So When Will They Be Punished? Don’t Hold Your Breath

If the Pinocchio story were true, then former CIA Directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would have such long noses that they would take up entire city blocks.

In October 2020, the four habitual liars, along with 47 other top intelligence officers, signed a public statement claiming that emails and correspondence found on an abandoned laptop belonging to Hunter Biden “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Such an operation, the former spooks claimed, would be “consistent with Russian objectives…to create political chaos in the U.S. to deepen political divisions here” and “undermine the candidacy of Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump.”

A comprehensive new study by Garrett Ziegler, a former White House staffer, published by Marco Polo—a research organization dedicated to exposing government corruption—combined with Miranda Devine’s book, Laptop from Hell (2021), shows that Brennan and company appear to have been deceitful.^[1]

It should be noted that Ziegler is a conservative who worked for Peter Navarro, a former Trump adviser, and some might argue that his report is biased.

However, if they read the report along with Devine’s book, they will see that the evidence is incontrovertible: the hard drive copy of the laptop is authentic and that Hunter Biden was a drug-addicted playboy—something Biden himself wrote about in his memoir Beautiful Things—and should be in jail for serial drug and prostitution offenses.

Hunter further was involved in influence-peddling business arrangements that helped skew U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Ukraine, and cast a pall of corruption over the Biden White House.

Legal Trouble and a Historical Pattern

Federal prosecutors are currently considering charging Hunter Biden with three tax crimes, including tax evasion and a charge related to a gun purchase.

A separate congressional inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs by the House Oversight Committee, headed by James R. Comer (R-KY), has combed through bank records to substantiate claims of influence peddling, uncovering that the Biden family had set up over a dozen companies while Joe Biden was Vice President, has received over $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies, and engaged in many intentionally complicated financial transactions to hide these payments and avoid scrutiny.^[2]

Concern was further raised about the Biden family’s pattern of courting business in regions of the world in which Vice President and now President Biden has had an outsized role and influenced U.S. foreign policy.

During a news conference in May, Comer acknowledged that Hunter Biden would have been far from the first relative of a President or Vice-President to try to make money off the family name.

Comer invoked Billy Carter, the brother of former President Jimmy Carter, who visited Libya and received a $220,000 loan; and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose firm has received billions of dollars from Persian Gulf nations.

“This has been a pattern for a long time,” Comer said. “Republicans and Democrats have both complained about presidents’ families receiving money.”

What is different about the Bidens, however, is their brazenness—Joe Biden bragged at an event before the Council on Foreign Relations that he blackmailed the Ukrainian government into firing the prosecutor of an energy company, Burisma, that paid Hunter as much as $5 million after appointing him to his board of directors, and which appears to have functioned as a CIA front for financing right-wing militias fighting a proxy war for the U.S. in eastern Ukraine.

The Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine—like Kushner’s in the Gulf Arab States—epitomizes the interconnection between capitalism and U.S. imperialism, which is leading us toward a potential world war.

Since he became Vice-President, Biden has been a super-hawk on Ukraine and pushed for escalation of the war with Russia at the same time that members of his families profited financially in Ukraine and gained access to new business opportunities.

Numerous theorists of imperialism have detailed the influence of private industries under capitalism in hijacking governments and driving imperialistic foreign policies among Western nations, including those that resulted in World War I.^[3]

Today, we see the same phenomenon combined with heightened levels of profiteering by U.S. Presidents and their families for whom control over government offers an opportunity for obscene levels of personal enrichment along with impunity from prosecution for criminal acts.

Rosetta Stone of White and Blue-Collar Crime

Over a 13-month period, Ziegler carried out a forensic examination of every email and file on the copy made of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive. The laptop had been abandoned in a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop in April 2019 and turned over to the FBI by its owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, who believed it contained evidence of felonies. The FBI at this time did not launch any formal criminal investigations.

The forensic analysis was commissioned by Ziegler and produced by a former federal investigator, a retired U.S. Secret Service agent Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, and Maryman Associates, founded by Brad Maryman, a 29-year veteran of the FBI.

Ziegler’s examination determined that there were approximately 459 violations of state and federal law on the laptop, including tax evasion, money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), as well as drug and prostitution-related offenses.

The report is an embarrassment not only for Hunter but for the entire Biden family, as it reveals severe problems with drug and alcohol abuse and unethical business practices whereby family members individually got rich by playing off the Biden name.

Ziegler calls the laptop the “Rosetta Stone of white and blue collar crime under the patina of the ‘Delaware Way.'” This “way” is basically a form of crony capitalism where corrupt businessmen around the world provide high-paying jobs and covertly bribe Joe Biden and members of his family in return for political favors and protection from prosecution.

In Laptop from Hell, Miranda Devine wrote that Delaware was named “American Lichtenstein” in the Financial Security Index, which “crowned Delaware the world’s most opaque jurisdiction, attracting capital from around the world, with no questions asked, and where legislation beneficial to financial services interests is worked out with lawmakers behind closed doors.”^[4]

Back in 2001, Hunter was given a lucrative job right out of law school with MBNA Corporation, a major bank and credit card company that was his dad’s largest donor.

Senator Joe Biden in turn championed legislation favorable to MBNA, including a law that made it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy and write off credit card debt, and helped block a bill that would require credit card companies to provide better warnings about the perils of making only minimum monthly payments.^[5]

The classic example of the “Delaware Way” applied on the global stage was Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Board of Directors of Burisma as part of a scheme that was designed to protect the company from prosecution for tax evasion and to save it from paying millions of dollars in fines.

According to Ziegler, Hunter and his partner Archer Devon, who was later convicted of swindling a Native American tribe out of $60 million in bonds (a scam Hunter was deeply involved with), acted as unregistered foreign agents by intervening on behalf of Burisma’s titular head, Mykola Zlochevsky, at the State Department and organizing a dinner for Vadym Pozharskyi, a key adviser to Burisma, with Joe Biden at Café Milano in Washington, D.C.

Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told the Senate on June 12 that the Burisma executive who allegedly paid Joe Biden and Hunter Biden kept 17 audio recordings of his conversations with them, which the FBI has been informed about.

In January 2018, Joe bragged in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations about how he had pressured the Ukrainian government into firing prosecutor Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee because Shokin was intent on prosecuting Burisma and holding them accountable for white-collar crimes.

Burisma was controlled by Ihor Kholomoisky, a billionaire oligarch and Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in 2015 who financed private militias that were used to fight pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

The likelihood that Burisma was a CIA proprietary corporation used to clandestinely finance the war in eastern Ukraine—which began after the 2014 Maidan coup—is enhanced by the fact that Cofer Black, the former number three man at the CIA and director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center after 9/11, was appointed to its Board alongside Hunter.

Besides the Burisma affair, Ziegler’s report on the laptop includes more evidence of war profiteering in Ukraine: Jimmy Biden, Joe’s younger brother, secured more than half a million dollars in private mortgage loans for a vacation home in Florida from John Hynansky, a donor to Joe, immediately after Hynansky was granted a multi-million dollar loan from the U.S. government to sell luxury cars in Ukraine.

In the summer of 2014, Hunter was given a fully loaded Porsche valued at $129,000 for his involvement in illicit back-channel communications with the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan, Karim Massimov, who was trying to strengthen his ties to the U.S. State Department (Hunter was trying to get an oil and gas deal for Burisma in Kazakhstan and, according to Ziegler, acted as an unregistered foreign agent for both Massimov and Kazakh banking oligarch Kenes Rakishev).^[6]

According to Ziegler, Hunter also acted as an unregistered foreign agent for Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian real estate tycoon charged with bribery and abuse of power involving commercial development in Bucharest.

Hunter received more than $100,000 from Popoviciu which he did not disclose to the Department of Justice, and teamed with former FBI Director Louis Freeh to try to remove the Romanian prosecutor, Laura Kovesi, who was prosecuting Popoviciu and was fired in June 2018.^[7]

Remarkably, Hunter and his partners in another company at the same time were working to strike a deal with Popoviciu involving the same real estate tract in Bucharest over which Popoviciu was convicted of bribery. Romanian President Klaus Iohannis—the one who fired Kovesi—was later celebrated by Joe Biden after he became president at a reception in New York.

As for tax evasion, Ziegler suggests that Hunter evaded taxes on approximately $400,000 of his unreported Burisma income in 2014 because Hunter “couldn’t have lived on approximately $550,000 per year.”

In an i-message to his oldest daughter, Hunter confessed to how Joe for three decades did not report income he received from Hunter.

According to Hunter, Joe insisted that Hunter cough up half his earnings.

Based upon the decades of tax returns that he released as a member of the U.S. Senate, and then as Vice President, Joe illegally received these hefty payments from Hunter—though the illegal financial arrangement was flipped around as Hunter came to blow through millions of dollars in women and drugs and Joe had to step in and help pay his bills.

War on Drugs Farce

The blatant hypocrisy of Joe Biden is apparent in the section of Ziegler’s report detailing Hunter Biden’s drug-related crimes.

It was Joe Biden who allegedly came up with the phrase “drug czar” and, in 1982, played a leading role in crafting stricter sentences for drug offenders that if applied equally, according to Ziegler, “would have sent his own son and daughter to prison for decades.”

Besides Hunter, Joe’s daughter Ashley had a serious drug problem in the past and went through drug rehab; Joe’s daughter-in-law Hallie was also a drug addict.

Incredibly, Joe once admitted to Hunter that he may have gotten his drug problem from Joe and Hunter’s mother, Neilia, stating: “You got the disease from mommy [Neilia] and me.”

This indicates that an architect of America’s modern War on Drugs violated the very draconian laws he helped to create.^[8]

Hunter admitted in his 2021 autobiography that he routinely smoked crack cocaine—a drug for which penalties were particularly harsh under the drug laws Biden helped develop in the 1980s.

According to Ziegler, Hunter was not just a user but trafficked in drugs. He helped procure drugs for Hallie Biden—brother Beau’s widow with whom he had an affair—and conspired to commit mail fraud with his crack dealer who was featured on Maryland’s Most Wanted List by having him Fed Ex crack to him when he was in Los Angeles.

Sex Crimes

As is by now well known, the laptop details Hunter’s decadent lifestyle in which he routinely filmed himself having sex with prostitutes who were procured illegally. Some of the prostitutes were paid to travel cross-country for a tryst, thereby violating the Mann Act which forbids interstate transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery.”^[9]

A Window into America’s New Gilded Age

Ziegler suggests that Hunter Biden has compromised American national security because foreign governments have leverage over the Bidens because of all the illegal things that they have allegedly done.

Hunter’s extensive business dealings with Chinese business elites has also given these elites the opportunity to influence U.S. government policy while being granted favors like having their kids admitted into Ivy League colleges.^[10]

The impunity and protection that wealthy people were able to purchase from the Bidens was true as much at home as abroad.

When Beau Biden was Attorney General of Delaware, he gave a sweetheart deal to a member of the du Pont family, Robert Richards IV, who had raped his three-year-old daughter. The du Ponts had given Joe large sums of money and helped advance his political career for five decades.^[11]

Ziegler is ultimately correct when he says that Hunter Biden’s laptop is like a Rosetta Stone for uncovering corruption.

It offers a window into the two-tiered nature of the justice system, double standards of the War on Drugs, shady business dealings and blackmail carried out by America’s first family, and sexual perversion and overall decadence, which Hunter has been pretty open about.

Rather than serving the public, we see that the real function of top-level politicians under the current capitalist order is to shill for and grant impunity to one percenters for their crimes as part of a quid pro quo in which they enrich their campaign coffers and are able to live the high life.

The mainstream media are currently debating whether Biden is too old to run for office again in 2024; however, the issue should not really be Biden’s age.^[12]

Rather, it should be about him and his family’s deep-seated immorality and corruption, which is not only symptomatic of American capitalism in general, but specifically a degenerate era in politics that is comparable, if not far worse, to the First Gilded Age in American history during the late 19^th century.

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1. Miranda Devine, Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide (New York: Post Hill Press, 2021). ↑

2. In early June, Comer introduced a resolution to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress for his refusal to hand over an FBI document in which was recorded allegations, from a long-term trusted, paid confidential FBI source, that Joe Biden was allegedly paid a $5 million bribe by someone in Ukraine while he was Vice President. Two IRS whistleblowers have alleged that the Department of Justice has sabotaged the investigation into Hunter’s foreign business dealings conducted by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss since 2018. 

3. See, for example, V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, rev ed. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970); J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, originally 1902). ↑

4. Devine, Laptop from Hell, 47. ↑

5. Devine, Laptop from Hell, 49, 51, 52; Peter Schweizer, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite (New York: Harper Collins, 2020), 52. Hunter became a senior vice president at MBNA and then continued to receive lucrative consulting fees after he left the firm to work for the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department. Subsequently, Hunter was given a corporate board position with Eudora Global, an investment firm founded by one of his father’s biggest donors, Jeff Cooper. In 1996, Joe sold the Du Pont mansion where he was living to John Cochran, Vice Chairman of MBNA, for $1.2 million–more than twice what the house was worth in what journalist Miranda Devine calls a “corrupt, sweetheart deal.” ↑

6. In January 2022, Massimov was charged with treason. ↑

7. The Guardian described Kovesi as a “quiet, unassuming chief prosecutor who is bringing in the scalps,” leading “an anti-corruption drive quite unlike any other in Eastern Europe—or the world for that matter.” ↑

8. Hunter claimed to have smoked crack cocaine every 15 minutes for a period in his memoir. An alcoholic, he says he first drank champagne when he was eight years old and that he smoked crack with former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry when he was an undergraduate at Georgetown University. ↑

9. Ziegler reports that Hunter aspired to be a minor porn star. He was forbidden for a period from being in the company of his 14-year-old niece without Joe’s presence because it was feared he would behave inappropriately in front of her. The diary of Ashley Biden—who is Hunter’s half-sister since Jill is her mother—indicates that Hunter may have inherited his deviant sexual behavior from Joe. Ashley wrote in her diary that Joe had inappropriately showered with her when she was a child. Joe has also been accused of sexual assault in the 1990s by Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer. ↑

10. During the 2020 presidential debates Biden claimed falsely that no one in his family had received money from China. ↑

11. Richards IV was a great-grandson of chemical magnate Irénée du Pont and heir to the du Pont family fortune. He received only probation and served no time in prison. In 1975, Joe somehow bought a Du Pont mansion when he was a 32-year-old widowed Senator making $44,600 a year. Devine, Laptop from Hell, 48, 49. For more on the Richards IV case, see Deniz Çam, “How a DuPont Heir Avoided Jail Time For a Heinous Crime,” Forbes Magazine, June 14, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/denizcam/2019/06/14/how-a-du-pont-heir-avoided-jail-time-for-a-heinous-crime/?sh=461f886329db

12. As a note, the laptop emails suggest that Joe Biden began to suffer from memory loss as early as 2012. ↑

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