Joe Biden and

Like it or not, former vice-president and his son Hunter Biden have been very prominent in the news due to Dump’s seeming obsession to find (or maybe create) information which could implicate them in corruption. Dump thinks that it would be great for his 2020 election chances if he could smear the democrats for hosting a corrupt candidate. Joe Biden has been continually presented as the candidate with the best chance of defeating Dump. In recent months however it seems that Biden’s age and his relatively poor performance in debates is casting some doubts on his suitability as a first choice to defeat Dump.

It has never been clear to me why the US voters think Joe Biden would be such a good candidate. He is not just seriously showing his age but his political history provides very little reason to see him as a potential winner! Ironically he is likely to be such a weak candidate that Dump should be welcoming him rather than attacking him. Getting rid of Joe Biden early on in the race may help the Dems to find a better candidate who will be far more successful. By all accounts the Dems need a moderate to defeat Dump. Buttegieg is a moderate with youth on his side, who would probably make an excellent president. Elizabeth Warren is currently painted as too left wing. Whether that would really turn out to be as prejudicial as the media tend to suggest, remains to be seen. She is a certainly a great candidate and she can attract the women’s vote. But however that may be, after an initial surge her popularity now seems to have peaked – for the time being. Bernie Sanders is also pictured as a leader from the left. He also has his age – and a recent heart attack – to contend with but he does have charisma and his popularity is rising. At the year’s end his campaign was raising more funds than any of the other Democratic candidates. Yang is the ‘nigger in the woodpile’ – if you will pardon my expression – and Bloomberg is a dark horse. He has a lot of private money which he is prepared to spend on his campaign and a lot of

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experience. He also appeals to many of the old guard republicans who have been sidelined by the neo- fascists in their successful grab for power in the GOP during recent years.

It is an interesting aside. The expression with the ‘n’ word I just used to describe Yang’s candidacy is an American expression which originated in the 1860 election campaign. The candidate for the Republican party was Abraham Lincoln. Apparently support for the abolitionist movement was then still considered to be controversial. In today’s world that would comparable to Democrats downplaying their opposition to the NRA. Actually, as it turned out, after the election in 1860, abolition of slavery was proclaimed by President Lincoln in 1863 and finally confirmed by the 13th constitutional amendment which was passed by congress and approved by the states in 1865.

Today of course the GOP is a different party. I doubt if slavery would ever have been abolished with today’s GOP at the helm. Dump has been ambivalent about – if not supportive of - white supremacists, and still Dump’s base remains rock solid. Of course Dump himself has virtually no party allegiance. The only thing which matters to Dump is Dump.

He is hugely narcissistic and is solely interested in holding on to power to serve his own need for grandiosity. The GOP however continue to support him since for them, freeing up big capital seems to be the name of the game. Dump’s support for removing restrictions on the power of big capital is music to the ears of the GOP. If that means that the US constitution and the rule of law suffer collateral damage, then so be it. The party has moved far to the right and it will require a young charismatic leader to challenge Dump effectively.

Joe Biden is neither young nor charismatic. He has a difficult task ahead if he is to emerge as an effective candidate capable of defeating Dump in 2020. My guess is that he is not the man to do that! He will continue to slide in the polls and after facing defeats early on in the primaries he is likely to fade ignominiously into the past – where he belongs. He will be a better Grandad than POTUS. In 2008 when

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he was selected by the Obama campaign for veep he was viewed as a safe bet. Even then was considered to be too old to represent any real threat to Obama as president during a second term. Biden’s conservative voting record was paradoxically seen as an advantage for a black candidate. Even though Obama was the hero of the racial minority groups he did at least have a white veep candidate on his ticket who had a history of siding with segregationists on the busing issue and voting for big banks against bankruptcy protection for the little man. That would have been reassuring to many conservative voters – voters who may have worried about how a charismatic black leader with a record of working to help the disadvantaged might upset the apple cart. Another issue favoring Joe Biden’s candidacy for veep was that Biden himself had unsuccessfully run for the presidency in 1998 and 2008. Biden did not look like a winner and it seemed unlikely that he could ever outshine his boss. His previous runs for the presidency also meant that after undergoing the scrutiny of two campaigns there were unlikely to be any skeletons in his cupboard – with Biden, what you see is what you get! At that time the story that Dump today is so anxious to tell about Joe Biden’s son Hunter and about Hunter’s appointment in 2014 to the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company, , was still future news.

If you check out Joe Biden’s life history he seems basically to have been a great family man, even if his political record shows him leaning to the right. But POTUS…. No! He came from a middle class Catholic family which had fallen on hard times during his childhood. After a major dip his father finally achieved a moderate financial recovery working as a car salesman. Joe had a great relationship with his parents and his siblings. His closeness to his siblings – particularly as far as his brother, James, was concerned – was later used by his political opponents to cast aspersions on Joe’s own integrity. And it must be said; James’ career history does not seem to have been squeaky clean.

As a child there was no path laid out for Joe to attend an Ivy league university. Despite this, he did succeed in earning his first degree from Delaware university in history and political science even if it wasn’t a distinguished performance (he graduated 506 out of a class of 688). His subsequent law studies at College seem to have been equally undistinguished. In his own words he found his law studies ‘boring’ and there was also an issue of plagiarism during his first year, which he later attributed to his failure to correctly cite his sources. The plagiarism issue raised its head again and was seen to be at least part of the reason for his decision to withdraw his candidacy for president in 1988. There are still plenty of embarrassing videos online today showing Joe Biden making speeches which are – word for word – directly copied from Robert Kennedy, Joe Kennedy and the leader of the opposition labor party in the UK, Neil Kinnock. Joe has dismissed these criticisms as ‘much ado about nothing’ – but there is a pattern here which is certainly not to his credit! It seems that Joe was probably not a great original thinker. He was at ease with taking over ideas from other people and trading them as his own. Even his book, ‘Promise me, Dad’ seems to have been at least partly written by ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer. Joe thanks Mark effusively in the acknowledgements but stops short of crediting him as ghostwriter. Old guys often seem to get pretty much stuck in a rut! Ultimately Joe received his law degree in 1968, graduating 76th of 85 in his class. The long and short of this history is that he was not an academic high flyer.

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So maybe Joe’s talents lay elsewhere? Despite his dislike of boring law studies he started his career as a law clerk and later started his own law company. That was pretty much de rigueur for somebody aiming for a career in politics. And make no mistake about it, despite his relatively underprivileged background – or maybe precisely because of that – Joe Biden had set his sights early on on being a person who would change the way things were run. Power was important to Joe Biden. He first considered himself a liberal republican but when still in his twenties he became an independent before finally switching to the Democrats. In 1970 he successfully ran on a liberal platform to become a County Council member for the Democrats in New Castle, Delaware. He remained an ambitious person. Just two years later he ran for the Senate, challenging an aging incumbent Republican senator in 1972. Initially his chances seemed hopeless. Without big money behind him his family had to club together to run his campaign. His sister Valerie was campaign manager and his brother James was responsible for fundraising. Together they did a great job and to everyone’s surprise Joe succeeded in winning the seat.

James’ success in fundraising was a precursor to future events in his life. In 1973 in the same year that Joe became senator, James opened a nightclub with the aid of generous bank loans which many have attributed to his family relationship with the new US Senator Joe. Many years later in 2010 James joined a construction company which was granted a 1.5 billion dollar contract under the Obama regime for reconstruction in Iraq. Although Dump propaganda from is currently trying to paint this as pure nepotism the truth seems to be rather more nuanced. But the fact that James Biden was the vice- president’s brother was inevitably muddying the waters. And of course a night club is a different sort of business than using your brother’s name to muscle in on a building contract even if they both tend to reflect on the nature of the entrepreneur involved.

The future that James aspired to as a young man was clearly different from the future Joe had envisaged. James was the businessman, Joe was the politician. Joe Biden grew up in a world which had been totally disrupted by two world wars. For most people today, stories about Nazism and Stalinism are fading into history. But to people of Joe Biden’s age, the horrors visited on the Jews in Europe and the brutality of the , which included at least 1.7 million deaths due to hunger and incarceration in the Gulags, remained a very real warning for the future. For Joe Biden, with his memories of how badly wrong things can go, the claims he has made about his attempts to combat corruption and to resist Putin’s encroachment on are totally believable.

In 2014 Putin saw Ukraine slipping out of his grasp after the Maidan revolution which toppled his corrupt Ukrainian puppet, Yanukovic. After his fall from power Yanukovic had fled to with billions that he had ripped off the Ukrainian people. This was the signal for Russia to invade and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine and to annex Ukrainian territory. In the Ukraine, the divide between the liberal democratic West and the hard line communists in the East seemed virtually unbridgeable. Both sides of the divide included some fairly active fascist groups. It all provided a rampant bed for corruption throughout the nation.

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The next Ukrainian president after Yanukovic, the pro-Western Poroshenko, had a mandate to clean out the Augean stables and initially to the West it seemed as though he was making a good start with a law establishing the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU). The initiative for this bureau enjoyed the support of the anti-corruption campaigners who had helped lead the revolution as well as the U.S. government efforts (led by Biden) and other international backers of Ukraine. The bureau however soon ran into conflict with Poroshenko’s state Prosecutor General, Victor Shokin. Poroshenko may have been the people’s choice for president, but power still lay firmly entrenched in the hands of oligarchs who had blossomed under the Yanukovic regime. If you can’t beat them, join them, seems to have become the motto in Ukraine under Poroshenko. It seems that he only founded NABU under considerable pressure from the US. NABU’s early years were an uphill battle in the face of documented efforts by the Ukraine parliament and the Prosecutor General’s Office to undermine its work.

Joe Biden was tasked by Obama to help the new regime fight corruption but he soon realized that his attempts to coordinate US anti-corruption policy with Poroshenko’s regime were going nowhere. In particular his contacts with Shokin – the Bill Barr of Ukraine – were being inexplicably being sidetracked. Shokin was ostensibly investigating corrupt officials including former Yanukovic minister and founder of the natural gas company Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky. But instead of hanging them out to dry it turned out that Shokin was actually blocking corruption investigations by NABU and burying evidence which had been emerging. Shokin had even appointed his own chauffeur as public prosecutor and used him to collect bribes and protection money. After his chauffeur prosecutor was found with a cache of diamonds which he was unable to explain, Shokin’s days were numbered. Joe Biden told Poroshenko that Shokin had to be fired or the US would not release $1 billion in loan guarantees. Poroshenko was now widely perceived by the West as yet another leader engaged in protecting those who engaged in, or covered up corruption, including Shokin.

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The US pressure was widely supported by the EU and by the IMF who strongly supported Joe Biden’s attempts to reign in corruption, particularly with regard to the sacking of the corrupt Prosecutor General, Victor Shokin. In February 2016 Christine Lagard, managing director of the IMF threatened to withhold 40 billion dollars of support to Ukraine unless Poroshenko made ‘a substantial new effort to invigorate reforms’. It seems that this unusually blunt statement by the IMF had included demands to replace the long-time Poroshenko loyalist, . In the end Poroshenko had few remaining options. Initially he had attempted to resist but he finally caved in to US pressure and initiated Shokin’s removal. Firing Shokin had nothing to do with Shokin’s non-investigation of Burisma and everything to do with his protection of corrupt oligarchs. It seems that removing Shokin was not easy. Shokin first of all submitted a letter of resignation in February 2016, followed by around a month of contradictory announcements emerging from his office until he finally had to be voted out of office by the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada - the unicameral parliament of Ukraine.

After Dump was elected and after he got wind of what was happening in Ukraine he had Giuliani use the sacking of Shokin as fake news to suggest that Joe Biden had been interfering with anti-corruption efforts in order to protect his son, Hunter Biden. As so often is the case with Dump, this was a total reversal of the truth. Joe Biden had Shokin sacked in order to help the anti-corruption efforts. Shokin’s departure as Prosecutor General will have been bad news for Burisma, reviving the dormant anti- corruption case against Burisma’s founder and former energy minister for Yanukovic, Mykola Zlochevsky.

One of the stranger features of the Dump presidency has been his tendency to accuse his opponents of exactly the same delicts that he himself has been shown to be guilty of, even when his accusations are manifestly unrealistic, flying in the face of both reason and hard facts which are visible to the whole world. Dump has a way of repeatedly claiming that black is white. Today as I jot down these notes Dump has just assassinated the number 2 leader in Iran, general Soleimani. Throughout the world this is widely seen as pushing the US to the brink of war with Iran. Even the US State Department has called on all US citizens to leave Iraq. But Dump’s response to the criticism is to say that the assassination is aimed at decreasing the danger of war. He is the only person who claims this, but he continues to trot out the same message. It is completely in keeping with Dump’s style of rhetoric to claim that Joe Biden’s attempts to combat corruption in Ukraine were actually an attempt to defend corruption in Ukraine.

In this case, Joe Biden was Obama’s point man in the fight against corruption in the Ukraine. It is certainly true that the position of Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma was controversial and that this should have raised uncomfortable questions for Joe Biden, even if there is no evidence that Hunter had ever used his position for corrupt purposes. The regrettable fact is that it seems that Hunter didn’t use his position for anything at all other than cashing in on his family relationship to the US vice-president.

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Hunter himself was a big problem and he himself admits this in so many words. In a recent interview with the New Yorker he said, "Look, everybody faces pain, everybody has trauma. There’s addiction in every family. I was in that darkness. I was in that tunnel—it’s a never-ending tunnel. You don’t get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it". Hunter had been using alcohol and drugs pretty much indiscriminately since his college days. Several times he seems to have tried to get back on track. He went into rehab in 2003. Later on after his brother’s death he repeatedly tried to break with his addiction. He was on his way to a rehab in 2013 when he ended up buying crack from a homeless drug dealer who he later took into his home.

Despite Hunter’s record of substance abuse however it doesn’t seem to have seriously interfered with his career. He says that he first started using drugs and alcohol as a college student. After graduating from Yale law school Hunter was offered a top job with the MBNA credit card bank in Delaware earning a salary of $100,000 and an attractive signing bonus. Within 2 years he had risen to the rank of executive vice-president. It is not clear whether this meteoric rise was due to some outstanding ability or due to the fact that his father was a US senator who was siding with Republicans in support of new laws aimed at removing bankruptcy protection from consumers. At the time Joe Biden had earned the not altogether welcome monicker of ‘the MBNA senator’. Joe himself claimed that his support for the credit card companies was motivated only by the need to get a bipartisan bill passed. It is true that the bankruptcy protections for consumers could be used by rich white collar criminals to walk away from their debt. It is also true that the people hit hardest by stripping bankruptcy protections were the working poor who could not afford to pay for basic health care and a roof over their heads. It is also perhaps not a coincidence that the MBNA bank was one of the biggest contributors to Joe Biden’s campaigns. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Joe’s votes were being bought by the bank but it does mean that he would have been open to listening to their arguments. That can’t be said for the people on the street who were being stripped of protection from their creditors. The fact that Hunter also profited from his father’s voting choices were just some of the privileges which accrued to many family members of US power brokers. That’s the way things work. In 2008 a writer for the Inquirer wrote: “I predict that Hunter Biden is probably just another candidate for the Sleazy Relatives Hall of Fame, a long list that includes neer-do-wells in both parties like Roger Clinton, Neil Bush, Billy Carter and Donald Nixon…”. Today of course we could add many more names to that list, including most of the Trump family.

In May 2013 Hunter had been offered a commission in the US Naval Reserve. That in itself was highly unusual. He had been given a waiver for a drug-related incident when he was a young man and a waiver for being 3 years over age. A month into his service, he tested positive for cocaine during a random drug test and was discharged in February 2014 after serving a short commission of only 9 months. It is not clear whether he received an honorable or a dishonorable discharge. But given the time span of 8 months between his testing positive for cocaine and his dismissal it seems there must have been considerable discussion in the naval circles about how they should deal with him. According to Commander Ryan Perry the details of Biden's discharge could not be released due to the provisions of

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privacy law. The commander neglected to mention that Ensign Hunter Biden also happened to be the son of the US vice-president!

Three months after his dismissal from the Naval Reserve, in May 2014, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company. The fact that he seems to have been paid $83,333 per month by Burisma simply for attending two board meetings per year held outside of Ukraine and for offering his advice and experience of the US investment market to the other board members should have raised some eyebrows. It did. Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, George Kent raised concerns in 2015 about then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company but was turned away by a Biden staffer. According to Kent, “the message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president's son, Beau, was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at that time". This has been confirmed by Joe’s staffers. His son, Beau Biden – Attorney General for Delaware – died of brain cancer with his family by his side on the 30th May 2015. Obama delivered a moving eulogy at his funeral held on June 6th 2015. Hunter Biden also spoke for about 25 minutes.

According to his father’s book, in his eulogy Hunter had “captured the essence of his brother, without a single false note”. Hunter recalled how at 3 years old he had been hospitalized together with his brother Beau after an automobile accident which resulted in severe injuries for the two boys and the death of their mother, Neilia, and their younger sister Naomi. There is a photo of father Joe being sworn into office as US Senator in the hospital ward with his sons Beau and Hunter lying beside him as he takes the oath.

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Joe’s family life was tough. He has had more tragedy in his private life than anyone normal person could be expected to deal with. Given his past history and his closeness to both his sons, the recent controversy over Hunter’s position on the board of Burisma must have been extremely painful for his father. No doubt Joe will not be at all saddened if he fails in his bid to become the Democratic candidate for POTUS this year. He will probably reflect that he has given it his best shot and gladly spend his last years doing what he can for his family.

But the fact that he is now being faced with this new challenge is something he must always have known would happen one day. Ever since Hunter joined the MBNA bank in his early days as a senator, Joe saw how Hunter profited from his position. Possibly he even felt good about it. He may have been proud that he was able to help his son thanks to his position - and then again, perhaps not? But whatever he may have thought about the ethics of nepotism - either using his position or allowing his position to be used to help his family, he seems to have been singularly unaware of the dangers it posed for his political ambitions. That doesn’t sound good for a wannabee POTUS.

Hunter Biden himself has recently admitted to ABC News that without having a father who was vice- president of the it is unlikely that he would have ever have been offered a position on the board of Burisma. Hunter first came into contact with the owner of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky – a corrupt ex-minister from the Yanukovic government – via Devon Archer. Devon was a business partner who worked with Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz (scion from the Heinz food empire) in a private equity firm, Rosemont Seneca Holdings. Basically private equity firms help companies raise money and take a share of the money they raise by all sorts of ingenious legal constructions. They do this using their contacts. Devon, Hunter and Chris probably had many mutual contacts in business and in politics. Devon had once served as senior adviser to Heinz's stepfather, Democratic Senator John Kerry, during his 2004 presidential bid.

To understand how Devon and Hunter became ever involved with a Ukrainian natural gas company in the first place it is necessary to know how lobbying works in the US. Lobbying basically means trying to influence decision makers. In the US, lobbying political officials has become an extremely sophisticated business. To influence a politician means you have to a way of getting your foot in the door. There are all sorts of people and organizations would like to put their case to government officials but there is no way to do that without having access to the official concerned. Lobbyists specialize in cultivating contacts. To a large extent it’s not what you know, but who you know! If you happen to have a close family member in a position of power that gives you an opportunity to sell your access to your family member to people who need the contact. Joe Biden’s family were lobbyists and Joe doesn’t seem to have objected to this.

There is a photo taken on a golf course in 2014 which was triumphantly produced by Fox News as ‘proof’ of Joe Biden’s ‘corrupt’ contact with ‘a Ukrainian gas executive’. On the left we see Devon Archer with an unknown person who has a hand thrown amicably over Devon’s shoulder. To the right we see Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

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Somehow around that time Devon Archer had been offered a position on the board of Burisma and two weeks later he was joined on the board by Hunter Biden. says that the deal was brokered by former Polish President, Aleksander Kwasniewski, also a Burisma board member. Biden supposedly believed that helping the Ukraine to achieve energy independence would help protect the company from Russian President Vladimir Putin. That may or may not have been true, but Chris Heinz took a different view. Control over energy in Ukraine was – and still is - part of a tug of war between the West and Putin’s Russia. Chris saw joining the board of Burisma as a dumb deal. His distrust of Burisma led to a parting of ways between him and Devon and Hunter.

Hunter claims that he made a point of never talking about his business activities with his father. Hunter says the only time he spoke to his father about his appointment to the Burisma board was when his father asked him, “I hope you know what you are doing”. Hunter says he replied “Yes”. It seems unlikely that a father with such a purportedly close relationship with his sons could avoid talking to Hunter about his business activities. It seems difficult to imagine how their conversations would have taken place with Hunter and his father studiously avoiding any mention of what Hunter was doing with his life. And even in the unlikely event that this had actually been the case, it could only have happened because father Joe was worried about the implications his son’s activities could have for his own reputation. After all there is no suggestion anywhere that Joe had avoided talking with Beau about Beau’s work as Attorney General for Delaware state. Why would he?

The long and the short of this story is that despite the obvious nepotism in the Biden family, there is no evidence that Joe Biden had anything whatsoever to do with protecting Hunter from accusations of corruption. There is also no evidence anywhere that Hunter Biden had anything to do with corrupt deals made by Burisma. From all that we know about Burisma it seems that the accusations of corruption were aimed at its founder Mykola Zlochevsky. As energy minister in the Yanukovic government Mykola had issued highly lucrative exploration licenses for natural gas to his own company. Burisma was created

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as a legal entity allowing Mykola and his partners to siphon off profits - profits which by rights should have belonged to the Ukrainian people.

This all took place before Hunter Biden and Devon Archer had anything to do with Burisma. According to Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a businessman and former member of the Ukrainian parliament who is well acquainted with Mykola, it had been Zlochevsky’s idea to appoint Biden as a director. Oleksandr was owner of GK Gazovy Alyans, an oil and gas company in Ukraine, and was himself involved in a conflict with Poroshenko concerning corruption. It is not clear who was on the wrong end of the stick, Onyshchenko or Poroshenko. Or perhaps it was simply a falling out among thieves? It looks however as though Oleksandr’s former position in the Yanukovic regime was very similar to that of Mykola, which would suggest that Oleksandr was tainted by the same brush. However that may be, he chose to flee from the Ukraine in 2016 in order to seek protection in the UK. If anyone was in a position to know what really lay behind Hunter Biden’s appointment to Burisma then that would be Oleksandr.

After fleeing to the UK Oleksandr Onyshchenko was quoted by as saying that Biden had been appointed to protect Burisma at a time that the company was facing investigations for corruption. That makes sense. At a time that Poroshenko was bowing to US pressure to bear down on corruption and recover the billions which Yanukovic had stolen from the people, the lawyers for the new anti-corruption bureau NABU would have had to think twice before aiming their arrows at a company with two US citizens on the board, one of whom was the son of the US vice-president!

So today as Dump’s stooge Giuliani continues to commute back and forth to Ukraine in order to listen to Putin’s friends from the Yanukovic era, Dump himself has been impeached for trying to block the payment of nearly 400 million dollars which the US government had earmarked for Ukraine. The money was intended to help Ukraine defend themselves in the war on their Eastern frontier with Russia. Dump tried to block the payments in order to force the new Ukraine government to ‘investigate’ the Bidens and to revive the conspiracy theories launched by Putin regarding interference in the US 2016 election. Since Dump has effectively blocked the House of Representatives from getting their hands on much of the evidence they need to prove his complicity they have chosen to impeach him on the grounds of abuse of power and obstruction of justice. Both claims in the impeachment are indisputable and painfully obvious to anyone who has paid attention to what has happened in the world since Dump came to power. But the political ramifications of Dump’s impeachment are still anyone’s guess. Will the impeachment ever be sent to Moscow Mitch in order to be voted down by his GOP majority? We don’t know. But for the future of the world at large, much will depend on the coming elections in the US this year.

The only conclusion I can make from all that has transpired to date is that Joe Biden is not the man the world needs to remove Dump from power. The US journalist Ryan Cooper sums this up perfectly in an article published in ‘The Week’ entitled ‘Democrats are sleepwalking into a Biden disaster’. Cooper worries that Joe Biden remains the front runner and that “there is little sign as yet that he is going to

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lose his lead, despite his fumbling campaign”. I share Ryan’s concern, but my gut feeling tells me that Joe will not be the candidate. To my mind, he is yesterday’s man.

This article has been pretty much a real time narrative drawn from the news barrage which has bombarded us during the last weeks of 2019 and the start of the new year 2020. I wrote the article using information which I compiled from a variety of news sources covering the pretty much the complete political spectrum. When I sourced something that sounded biased or even fake I tried to source the same facts from other links. But I am not an investigative journalist and with the exception of a personal source in Kharkov in the Ukraine I have no access to new information. I hope that I have succeeded here in providing a summary which can help voters form a balanced opinion. It is often difficult to see the wood from the trees. This article is my attempt to do just that!

It is a long read. But I would be very grateful to hear from any readers who make it to the end. Did it help you understand more about the impeachment or about the relationship between Joe Biden and his family? Who is your choice for the next POTUS?

I have listed many of my sources here in the following links. Whenever I tried to answer a question such as “How did Devon Archer first meet Mykola Zlochevsky or Aleksander Kwasniewskisky?” I just googled the question and then followed the links. Of course one link led to another and most of my questions grew into a tree of links. I suspect this list below misses many valuable sources I have used for this article and some of the links were obviously far more useful than others. Two journalists who really made a big impression on me were Adam Entous and Ryan Cooper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_States https://www.eurotrib.com/story/2019/10/3/191323/134 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the-ukrainian-prosecutor-behind-trumps-impeachment https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hunter-biden-ukraine/what-hunter-biden-did-on-the-board-of-ukrainian-energy-company- burisma-idUSKBN1WX1P7 https://www.unian.info/politics/1636742-feygin-chances-for-release-of-political-prisoners-from-russia-poor.html https://blog.cwdresearch.com/posts/hunter-biden-was-he-paid-appropriately-as-an-independent-director/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-biden-jeopardize-his-fathers-campaign https://www.justsecurity.org/66271/timeline-trump-giuliani-bidens-and-ukrainegate https://theweek.com/articles/887283/america-guilty-everything-accuse-iran-doing https://warroom.org/quid-pro-joe-biden-iraq/ https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/18/us/biden-admits-plagiarism-in-school-but-says-it-was-not-malevolent.html https://nypost.com/2019/10/15/joe-bidens-brother-and-son-have-a-long-history-of-profiting-off-his-name/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/02/joe-biden-investigation-hunter-brother-hedge-fund-money-2020- campaign-227407 https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/12/elizabeth-warren-has-a-plan-to-fight-corruption-and-perhaps-joe-biden/ https://theweek.com/articles/887283/america-guilty-everything-accuse-iran-doing https://warroom.org/quid-pro-joe-biden-iraq/ https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/18/us/biden-admits-plagiarism-in-school-but-says-it-was-not-malevolent.html https://nypost.com/2019/10/15/joe-bidens-brother-and-son-have-a-long-history-of-profiting-off-his-name/ https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/what-joe-biden-actually-did-in- ukraine/articleshow/72000925.cms?from=mdr&utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/12/the-money-machine-how-a-high-profile-corruption-investigation-fell-apart https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/ex-polish-president-kwasniewski-hunter-biden-burisma https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rep-duncan-hunter-trump-iraq-biden-four-blackwater-veterans-prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykola_Zlochevsky

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burisma_Holdings https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/lobbyists/summary?cycle=2014&id=Y0000040316L https://www.ft.com/content/3904f888-e8ef-11e9-a240-3b065ef5fc55 https://nypost.com/2018/03/15/inside-the-shady-private-equity-firm-run-by-kerry-and-bidens-kids/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_Poroshenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yanukovych https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kuchma https://johnsolomonreports.com/the-ukraine-scandal-timeline-democrats-and-their-media-allies-dont-want-america-to-see/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/firm-hired-by-ukraines-burisma-tried-to-use-hunter-biden-as-leverage-documents-show- 11573009615 https://orinocotribune.com/a-timeline-of-joe-bidens-intervention-against-the-prosecutor-general-of-ukraine/ https://mronline.org/2019/10/07/when-ukraines-prosecutor-came-after-his-sons-sponsor-joe-biden-sprang-into-action/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor_Kolomoyskyi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleksandr_Onyshchenko https://www.dw.com/en/fugitive-oligarch-and-equestrian-patron-denied-german-visa/a-45547512 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/showjumping-ukrainian-mp-facing-embezzlement-charges-flees-london-1577426 https://www.dw.com/en/ukraines-anti-corruption-campaign-targets-klitschko-and-poroshenko/a-49816916 https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/poroshenko-s-game-to-avoid-anti-corruption-court-continues/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/01/16/joe-biden-designated-mourner/ https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/azarov-shokin-lutsenko-a-trio-that-only-certain-foreign-journalists-find- credible.html

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