By: Jim Hightower
During the big Washington showdown over the government’s debt ceiling, it looked possible for a brief moment that Joe Biden might bully GOP leader Kevin McCarthy into hurting one of America’s most vulnerable minorities: The überrich.

Republicans were pushing hard to “fix” the government’s financing crunch by imposing vindictive new work requirements that would cut off benefits for older, low-income Americans who need Medicaid and food stamps to get by. Democrats had denounced the cruelty and rank unfairness of punishing the poor, while requiring nothing from millionaires and billionaires. Biden twitted McCarthy with the threat of putting some of the burden on the privileged – before backing away from democratic principle, jovially assuring Kevin that he was just pulling his leg.

And a good thing he backtracked, too. Are you aware that the richest among us are suffering? CEO pay hikes have slowed to a trickle, with honchos of major corporations getting their incomes increased last year by an average of only about $15 million each. How can Washington expect such hard-hit families to help with the national debt?

Besides, many top executives are already making painful sacrifices to keep corporate profits soaring. Not sacrificing personally, of course, but sacrificing employees. Google’s top boss, for example, punted tens of thousands of workers last year, just before rewarding himself with a $226-million paycheck for doing the dirty deed. (By the way, it would take several lifetimes for a regular Google worker to amass the fortune the chief pocketed in that one year).

But hey, that’s how the system works, right? And it’ll keep working like that as long as corporate-financed political operatives like Biden and McCarthy are the ones making the “compromises.” After all, it’s not really a compromise when two foxes and a chicken v**e on what’s for dinner.

The GOP ‘bribery’ allegations against Biden remain t***sparently thin

Analysis by Philip Bump
National columnist
Updated June 13, 2023 at 4:35 p.m. EDT|Published June 13, 2023 at 10:40 a.m. EDT


This article has been updated.

The news release went out on May 3 from the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee.

“Information provided by a whistleblower raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national,” it alleged, quoting committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).

A letter from Comer and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to the FBI, seeking the release of documentation of a June 2020 interview, wasn’t similarly hedged. The document, it claimed, “describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.”

Over the next month, Republicans pressed the FBI to release the form publicly. Comer threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in contempt. Grassley and he appeared on Fox News and other right-wing media over and over to use this pressure campaign to re-elevate the allegation they’d featured at the outset. Eventually, the FBI made the document available for members of Congress to view, redacting information about the confidential source who had been interviewed.

But despite incremental new revelations about the form and about the push for the form to be released, nothing about the situation has changed from that first news release. Republicans are hyping a secondhand allegation from a single source — an allegation that was in the hands of Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department in mid-2020 without leading to criminal charges or, it seems, any specific investigation.

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It is not hard to figure out why this is unfolding the way it is unfolding. There’s an enormous appetite on the right at the moment for evidence that the FBI and Justice Department are deploying a double standard or that Biden deserves to face criminal charges just as much as former president Donald Trump. That provides the space that Comer and Grassley are filling, running far ahead of their extremely limited evidence.

According to reports from legislators who’ve seen the interview document — including Comer and Grassley, who say they’ve seen an unredacted version of it — the allegation is that an executive with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma offered bribes of $5 million to both Joe Biden and his son H****r B***n.

Burisma, you’ll recall, was at the center of Trump’s first impeachment. Trump wanted Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden (who he correctly expected to be his 2020 opponent), claiming that Biden tried to block a corruption investigation into the company to benefit his son. This was debunked at that point, with Biden’s calls for the ouster of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin being rooted in Shokin’s not aggressively prosecuting corruption. There’s no evidence that Shokin was investigating Burisma, and there was an international consensus that he needed to go.

Both because Trump was facing impeachment and because his team believed that Biden was vulnerable on the issue, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani continued to seek derogatory information about Biden in Ukraine. This was worrisome to federal law enforcement, which warned the Trump White House that Giuliani might be a vector for Russian misinformation. (One of his sources was later added to a sanctions list during the Trump administration for being linked to Russian intelligence.) At the beginning of 2020, Barr established a process for vetting information about Ukraine, clearly in part because of concern that Giuliani’s information would trigger wild goose chases. The U.S. attorney responsible for vetting the information, Scott Brady, met with Giuliani soon after.

Reporting suggests that the bribery allegation was brought to the FBI’s attention by Giuliani. In an interview on Fox News this week, Barr claimed that the allegation came not from Giuliani but from the FBI itself, but that may be a semantic distinction between how it got to the FBI and how it got to Brady.

Regardless, the bureau spoke with a confidential source in June 2020 about the allegation, generating the FD-1023 document Comer and Grassley are seeking. That source, whose identity the bureau is eager to protect, is someone who had been paid by the bureau for information in the past and is considered credible — though that of course doesn’t extend to the Burisma executive with whom the source spoke. It’s the executive who alleged the bribery, money purportedly offered in part to halt the investigation of Burisma by Shokin.

An investigation, remember, that doesn’t appear to have existed.

There are other problems with the story, too. The House Oversight Committee has been breathlessly dissecting H****r B***n’s finances in an effort to build out a story about the corruption of “the Biden family.” (There’s no evidence of payments to Joe Biden, hence the blurred allegation against the family broadly.) The committee has detailed how payments from Chinese actors, for example, appear to have been divvied up between people linked to H****r B***n or his uncle.

Yet there is apparently no evidence of a $5 million payment to H****r B***n. That Comer has spent the month fighting with the FBI about releasing an unredacted version of the interview form instead of, say, finding the $5 million in the voluminous financial documents his committee possesses is telling.

So is the fact that no charges for bribery were brought against Joe or H****r B***n. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Oversight Committee Democrats said that the bureau, in showing the document to members of Congress, “informed the Committee, in no uncertain terms, that this assessment was closed in August 2020 after it failed to identify sufficient evidence to justify further investigation.”

On Fox News, Barr claimed that there was no further investigation by Brady because that wasn’t Brady’s mandate. He and committee Republicans have suggested that the interview became part of the ongoing investigation of H****r B***n in Delaware, though there’s no evidence that Biden is under investigation for being party to any sort of bribe.

On Monday, Grassley attempted to inject a new wrinkle into the discussion.

“According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses fifteen audio recordings of phone calls between him and H****r B***n,” he said from the floor of the Senate. “According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then-Vice President Joe Biden.”

“What, if anything, has the Justice Department and FBI done to investigate?” he added.

It’s really important to remember that, while this is new information — purportedly redacted from the version of the document shown to Congress — it is not new evidence. This is the same alleged executive talking to the same FBI source in the same document. In other words, the claim that these recordings exist comes from the same person who alleges that the bribe was paid. It is of no more credibility than the original claim.

It also fairly obviously undercuts Grassley’s point. If there were recordings, that would seem to suggest that the FBI would have even more grounds to move forward with a probe — without appearing to have done so. Grassley is arguing that, given the breadth of allegations from the executive, it’s bizarre that the FBI didn’t investigate. The more obvious conclusion is that the claims were not the smoking gun Grassley is presenting.

Even Comer pumped the brakes on it. He was asked, during an interview on Newsmax, if the recordings were “legit.” He confirmed that the recordings were mentioned in the 1023 — but “we don’t know if they’re legit or not” and that they were simply claimed to exist by the executive with whom the FBI source spoke.

Grassley did something similar when a Fox News host asked him whether the document was “damning” for President Biden.

“There’s accusations in it, but that’s — it’s not for me to make a judgment about whether these accusations are accurate or not,” he said. “It’s … my job to make sure the FBI is doing their job.”

As journalist Marcy Wheeler notes, Comer and Grassley appear to be engaged in precisely what Republicans have long alleged about the dossier of reports compiled about Trump by former intelligence officer Christopher Steele: elevating questionable allegations from foreign sources that are t***smitted by a paid FBI informant. But the target of these allegations is Biden, so they’re presented with a default credulousness.

It is unquestionably possible that some element of the allegation is true. We know that H****r B***n was paid by Burisma to sit on its board — almost certainly because of his last name — and it’s not hard to imagine that he was involved in some even sketchier t***sactions. It is also possible that the then-vice president was also involved, though the allegation as it is currently understood doesn’t make much sense.

But it is also the case that Comer, Grassley and their allies are more interested in elevating the allegation than evaluating it. Since that news release at the beginning of May and its initial claim that Biden was bribed, the allegation has not gotten more credible. It was likely tied back to Giuliani? The FBI had it and didn’t pursue a probe? Despite there being “tape recordings”? And Oversight never got wind of the alleged $5 million payment?

Republicans have an easy response to this: The FBI is corrupt and anti-Trump. But that’s just begging the question.

Update: Two members of Congress who have seen the 1023 told the New York Post that the executive at issue was Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky. In 2020, former Giuliani aide Lev Parnas — then himself under indictment on federal charges — told Politico that Giuliani had met privately with Zlochevsky in mid-2019, in the middle of Trump’s effort to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into Biden.

“Asked to detail any contacts he had with Joe Biden from 2013-2019, and whether H****r ever facilitated any meetings,” Politico’s Natasha Bertrand wrote, “Zlochevsky replied: ‘No one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during H****r B***n’s engagement.’ "

Giuliani, Parnas said, was furious at that answer.

A person is only as important as the problems he wrestles with. This doesn’t seem very important.
Why do you care?
Worry about your soul.

Jim Hightower <jimhightower@substack.com>
9:31 AM (12 hours ago)


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As Scottish literary giant Robert Burns wrote, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men/Go oft awry.”

His 1785 poem, titled “To A Mouse,” could be directed today at the right-wing sloganeers who’ve been scheming so furiously to turn their hokey “woke” snobbery into a winning political stratagem. “Your local librarian is woke!” they screech. “So is Disney, Inc.! Some of your churches, too, plus all Democrats, and – OMG – even Bud Light!!!” Creeping Wokeism is the new Red Scare, Welfare Queen, and Willy Horton political bugaboos rolled into one, forming the main “issue” of Republicans now running for President, Congress, and dogcatcher.

But rather than getting defensive, insisting you are NOT woke, consider firing back by saying, “Of course I’m woke!” For the great majority of Americans, being woke is a very positive characteristic, meaning you’re awake, attentive to what’s going on. Indeed, in Black communities, “stay woke” has long meant staying alert to racial and social injustices. But even some Republicans must consider it bizarrely self-defeating for their party’s top candidates to be urging v**ers to go to sleep.

GOP leaders explain that anti-woke means crusading against D.E.I (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness). But wait – that means they’re opposing America itself, for we are a nation united under the essential principle of e pluribus unum. As affirmed by the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence, the 14th Amendment, the Statue of Liberty – and our kindergarten teachings of sharing and fairness – ours is a country rooted in constant diversification, expanding e******y, and the democratic idea that every voice ought to be included. Our country needs more of all three!

This is Jim Hightower saying… America is way short of achieving these historic ideals, but shame on those revisionist political elites now demanding we abandon even striving for them. Confront the charlatans!

A fired Starbucks manager gets awarded $25 million because jurors agree that she was fired for being white.

You really don’t know that Europe and most of the world is helping the Ukrainian people? You think it’s just the U.S.?

So Zemirah, you jump in to defend Wolf Councilers h**e and name calling. You call it love and not h**e. And if I call it h**e ( language like filthy q***r) then I’m in full r*******n against God?
You said We all know what god had written down. If you think god wrote anything down then I feel sorry for you. You did say the Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit, so maybe you were just rambling quotes about god writing the Bible and actually do understand. Wolf councillor quoted Leviticus and the Old Testament when I said said it was written by superstitious old Jewish men.
You chose to ridicule me by diverting my statement and suggesting that I meant the disciples of the New Testament so you could show your knowledge and infer that I was wrong. Deceitful but, I wouldn’t expect more from a “Holier than thou” who professes to know God because he read thousands of years old text from a time of bigotry, superstition, intolerance and ignorance that someone told you it was written by God. And you respond: Really? Wow!
Or inspired by God, the same way Gone with the Wind was inspired by the Civil War.
You defend hatred and call it common sense.
If you know god, then you should know something about him that was never written down in the scriptures, or do you just know what you’ve been told by someone as unscrupulous as yourself?

You think you know what god think’s because a bunch of superstitious old Jewish men wrote text that found it’s way to a collection we call the bible?
You choose which part of the Bible to follow or not follow because of your h**e?
You choose to disregard the part where someone wrote that Jesus said “Love your neighbour as yourself”?
So when did you make your decision to be straight or gay? You must remember a choice like that for yourself if everyone chooses as you say.

Hitler prayed for good weather so he could continue their N**i aggression and the prayer was answered.

On the surface, it seems like a senseless waste of money better spend here at home. You can’t take any politician serious about the national debt if this is happening. Wouldn’t you like to know who sponsored this and who signed off on it?

I don’t want to see that!

The oldest New Testament writings are 200 and some years after Christ. No witnesses, hearsay in a time of superstition.

But the main concern for the wealthy controllers is to have their servants cut benefits to the working and poor and reduce taxes for the wealthy.
GOP=Got o zero Principles

You can't be an honorable, honest Republican and expect the party of dupes to accept you.
Those maga dupes will lie to themselves rather than admit Trump fooled them. They won't read, they won't use any common sense. Just tell them what they want to hear. Some of them pretend that they didn't hear about the so called patriots smearing feces on the walls of the Capitol building. They pretend they didn't hear that it was Trump trying to steal the e******n. I guess is Fox was all they watched, it's possible. There is no excuse for being willfully stupid.

When I sit back and look at him, I figure the world would have been better off if the piece of $#!× was never born. He added nothing to anyone's life.
Because of him there are close to what, a thousand "we the people " in prison, women raped and assaulted, more people on their way to jail because he needed f**e e*****rs for his stolen e******n **e.
BS, for taking care of we the people.