive tens of millions in payments from oligarchs in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Romania, and China.
The reason is this: The Bidens are corrupt. And they’re corrupt in a straightforward, easy-to-understand way. As vice president, Joe Biden was a powerful man. He used that power to do things for wealthy foreign oligarchs who made him and his family rich. It’s not more complicated than that.
The Bidens didn’t even try very hard to hide it. In fact, that might be the most revealing aspect of all of this. Consider the timeline here. By the time Biden took that phone call with President Poroshenko in May 2016, he’d already strongarmed the Ukrainian government into firing the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating Burisma. A few weeks later, Hunter was again copied on an email to Biden (again under the alias “Robert Peters”) this time about his father’s schedule for the following day, when he had a meeting with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman. After that meeting, the White House announced a new aid package to Ukraine.
Recall that Biden was President Obama’s point man on Ukraine policy beginning in the spring of 2014, shortly after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. Months later, in May of that year, Hunter took a position on the board of Burisma, which paid him a jaw-dropping $83,000 a month despite Hunter’s complete lack of expertise in the energy sector. (Hunter’s erstwhile business partner Devon Archer recently claimed Hunter’s real value-add was the “Biden brand,” which is to say access to Joe Biden).
What else was happening around this time? On May 26, the same day Hunter was copied on the email about the phone call with Poroshenko, Donald Trump passed the threshold of delegates required to guarantee his nomination to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. It had been pretty clear at least since mid-April that Trump would likely win the GOP primary, but by the end of May, it was all but guaranteed.
It’s not too much of a stretch to think the Bidens probably assumed — as most of Washington assumed — that Trump had almost no chance of winning the general election against Hillary Clinton that November. And with Clinton in the White House, Joe Biden wouldn’t have to worry about anyone asking questions about his involvement in Shokin’s firing or his connections to Hunter’s foreign business deals, as Trump eventually did. He wouldn’t have to worry about GOP investigations into his use of pseudonyms and his family’s complex network of shell companies and payments from foreign oligarchs. His blatant influence-peddling, in other words, would receive zero scrutiny from a Clinton administration. (The Clintons, after all, perfected influence-peddling through their Clinton Global Initiative.)
Maybe that’s why Biden didn’t try all that hard to hide what he was doing. He simply never thought he’d get caught because he never expected Republicans would take power — and likely never imagined that, as a result of Trump’s victory, he himself would be running for president in 2020.
Hubris, in other words, made Biden sloppy in his grift. And now that Republicans are looking into it, evidence of that grift abounds. So far from an “absolute wall” between Hunter’s business deals and Joe’s duties as VP, it appears as though the former was entirely dependent on the latter. Hunter’s entire business consisted in providing access to his father, who influenced policy in exchange for gobs of money.
The corporate media can keep pretending there’s “no evidence” linking Hunter’s overseas business deals to his father, and unless the president comes out and declares that he took bribes, the press is sticking with its ridiculous story. But the plain truth is that there’s no other reasonable explanation for Hunter’s schemes and Joe’s behavior, and every single person in America knows it.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
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