The closed-door testimony Monday of former Hunter Biden business associate Devon Archer has produced evidence implicating President Joe Biden in a bribery scheme in which a foreign company paid his son in return for saving its “brand” from legal peril.
House Oversight Committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) summarized Archer’s testimony in a press statement afterwards:
Devon Archer’s testimony today confirms Joe Biden lied to the American people when he said he had no knowledge about his son’s business dealings and was not involved. Joe Biden was “the brand” that his son sold around the world to enrich the Biden family. When Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States, he joined Hunter Biden’s dinners with his foreign business associates in person or by speakerphone over 20 times. When Burisma’s owner was facing pressure from the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company for corruption, Archer testified that Burisma executives asked Hunter to ‘call D.C.’ after a Burisma board meeting in Dubai.
Comer added:
In December 2015, Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, an executive of Burisma, placed constant pressure on Hunter Biden to get help from D.C. regarding the Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption. Hunter Biden, along with Zlochevsky and Pozharski, “called D.C.” to discuss the matter. Biden, Zlochevsky, and Pozharski stepped away to make the call. This raises concerns that Hunter Biden was in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Archer’s testimony about Shokin confirms the Republican version of events explaining Joe Biden’s bizarre boast in 2018 that he had Shokin fired. Democrats tried to argue, during the 2019 impeachment investigation of then-President Trump, that Shokin was himself corrupt, and that his firing was “the position of the U.S. government and basically the entire global community.” But Trump’s version of events — that because of “Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution” — turns out to have been correct.
This is the “quid pro quo” in the allegation that Joe Biden, through his family, took bribes from foreign companies, using his son as a conduit. Even without an explicit quid pro quo, however, there are also legal grounds for prosecuting bribery based on a so-called “stream of services” over time. As Fox News, via the New York Post, noted:
[F]ormer FBI official Chris Swecker, who led the bureau’s criminal investigations division from 2004 to 2006, said that things didn’t look good for President Biden, noting the many alleged speakerphone calls.
“As head of the criminal division, we saw this quite a bit in bribery cases, it’s called stream of services,” Swecker told Fox News as Archer left Capitol Hill.
“You sell access or something of value and you get something back in return, but it’s not an express quid pro quo. It’s just an understanding but if you can match up the services within a reasonable period of time, with the thing of benefit, in this case, $10 million, or whatever it is, then you then you have bribery,” Swecker said.
President Biden would not be saved just because the money went to his son instead of to him; politicians are routinely convicted of bribery for arrangements benefiting their relatives.
Even Democrats now admit that Joe Biden did speak to Hunter Biden’s business associates. They can no longer ignore the facts.
As Breitbart News noted in January, March, June, and July, sufficient evidence already existed to support an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden for bribery, one of two offenses specifically enumerated in the Constitution as impeachable.
Archer’s testimony provides an explicit quid pro quo implicating Joe Biden. The Department of Justice, which would have granted a sweetheart plea deal to Hunter Biden to keep him from being investigated for any of these deals, cannot be trusted.
Only a congressional committee with the subpoena powers of an impeachment inquiry can uncover the truth about the Bidens.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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