Opinion
As the Mark Steyn/Michael Mann lawsuit (eleven years and counting) shows, the wheels of justice in Washington grind excruciatingly slow. At least, when they’re not powering show trials against an ex-president and his supporters.
On the other hand, when it comes to getting to the bottom of the venality of Biden Inc., Washington justice grinds slower than a glacier. But, also like a glacier, they can grind exceedingly fine.
Slowly, surely, tortuously, the web of Biden Inc. corruption is being dragged into the light.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) released bank records showing that Hunter Biden’s company, Owasco PC, transferred money to President Joe Biden in 2018.
Owasco PC was an entity Hunter Biden used to handle income he received from his foreign business deals. For example, some of the money he earned from working with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma would flow to his Owasco account, as would payments from Hunter Biden’s work with a Romanian oligarch.
There are two takeaways from this:
Firstly, Joe Biden’s claims never to have profited from his son’s business dealings are exposed as the obvious lie they were.
The Oversight Committee Republicans said the bank records were significant because they featured transactions involving Owasco, Hunter Biden’s primary business entity at the time, and did not appear to involve Hunter Biden’s personal bank account. Joe Biden had for years claimed to maintain a firewall between his son’s foreign business dealings and his own affairs, but documents released over the past several months by the House Oversight Committee suggest Joe Biden’s personal finances were more closely intertwined with his son and brother than previously known.
Secondly, Hunter Biden is apparently a Breaking Bad fan. In that series about the criminal underworld of the meth trade (bing!), villain Walter White (Bryan Cranston) tries to launder his ill-gotten money by spreading small amounts in multiple transactions, so the IRS won’t notice.
According to a bank statement released Monday by Comer and the committee, the Owasco entity transferred $1,380 to Joe Biden on Sept. 17, 2018. According to the ACH Authorization Agreement, a form used for setting up direct deposits, the payments would be made “monthly” starting Sept. 15, 2018, though the committee only released a document showing the singular payment that went through on Sept. 17.
An email found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop suggests Hunter Biden had listed the $1,380 payments to his father as reimbursements for a Ford Raptor truck.
An Oversight Committee aide said the committee is aware of at least three monthly payments in the same amount made to Joe Biden: the one on Sept. 17, another on Oct. 15, 2018, and another on Nov. 15, 2018.
At north of $80K for a Raptor, there must clearly be plenty more payments to be uncovered. The Committee hasn’t finished digging, yet.
Hunter Biden used Owasco as something of a clearinghouse for the various foreign business deals he had pursued during his father’s vice presidency and shortly after it. He created the company, one of several affiliated with him during his years of foreign work, to help manage the large tax bills he was incurring by earning much of his money through consulting fees and other arrangements that did not involve his employers withholding taxes for him.
In addition to payments from businesses in Ukraine and Romania, Hunter Biden used Owasco to collect income from a lucrative partnership with Chinese government-linked CEFC, an energy conglomerate in China […]
Hunter Biden withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese joint venture and deposited them into his Owasco account in the weeks that followed. He paid his uncle, James Biden, a cut of the Chinese income using the Owasco entity.
“At this moment, Hunter Biden is under an investigation by the Department of Justice for using Owasco PC for tax evasion and other serious crimes,” Comer said. “And based on whistleblower testimony, we know the Justice Department made a concerted effort to prevent investigators from asking questions about Joe Biden. I wonder why?”
The Washington Examiner
And there’s a whole lot more filthy lucre washing around in the Biden basement.
So far, [the Committee] has uncovered 20 shell companies that were used to provide Biden family members and associates with $24 million between 2015 and 2019 from foreign business deals that ex-business associates say sold Mr. Biden as “the brand.”
The Washington Times
Meanwhile, Biden’s likely election rival is threatened with bankruptcy and jail, all because a (Democrat-appointed) judge Just Reckons he exaggerated the value of some of his properties when applying for loans.
Tell me again how America hasn’t become a tinpot dictatorship.