Discussions on the Hill about launching an impeachment inquiry are ramping up, both publicly and behind closed doors. And as the shameless Democrat fixers in our national media and federal law enforcement shut their eyes to piles of evidence of President Joe Biden’s corruption — or actively try to make it go away — it’s increasingly apparent an impeachment inquiry is the only way for the American people to get real answers.
There are a plethora of angles to the scandal, from the Justice Department’s alleged interference stalling investigations into the Bidens to the FBI’s attempts to hide evidence from Congress. But at the center is an influence-peddling scheme in which Hunter Biden sold access to his father, enriching the Biden family in return for what appear to be foreign bribes. In one such apparent instance, Hunter Biden was hired to the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, for the special treatment that the Biden family “brand” could provide. When Burisma was under investigation by Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Joe Biden leveraged U.S. aid to Ukraine to get the prosecutor fired — something he shamelessly brags about doing.
Here are 15 questions lawmakers need to get curious about fast.
1. What did the Biden family do to earn millions from foreign oligarchs, if not trade political favors?
It would be really easy for Joe Biden to make this whole apparent bribery scandal go away, if he could just tell us what product or expertise his family offered to earn millions from foreign entities. He can’t, of course, because unlike in the case of his presidential predecessor, there is no legitimate Biden family “business” like real estate or venture capitalism or cobbling shoes. With the exception of the four years Trump was in office, Joe Biden has been in political office since he ran for county council in 1970. He’s got influence, lots of it — and now he’s got money, lots of it.
2. How long have the Bidens been personally profiting from Joe’s public “service”?
Many of the emails and much of the testimony implicating Joe Biden in trading political favors for money date to his days in the Obama White House. But when exactly did the family business start raking in cash?
3. Who is the “big guy”? What did he do to deserve a “remuneration package” containing equity in a venture by a Chinese energy firm?
It’s an open secret that the “big guy” referenced in emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop is Joe Biden — but Republicans will apparently have to get a public admission on the record before corporate media will acknowledge it. An email addressed to Hunter Biden in 2017 discussed a “provisional agreement” distributing shares in a venture of Chinese energy company CEFC, with 10 percent “held by H for the big guy?”
James Gilliar, the author of the email, would later clearly refer to Joe Biden as the “big guy” again, and former Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski has confirmed the nickname. Also as documented in an FD-1023 form from June 2020, a “highly credible” confidential human source told the FBI that Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, referred to Joe Biden as “the Big Guy.”
4. Why did Joe Biden use pseudonyms in multiple emails, including one documenting a call with the Ukrainian president?
Earlier this month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer demanded records from the National Archives in which then-Vice President Joe Biden used pseudonyms “including but not limited to Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware.” One such email “included an attachment that had details about a scheduled phone call between then-Vice President Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in May 2016,” as my colleague John Daniel Davidson noted. “The only person copied on the email was Hunter Biden.”
5. What exchange was Zlochevsky referring to when he said “it costs 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden”?
Burisma founder Zlochevsky told a trustworthy FBI confidential human source that “it costs 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden,” according to the FD-1023 form released publicly by Sen. Chuck Grassley. Do records of these payments show up in any of the Bidens’ numerous bank accounts or shell companies? Was this payment in return for getting the prosecutor fired? And what did Zlochevsky mean when he claimed he was “pushed to pay” by the Bidens?
6. What is Viktor Shokin’s testimony?
Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor general whom Joe Biden brags about getting fired, claimed to Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade over the weekend that “Poroshenko fired me at the insistence of the then-Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma.” He also apparently told Kilmeade that no other news outlets had bothered to ask him for an interview, a reflection of how deeply incurious the legacy media have become.
7. What role did the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine play in fueling the United States’ entry into their war with Russia?
It’s likely there are people in the Ukrainian government who know something about Biden’s string-pulling to get Shokin fired. As Federalist Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland observed, Alexander Ostapenko, who introduced the FBI’s confidential human source to Burisma officials, was known to be working “in some office for the administration of President Zelensky” when the FD-1023 report was made in 2020. What might government officials in Ukraine know about the Biden family’s dealings, that Joe Biden would do anything to keep hidden?
8. Is potential NATO entrance for Ukraine a reward for them obeying Biden’s demands they cover up his corruption?
We’ve already sent some $113 billion in aid to Ukraine, and President Biden has pledged to keep the support flowing “as long as it takes.” Biden, other NATO leaders, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared to come to an agreement last month that Ukraine can enter NATO after the Ukraine-Russia war is over. “It’s not about whether they should or shouldn’t join, it’s about when they can join. And they will join NATO,” Biden promised.
What prompted this kind of concession from the president who told reporters in June that he was “not going to make it easy” for Ukraine to enter, and insisted in 2021 that Ukraine must “clean up corruption” first?
9. Was the Donald Trump impeachment over Ukraine a Democrat coverup for Biden’s corruption there?
In a phone call with Zelensky, then-President Donald Trump noted, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that,” and told Zelensky, “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.” For probing the apparent corruption, Trump was impeached by Democrats in the House of Representatives. Did Democrats push this impeachment to discredit the potential Ukrainian investigation into the Biden family?
10. There’s evidence that at least one Ukrainian business got Joe Biden to move U.S. policy on its behalf. His family has also gotten a lot of Chinese money. So what U.S. policies on behalf of China has Joe Biden advanced?
Hunter Biden brought in “$5.8 million, more than half his total earnings from 2013 to 2018, from two deals with Chinese business interests,” NBC News admitted, even though records “don’t show what he did to earn millions from his Chinese partners.” Comer revealed earlier this year that multiple Bidens — Hunter, James Biden, Hallie Biden, and “an unknown ‘Biden’” — and their various companies “received over $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to their associate, Rob Walker. Most of this money came as a result of a wire from a Chinese energy company.”
In a 2020 presidential debate, Joe Biden lied that no one in his family was receiving money from China. What policy decisions did that lie potentially cover for? For example, a joint venture that Hunter Biden launched less than two weeks after accompanying his father to China on Air Force Two later “helped coordinate the purchase by a Chinese mining company of the world’s largest cobalt source in the Congo,” increasing Chinese control of the mineral essential for manufacturing electric car batteries.
11. What was Joe Biden’s involvement in an exchange in which Hunter purportedly extorted a Chinese businessman for money?
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” Hunter Biden wrote in a WhatsApp message to Chinese businessman Henry Zhao, according to testimony from IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley. Hunter also signaled his “ability” to leverage “the man sitting next to me and every person he knows” to “forever hold a grudge that you will regret” if Zhao did not comply with his demands. Photos from Hunter’s laptop show he was at Joe Biden’s Delaware home when the message was sent. Of course, even if the “big guy” wasn’t next to Hunter, that message makes it clear Hunter used his father to keep the cash flowing.
12. According to the Durham report, the DOJ (and its arm, the FBI) have known of and failed to do much about multiple instances of foreign influence on Democratic Party presidential candidates. What did the DOJ and FBI know about Joe Biden’s foreign influence operations, and when did they know it?
Special Counsel John Durham revealed in his explosive report on the Russia-collusion hoax that the FBI had received “allegations involving possible attempted foreign election influence activities associated with entities related to [then-presidential candidate Hillary] Clinton” involving multiple foreign governments. One agent told Durham that “everyone” was “scared with the big name [Clinton],” and Durham concluded that the agency slow-walked any response to the allegations of attempted foreign influence directed at the Clinton campaign compared to “the speed with which the FBI undertook” to act on the bogus accusations made against Donald Trump in the debunked Steele dossier.
We also learned from IRS whistleblowers that the DOJ refused to allow IRS investigators to follow any leads that implicated Joe Biden in the Hunter Biden tax investigation, so did the same thing happen to potential leads within the DOJ?
13. Who made the call that IRS agents investigating Hunter weren’t allowed to ask questions about Joe Biden?
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler told lawmakers that their team was instructed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf not to ask any questions about “the big guy” or “dad” in their investigation into Hunter Biden.
14. Did DOJ leadership prevent Weiss from looking into Joe Biden’s involvement in the pay-for-play scandal?
When he was in office, former Attorney General Bill Barr issued guidance “requiring the written approval of the attorney general before the FBI launches an investigation of presidential candidates,” which Biden’s AG Merrick Garland has reportedly continued. So when the FBI initially opened its investigation into Hunter Biden, if the scope of the investigation was narrowly defined (such as only relating to tax offenses), U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s team in Delaware “could not conduct even the most rudimentary of investigative techniques to probe” evidence of Biden bribery without first getting Garland’s permission, as Cleveland noted in June.
So did Weiss ask for that permission, and if so, what was Garland’s response?
15. Why did the FBI try to withhold the FD-1023 from Congress?
When Comer and his team demanded the FD-1023 from the FBI, Director Christopher Wray refused to comply until he was threatened with contempt of Congress, “[a]fter weeks of refusing to even admit the FD-1023 record exist[ed].” The same form was withheld from IRS investigators looking into Hunter Biden by federal prosecutors. It’s obvious why Biden wouldn’t want that document to become public, but why would the DOJ and FBI try to keep it hidden?
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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