In a staggering act of journalistic deceit, the New York Times is reporting that Republicans launched an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden without any “evidence of financial wrongdoing or corruption by the president.” Similar statements have been made by a massive array of media outlets and Democrat politicians.
In reality, overwhelming proof of Joe Biden’s corruption and wrongdoing has been found, including hard evidence like written records and corroborated testimonies from first-hand witnesses. Collectively, at least 12 sets of documented facts leave no reasonable doubt that Biden participated in his son’s illicit businesses deals, bribed foreign officials, and obstructed justice.
Moreover, no less than three major defenses of Biden are demonstrably false.
Joe Biden claimed at least eight times that he had nothing to do with his son Hunter’s business dealings and never even spoke to Hunter about them. For example, he told a group of reporters on August 28, 2019:
I have never discussed with my son, or my brother, or anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses, period.
In May 2017, two of Hunter’s business partners exchanged several WhatsApp messages about the Biden family’s involvement in their dealings, and one of the partners wrote to the other:
Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face, I know u know that but they are paranoid.
In 2023, the business partner who was on the receiving end of the “Don’t mention Joe” message stated:
The American people don’t fully appreciate yet the key role Joe Biden played in the Biden family global influence peddling … I would equate it to a chairman’s role in a traditional business structure.
In May 2017, the same partner who wrote “Don’t mention Joe” sent an email to Hunter and two of their other partners in which he proposed how the “equity” of a joint venture with a Chinese energy company named CEFC would be “distributed.”
He did by listing the initials of the people copied on the email and numbers that add up to 100 percent. The last one says, “10 held by H for the big guy?”
The only person copied on the email with the initial “H” is Hunter Biden, and a partner who received the email publicly stated that “the big guy” is “in fact a reference to Joe Biden” and the “email is genuine.”
CEFC was not an ordinary business but an effective arm of the Chinese government. In a 2018 voice recording, Hunter Biden described one of the company’s executives who directly paid Hunter $1,000,000 as the “spy chief of China.”
On July 30, 2017, Hunter Biden sent a threatening WhatsApp message to a CEFC executive stating:
Four photographs prove that Hunter was at Joe’s house that day and took Joe’s cherished Corvette out for a spin.
One week later on August 8, a major corporate shareholder of CEFC wired $5 million to a company named Hudson West III, which had a bank account balance of zero just five days earlier. This company then funneled more than $4 million to companies associated with Hunter.
Two and a half weeks after that $5 million wire, Hunter texted a CEFC executive about a meeting at New York City penthouse recently purchased by the chairman of CEFC, “My uncle will be here with his BROTHER who would like to say hello to the Chairman.”
The “uncle” was Jim Biden, who made $65,000 per month on this deal. The “BROTHER” was undoubtedly Joe Biden, as evidenced by Hunter’s use of ALL CAPS and the fact that Hunter invoked his father to threaten CEFC one month earlier.
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the—four—five former heads of the CIA—both parties—say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.
Trump responded, “You mean the laptop is now another ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax? You gotta be—Is this where you’re going?” Biden shot back, “That’s exactly what—exactly what was told.”
That isn’t even close to what the intelligence officials said. More importantly, the contents of the laptop have been widely verified as authentic, and evidence of this was clear from the start.
Even if Hunter lied to his father, Joe knew right away that incriminating information from the laptop was real because he personally participated in it. For example, the very first article about the laptop exposed an email that showed Joe met with one of Hunter’s business partners in April 2015. Despite multiple emails from the laptop proving the meeting happened, the Biden campaign and numerous media outlets cast doubt on this fact until a photo and testimony from one of the attendees confirmed it occurred.
Furthermore, the intel officials didn’t allege that the contents of the laptop were fake. Instead, they claimed that the release of the content had “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” while admitting that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
That’s a far cry from Biden’s assertion that the laptop was a “bunch of garbage” and “nobody believes it.”
Even though Biden blatantly misrepresented on national television what these intel officials wrote, not one of them publicly corrected him. Nor did they correct the gaggle of major media outlets and so-called fact checkers who changed the phrase “Russian information” to “Russian disinformation.”
In short, the intel officials never had any evidence of Russian involvement and stayed silent as their words were twisted by Biden and the media. This reeks of a concerted and widespread disinformation campaign to hide the truth about Biden from the American people.
So does that fact that former acting CIA director Mike Morell admitted under oath that he asked his fellow intel officials to sign the “Russian information” statement:
In March 2014—while Joe Biden was vice president of the U.S. and acting as President Obama’s point man in Ukraine, Hunter and one of his business partners began courting business from a major Ukrainian natural gas producer named Burisma.
In an email to Hunter on March 6, the partner wrote:
Do some fishing around on this company. I am with the owner in meetings today and going to dinner together this evening. He’s obviously stressed but appears incredibly legit and great guy. Will call to debrief on opportunity….
That “obviously stressed” “great guy” was Nikolai Zlochevskyi, a notoriously corrupt oligarch who was under investigation by Ukrainian authorities and was on the verge of having his London bank accounts seized by British officials in a money laundering probe.
Hunter and his partner were granted access to Burisma’s corporate data within days, and shared a briefing about the company on March 18.
Less than a month later on April 12, the White House announced that Vice President Biden “will travel” to Ukraine “for meetings with government leaders and members of civil society” just 10 days later.
On the day after the announcement, Hunter sent an email to his partner claiming that Burisma needs to “know that we will not and cannot intervene directly with domestic policy makers” but that Hunter convinced “my guy” (obviously Joe) to visit Ukraine, and he might do a “really good thing” for Burisma.
Hunter also wrote that this business deal “could easily become very complicated” and made plans to communicate secretly via phones not linked to their names. Per the email:
Two days later on April 15, Burisma began making a series of payments totaling at least $3.3 million to a Delaware corporation that gave $708,312 directly to Hunter and $2.5 million to at least six different entities associated with Hunter.
When Joe Biden visited Ukraine one week later on April 22, he did a “really good thing” for Burisma by publicly promising Ukraine’s legislators that the U.S. would help the nation “pursue energy security.” This was a clear benefit to Burisma, which was the largest private natural gas producer in Ukraine.
In June 2020—four months before any information about Hunter’s laptop became public—an informant reported to the FBI that he had multiple conversations with Zlochevskyi in 2015–2019, and Zlochevskyi said the following:
This is the fourth independent source which shows that Hunter and his partners tried to shroud Joe’s involvement in their dealings by referring to him as the “Big Guy,” “his BROTHER,” and “my guy.”
It is also the first of three independent sources that show Joe Biden had Shokin fired to protect the CEO of Burisma, which was paying Hunter a million dollars per year.
In September 2019, Shokin signed a sworn affidavit stating:
Corroborating Shokin’s testimony, his office obtained a court order to seize some of Zlochevskyi’s properties—including his land, houses, and a Rolls-Royce Phantom—only two weeks before he was forced to resign.
White House phone logs show that Joe Biden talked to the president of Ukraine at least three times in the week surrounding Shokin’s dismissal. The phone log for the last of these calls states that Biden “commended President Poroshenko’s decision to replace Prosecutor General Shokin, which paves the way for needed reform of the prosecutorial service.”
Contrary to Biden’s claim that the prosecutor stood in the way of reform, the president of Ukraine complimented Shokin for implementing reforms that his predecessors had “been opposing for decades” and then listed the specific reforms. The president then said that he only asked Shokin to resign because he “failed to gain society’s trust.”
In a January 2019 text, Hunter Biden wrote to his daughter that she needs “to figure out how you can support yourself I never give you another dime again. If you want to go to Pop that’s fine.” (Typos in the original.) Hunter then added:
I Hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family Fro 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary. (Typos in the original.)
Other documents on Hunter’s laptop prove that Joe’s children, grandchildren, wife, and daughter-in-law all called him “Pop.” So did Joe’s assistant when communicating with the family.
This constitutes direct evidence that Joe demanded and received a share of Hunter’s dealings.
Epitomizing the depths of denial about this issue, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump recently alleged in an interview there was “no evidence that Joe Biden acted on Hunter Biden’s behalf or that Joe Biden took money.” When the interviewer confronted Bump with the text of Hunter saying he gave half his income to his dad, Bump claimed, “I have no idea what that means,” became highly defensive, and ended the interview.
Regardless of whether Joe received any money from Hunter’s dealings, using the power of his office to illicitly enrich his family is still classic corruption.
Documents from Hunter’s laptop reveal that Joe had several email aliases, such as:
The last of those addresses was a government account, as evidenced by the domain “pci.gov”.
On June 7, 2015, Kathy Chung, a government-paid assistant of then-Vice President Biden, sent an email to Joe’s government email alias and to Hunter with the subject line, “See below. These are all cell numbers.”
The email, sent to Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov and hbiden@rosemontseneca.com, contained the cell phone numbers of 25 high-level current and former government officials that wielded an enormous amount of power, such as:
Given that Chung was a federal employee who worked directly for VP Biden, there can be little doubt that Joe ordered her to give this information to Hunter. The fact that Chung sent this to Joe’s government alias strongly suggests that she wanted him to know she did what he asked without leaving an obvious record of it.
This goldmine of influential contacts was given to Hunter while he was being paid by Burisma to lobby U.S. officials to protect Zlochevskyi from the law—as detailed below.
The most damning evidence of Joe Biden’s criminality is a widely ignored email exchange which proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he engaged in bribery and obstructed justice.
In November 2015—seven months after Hunter and Joe dined with a Burisma executive at a restaurant near the White House—the same executive sent an email to Hunter and his partners in which he:
Hunter’s partners discussed the email among themselves and plotted how to close the deal, writing, “Hunter, You need to” tell Burisma that we “deliberately” didn’t mention the names of the officials who end these criminal cases “to be on the safe and cautious side.”
Hunter then replied to Burisma, “Looking forward to getting started on this,” and Joe proceeded to do precisely what the emails stated, verbatim:
Some have claimed that Joe Biden had nothing to do with the smoking gun emails because Hunter wrote to Burisma that a public relations firm called Blue Star Strategies would “deliver” what Burisma wanted. This was an obvious smokescreen and part of their agreement to not “mention Joe,” as proven by the following facts:
Another demonstrably false defense of Joe Biden is that Shokin wasn’t even investigating Zlochevskyi when Biden demanded his removal. This is disproven by the court order obtained by Shokin’s office to seize Zlochevskyi’s lands and houses two weeks before Shokin was forced to resign.
After spreading the “Shokin wasn’t investigating” falsehood far and wide, journalists have changed it to the far weaker claim that Shokin wasn’t prosecuting Zlochevskyi aggressively enough for his firing to benefit Zlochevskyi. For a prime example of this shift, the Washington Post’s lead “fact checker” reported in:
Both of these arguments are belied by the email Burisma sent to Hunter one month before Joe demanded the firing of Shokin. Again, the Burisma executive told Hunter and company to “proceed immediately” with getting “high-ranking US officials” to “visit” Ukraine and convince “the highest level of decision makers” to “close down” all “cases/pursuits against” Zlochevskyi while identifying the “Prosecutor General” as one of their “key targets.”
If the Prosecutor General (i.e., Shokin) wasn’t creating a problem for Zlochevskyi, there would be no need for Burisma to send that email demanding immediate action from Hunter.
Independently confirming the evidence from Hunter’s laptop, an informant reported to the FBI that Zlochevskyi directly told him that Shokin’s investigation “would have a substantial negative impact” on his business, but Hunter “will take care of all of those issues through his dad.” Again, this was documented in writing months before any of the contents of Hunter’s laptop became public.
A common refrain of the media is that “everyone” wanted to get rid of Shokin, and Biden was simply carrying out their wishes. For example:
Beyond that fact that Burisma funded the Atlantic Council, Hunter’s Blue Star associates were on the Atlantic Council, and Klimkin was terrified of losing U.S. support for Ukraine, all of those claims were made four years after Biden demanded Shokin’s removal.
Demolishing those unsupported claims from questionable sources, there is a written record of praise for Shokin and his office around the time when Biden demanded his firing in December 2015:
The only written records of people condemning Shokin around the time when Biden called for his removal were Biden’s underlings and political allies. Moreover, the loudest of them have a history of backroom dealings and double-talk. This includes:
Most importantly, the Biden camp’s criticism of Shokin occurred after Hunter and company began lobbying the State Department to protect Burisma while cloaking their actions with attorney-client privilege. This is proven by the following emails exchanged one month after Burisma began paying Hunter:
Tellingly, the State Department never called for of the resignation of Biden’s “solid” prosecutor who dropped all criminal charges against Zlochevskyi, even though:
In short, Hunter Biden launched an effort to protect Zlochevskyi by lobbying Joe’s political allies and subordinates, especially those in the State Department. These efforts failed to stop Shokin, so Burisma grew impatient and told Hunter to act “immediately.” Hunter then enlisted Joe, who did exactly as Burisma directed.
The U.S. Constitution states that the president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
At least 12 sets of documented facts prove that Joe Biden engaged in actions that accord with textbook definitions of bribery, extortion, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice. Furthermore, no less than three major defenses of Biden are littered with half-truths and outright falsehoods.
Because Biden’s illicit dealings involved foreign corporations and governments like China and Ukraine, he is vulnerable to international blackmail. Given that he is now the president of the most powerful nation in the world, this poses a serious danger to Americans and all of humanity.
James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a research institute dedicated to publishing facts about public policies and teaching research skills.