Home » Devon Archer testifies: promoting the “brand”; firing Shokin

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Devon Archer testifies: promoting the “brand”; firing Shokin — 18 Comments

  1. “I don’t even know whether the Democrats think any of their disclaimers are believable to anyone but the most stalwart Biden voters, or whether they’re just thumbing their noses and laughing at the lot of us.”

    Answer: both. They think (correctly or not) some people are that gullible and in any case they don’t care.

  2. Democrats indict Trump on totally ridiculous charges. Because they are evil.

    They prove they are evil more and more every day.

  3. At the time, I thought that the Biden interview where he brags about getting Shokin fired was fairly unseemly. As in, I’m not just an ineffectual VP. I have real power. Of course, Biden’s claim that Shokin was corrupt or a loose cannon lent a facade of legitimacy to it.

    Not long after, came the news items that Burisma was corrupt, Hunter was paid ridiculous sums working for Burisma, and Shokin was going after Burisma. And Joe bragged about this firing??

    The problem for Republicans is that it is so hard to prove that a specific government action was caused by a bribe. The Shokin firing might possibly be an exception, though I doubt it.
    ______

    The Democrat media is now spinning the story that Joe and Hunter were selling the illusion of influence. Not actual influence. Well, the latter is criminal bribery, but isn’t the former the very definition of a confidence game.

    Trust us! We’re just liars, not criminals.

  4. I can’t shake my cynicism here.

    That this testimony wasn’t public just smells of cover up. Ds & Rs walk out spinning their tales and all us rubes can’t go to the video for verification.
    As the Boss noted yesterday…The Big Guy will suffer no loss here & The Bag Man may get a less sweet sweetheart deal.
    Alot of harrumphing on both sides and POTUS Trump gets the lash.
    A pox on the whole damned lot of ’em

  5. Adam Smith famously observed, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”.

    How much more road can there be down which to kick the can?

  6. If the prosecutor was not being active enough, would the US government say anything other than “light a fire” under him, and make him go after the guilty?

    You wouldn’t demand his resignation unless he was clearly targeting innocent lambs for political purposes. Or someone you wanted to protect.

    But I’d suggest you look at the Atlantic Council postings which surely obfuscate in their views on Shokin.

  7. The corruption seen in these stories is enough to make me want a shower after reading them. This is banana republic stuff.

  8. “The illusion of influence” is influence if you can use it to get a prosecutor fired. Isn’t influence always dependent on whether people believe you have it? So much of it is bluff, and if people believe your bluff you can get them to do what you want. Until somebody calls your bluff you have influence. And if you’re the president’s “point man” for Ukraine isn’t that real influence?

    I did sort of accept Team Biden’s explanation for the Shokin firing at first, but think about it. Foreign governments are full of corrupt officials. Ukraine and Russia certainly are. US politicians don’t usually do anything about them unless somebody complains — somebody who has clout with a US politician. It’s not like there were humanitarian concerns involved. One way to get clout is to pay for it: bribery.

  9. As far as I know, the VP’s constitutional powers to not go much beyond presiding over the Senate and casting a tie-breaking vote. Where does he get the power to withhold aid from Ukraine? Why would anyone bother to influence/bribe the VP unless the President was involved? So was Obama in on the deal?

  10. There may very well be Biden supporters who are so delusional that they actually believe that foreign oligarchs paid millions of dollars to the Biden family to hear old Joe say hello and deliver weather updates, but this is certainly not true of Democrats in Congress. They all know that Biden took millions of dollars in bribes and there is not a one of them that is willing to speak out against it. Their only interest is to protect their leader until such time as they are told he is expendable.

    I still believe that there is a persuadable portion of the American public who are still ignorant of the depths of the Biden corruption but will turn against Biden if they know the truth. Republicans should be doing much more to put the facts before the public.

  11. The Democratic Party has become the American Communist Party, totalitarian, corrupt and evil.

  12. Re: The Brand

    I love that Hunter and the Big Guy are up on the latest marketing concepts!

    I was once at some entrepreneur workshop where we were instructed to consider our personal selves as a Brand and act accordingly.

  13. What I continually find interesting is the total abandonment of appearances. Normally an upstanding politician or executive in the private sector will go the extra mile to avoid the appearance of impropriety. When one has an ethics class, or is taken through a corporate policy course on the company’s requirements, unethical decisions or choices are used as examples, but a substantial amount of time is also spent on choices and decisions that are not, in and of themselves, unethical – but they might be interpreted as being suggestive of unethical behavior, and therefore are discouraged or even prohibited (in corporations).

    Not here, though – Not with Biden, Inc. Nobody has made any mention of the preponderance of evidence that establishes an appearance of impropriety. Over and over again, the Biden Crime Family has made public choices that reek of ethical failure, that show a reckless disregard for what we would normally call, ‘unimpeachable’ conduct. In other words, standards and behavior geared toward preserving reputation. And time and time again, these events, these Red Flags, pass unremarked.

    There must be a lot of corporate trainers out there, shaking their head and wondering what they’ve been busting their butt for, all these years. Legal and Contracts/Procurement executives, too. Why bother? Take the gift, man.

  14. As to what Hunter was selling, Mollie Hemingway explains.
    https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/01/evidence-of-biden-burisma-corruption-is-overwhelming/

    While no one actually thinks Joe Biden has a secret interest in meteorology that he only shares with corrupt foreign oligarchs who happen to be in business with his son, the claim is ridiculous for another reason.

    As conservative broadcaster Larry O’Connor wrote, “Understand this: Hunter getting Joe on speakerphone WAS THE DELIVERABLE. It literally doesn’t matter what was discussed. Showing that he could get the Vice President of the United States on the phone was all Hunter had to show his clients to seal the deal. He was selling ACCESS not policy. Getting The Big Guy to pick up the phone demonstrated his ability to deliver that access. Case closed. Impeach.”

    Otherwise, why would Joe Biden get on the phone with his business associates at all? Why would Barack Obama’s point man in Ukraine be talking to Ukrainian officials under suspicion of massive corruption who were paying large sums of money to his son? What was the point, exactly, if not as chairman of the family business?

    We know Burisma was paying Biden family members for help getting powerful people in D.C. to get investigators off its back. We know Biden was the top official in D.C. related to Ukraine. Five days after Burisma made the request, Biden was laying the groundwork for the firing. And he has publicly bragged about getting the prosecutor fired.

    In 2019, President Donald Trump was impeached for raising the issue of a potential corruption scandal involving Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Burisma. At that time, scores of corporate media and other Democrat activists asserted without evidence that Shokin was not investigating Burisma and that it was a lie to suggest otherwise.

    For instance, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post wrote in 2019, “Trump has falsely claimed that Biden in 2015 pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, because he was investigating Ukraine’s largest private gas company, Burisma, which had added Biden’s son, Hunter, to its board in 2014. There are two big problems with this claim: One, Shokin was not investigating Burisma or Hunter Biden, and two, Shokin’s ouster was considered a diplomatic victory.”

    Since that false “fact” “check,” investigators in the House and Senate have shown that the Biden family business involves oligarchs and other powerful figures from Russia, Romania, China, and even France and other countries. Joe Biden reportedly met and spoke with his son’s employers from across the globe. The corporate press and other Democrats will fight disclosure about the Biden family business every step of the way, but Archer’s transcribed interview shows how important it is to reveal the truth of that business to the American people.

  15. @ bof > “So was Obama in on the deal?”

    Don Surber thinks so.
    https://donsurber.substack.com/p/bidens-crime-family-is-all-of-dc

    I suspect that the 10% for the Big Guy that his children surrendered from their loot did not mean Biden but rather his boss, Obama. And I suspect that Obama spread the wealth around. If Red China and Corporate America can buy off politicians, why not the president of the United States?

    Obama didn’t wrest the nomination in 2008 from Hillary because he was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean,” as Joe Biden put it. No, no, no. Obama had Chicago money and the Cook County Democrat machine behind him.

  16. “Where does he get the power to withhold aid from Ukraine? …was Obama in on the deal?”

    Biden claimed he had Obama’s backing, in his “son of a bitch” remarks.

    Many people voted for Obama to prove that they were not racist. Now he is Untouchable, for the same reason.

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