Biden: ‘Not a Single Bit of Evidence’ Son Asked Me to Help Him in Ukraine
By Charlie Spiering
Former Vice President Joe Biden denied Monday that his son Hunter Biden asked him for a favor in Ukraine while serving on the energy board of a Ukrainian energy company.
“We never once discussed it when he was there,” Biden told the Associated Press. “There’s not a single bit of evidence that’s been shown in any reporting that’s been done that he ever talked about it with me or asked any government official for a favor.”
When he was vice president, Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine if officials did not fire the country’s top prosecutor, who was pursuing a corruption investigation of an energy company while his son Hunter was serving on the board.
The connection was revealed in author Peter Schweizer’s best-selling book Secret Empires,and the reporting was confirmed in the New York Times.
Hunter Biden was paid as much as $50,000 per month while serving on the board, as his father led the Obama administration’s policy with Ukraine.
Biden’s “not a single bit of evidence” defense echoes former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s repeated assertion that there was no evidence of improper paybacks after she approved the Uranium One deal — despite receiving $145 million in pledges and donations for the Clinton Foundation.
Biden’s Ukraine connection made recent headlines after President Donald Trump’s personal attorney suggested he would travel to Ukraine to investigate the issue before ultimately deciding against it.
Biden criticized Giuliani for even considering the idea.
“I can’t remember any lawyer representing the president, conferring with the president, deciding to go overseas, where a government relies on U.S. largesse to try to get them to do something that everybody knows never happened,” Biden said during an interview with WMUR.
In the same interview, he also pointed to the reporting surrounding the conflict of interest.
“All the reports indicated that not a single, solitary thing was inappropriate about what my son did. He never talked to me. He never talked to anybody in the administration,” Biden said.
In his interview with the Associated Press, Biden defended his son’s role on the board.
“I have great confidence in my son,” he said. “He’s a man of great integrity.”
Joe Biden: Trump’s ‘God-Awful Tax Cut Has Not Helped Anybody Who’s Real’
By Charlie Spiering
Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to make false claims about President Donald Trump’s massive tax cut, saying Thursday it had not helped average Americans.
“The God awful tax cut has not helped anybody who’s real, anybody out there breaking their neck trying to figure out how to make the next meal,” Biden said at a fundraiser.
Since announcing his presidential campaign, Biden has continually attacked Trump’s tax cut.
“There’s a $2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. Of course not,” he said during his April campaign launch in Pittsburgh. “All of it went to folks at the top and corporations.”
That statement earned a lecture (and a “Four Pinnochio” rating) from the Washington Post fact checker, calling Biden’s claim “simply wrong.”
According to the Tax Policy Center, 82 percent of income earners in the $50,000 – $75,000 income range were estimated to get a tax cut of nearly $1,000.
Recently, Biden tried modifying his speech by asking his campaign audience whether or not they felt that they had benefitted from the tax cut:
Shouts of “No!” from the partisan crowd usually follow as Biden continues to rant about Trump helping the wealthy.
On the campaign trail, Biden proposes a great deal of federal spending, which he says could be paid for by repealing the tax cuts.
“Guess what, first thing I’d do is going to repeal this Trump tax cut, oh not a joke,” he said in South Carolina on Saturday.
Biden Says Margaret Thatcher, Who Died in 2013, Contacted Him to Complain About Trump
Another major gaffe for the former Vice President.
By
Former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden said that several heads of state, including the deceased Margaret Thatcher, have reached out to him to express their concern about President Donald J. Trump.
“Biden also told donors that he’s heard from 14 heads of state from around the world who’ve voiced concerns to him about Trump,” according to Bloomberg. “That list included Margaret Thatcher, he said, before correcting what he called a ‘Freudian slip,’ that he was actually referring to current British Prime Minister Theresa May.”
“Margaret Thatcher, um, excuse me, Margaret Thatcher – Freudian slip – but I knew her too… The Prime Minister of Great Britain Theresa May,” he reportedly said while listing off names of those who are concerned with Trump’s presidency.
Thatcher left political office in 1990.
Biden was speaking a $2,800 per head fundraiser in Columbia, S.C. on Saturday night. The 76-year-old candidate has faced mounting questions about his age as he kicks off his presidential bid. Last week, he slurred and rambled through a speech to union members in Pennsylvania last week.
Big League Politics reported:
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden slurred his way through a rambling speech Monday at a Teamster local hall in Pittsburgh. Biden is clearly focusing on the Midwest and on union voters, and though he has a good chance of cutting into President Trump’s lead there Trump still has the support of many rank-and-file union members if not the leadership.
Biden’s speech was less than inspiring:
Biden also landed in hot water over comments about visiting inner-city communities, which he called “the hood” at a campaign stop in Iowa.
“Through a program, we had through community colleges, we said look, put together a program for us where we could teach people how to code,” he said. “We went out, literally into the hood, and they found, turns out, 54 [people], they happened to be all women, the vast majority were women of color, no more than a high school degree, aged 25-54, and a third of them only had GEDs.”
‘ANYONE EVER SEEN COCAINE?’: UNEARTHED VIDEO SHOWS BERNIE LECTURING YOUNG CHILDREN ABOUT DRUGS
‘I’m only 5 years old,’ says child
MAY 4, 2019
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a 2020 presidential candidate, once asked a group of children if they had ever seen cocaine and if they smoked cigarettes when he was the mayor of Burlington, while talking to kids as a part of his old television show.
In an episode of Sanders’s show “Bernie Speaks with the Community,” which was created in the 1980s, he is sitting on top of a wooden picnic table with a microphone speaking with a group of children about a variety of issues, with a focus on drugs. Politico obtained footage of the show and released it Friday.
“Do any of the older kids you know have some problems with drugs?” Sanders asked the children. “Who wants to talk to me about that? What about drugs? Is that a problem?”
“I like coke!” one little boy said.
“Tell me about that,” Sanders asked.
“I like Coca-Cola!” the boy corrects himself.
“Oh, Coca-Cola. Alright, but who knows about cocaine?” Sanders continued.
“Anyone ever seen cocaine? Do any of the kids know people who use drugs like that?” Sanders asked. “You don’t have to tell me who, but I bet you do.”
A couple children at the table said they might have seen cocaine, and he cut them off.
“Hold it!” he said, later adding the drug “screws up your mind,” before changing the subject to cigarettes, asking the children, “Who here smokes?”
“Come on, raise your hand.”
“I don’t smoke because I’m a little kid,” a child sitting in someone’s lap responded. “I’m only 5 years old.”
Sanders is a front-runner in the 2020 presidential fight, with a crowded field of Democrats who hope to take on President Donald Trump. However, Sanders’s former press secretary decided to join former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for president, deciding to not work for her former boss.
Trump accused the Democratic National Committee of conspiring to oust Sanders from the 2020 Democratic primary in an April tweet.
BIDEN ALIGNS WITH FAR LEFT DEMS: “WE AGREE ON BASICALLY EVERYTHING”
Duly noted
MAY 4, 2019
NYT Confirms Hunter Biden Was Paid by Ukrainians While Father Was VP
By Rebecca Mansour
Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was paid for his work as a board member a Ukrainian oligarch-owned energy company while his father was vice president, the New York Times confirms.
According to the Times, Hunter Biden was paid “as much as $50,000 per month in some months” as a board member of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm owned by a member of the Ukrainian oligarchy.
Vice President Biden was heavily involved in mediating U.S. policy towards the Ukraine. When a Ukrainian prosecutor launched a corruption investigation into the energy company Hunter Biden was board member of, Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the country if the Ukrainian government did not fire the prosecutor. As John Solomon of The Hill reported, Biden’s threat would have thrown the former Soviet republic into insolvency at a time when Ukraine was fending off threats from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
In a speech last year before the Council on Foreign Relations, the former vice president bragged about his successful use of these strong-arm tactics to get the prosecutor fired, saying that he told the Ukrainians, “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Biden then boasted, “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”
Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel report at the Times:
It was a foreign policy role Joseph R. Biden Jr. enthusiastically embraced during his vice presidency: browbeating Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government to clean up its act. And one of his most memorable performances came on a trip to Kiev in March 2016, when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine’s leaders did not dismiss the country’s top prosecutor, who had been accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite.
The pressure campaign worked. The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders, was soon voted out by the Ukrainian Parliament.
Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.
Hunter Biden was a Yale-educated lawyer who had served on the boards of Amtrak and a number of nonprofit organizations and think tanks, but lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine. He would be paid as much as $50,000 per month in some months for his work for the company, Burisma Holdings.
The current Ukrainian general prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, has reopened the corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, The Hill reports.
Hunter Biden’s involvement with the Ukrainian energy firm and his sweetheart deals with China’s communist regime while his father was vice president were exposed in Peter Schweizer’s bestselling book Secret Empires.
In an interview last month on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight, Schweizer explained, “Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point-person on policy towards Ukraine. He steered $1.8 billion in aid to that government and while he was doing so, his son got a sweetheart deal with this energy company that — we’ve been able to trace over just a 14-month period — paid $3.1 million into an account where Hunter Biden was getting paid.”
“Suffice to say, Hunter Biden has no background in Ukraine,” Schweizer noted. “He has no background in energy policy. There’s really no legitimate explanation as to why he got this deal with this energy company, other than the fact his father was responsible for doling out money in Ukraine itself.”
“It’s a huge problem,” Schweizer added. “And it goes to this question of corruption and potential payoffs and bribes that these foreign entities were making to the Bidens in exchange for hopefully getting favorable treatment.”
Tom's Blog 