Biden Corruption: Tony Bobulinski Upends All The Mainstream Talking Points
/I watched most of Tony Bobulinski’s interview on the Tucker Carlson show last night. You may have as well. This interview basically blew to smithereens the official Biden campaign/mainstream media talking points about Joe Biden’s knowledge/involvement in Hunter’s foreign business dealings.
If you missed the interview, there is a YouTube video of the full appearance posted at PowerLine here, and a transcript at RealClearPolitics here. Also, Scott Johnson at PowerLine has put together a compilation of coverage of the interview at various outlets:
Charles Creitz covers the Carlson interview for FOX News here. Bruce Golding covers it for the New York Post here. Tristan Justice covers it for the Federalist here. Bryan Preston covers it for PJ Media here. Andrea Widburg sets forth the background and hits the highlights in the American Thinker column posted here this morning along with videos of each FOX segment.
All of those are right-side sources, of course. But how was this story covered — if at all — over on the left? I mean, all the official story lines that have been so universally promoted are now in tatters. Could they really just completely ignore the whole thing, only a week before the presidential election?
So I thought I would check out my favorite whipping boy, the New York Times, and see what I could find. I started by paging through this morning’s print edition. There’s not a word in there about Bobulinski or last night’s interview. Doing a Google search, I find that the most recent pieces mentioning the name Bobulinski are (1) a Ross Douthat op-ed from yesterday (October 27) with the headline “The Media’s Hunter Biden Conundrum,” and (2) a “news” article from Sunday (October 25), with the headline “Questions and Answers About the Bidens and a Deal in China.” Obviously, both of those were posted before last night’s Carlson interview.
The Douthat article is an opinion piece, essentially arguing that the Hunter Biden revelations are not “the greatest scandal of our time.” (I would actually agree with that. For example, the scandal of former President Obama using the FBI and national intelligence services to spy on the opposition political campaign is a much bigger scandal. However, the Biden corruption scandal is nonetheless a very important scandal.) Meanwhile, the October 25 “news” piece purports to deal with the facts. So let’s look at the version of the facts in that article in light of Bobulinski’s new interview.
From the October 25 New York Times piece:
Was Joe Biden involved in this deal?
There is no evidence in the records that Mr. Biden was involved in or profited from the joint venture. . . . Mr. Biden’s tax returns, which he has released, show no income from any such venture. . . . The Biden campaign has rejected all assertions that the former vice president had any role in the negotiations over the deal or any stake in it. Andrew Bates, a Biden campaign spokesman, said the former vice president never had any stake in the project. “Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever,” he said. . . .
From Bobulinski last night:
. . . [A]s you can imagine I’ve been asked by a hundred people the last month you know, why would you be meeting with Joe Biden, and I sort of turn the question around to the people that asked me, why at 10:38 on the night of May 2nd [2017] would Joe Biden take time out of his schedule to sit down with me in a dark bar at The Beverly Hilton, sort of positioned behind a column so people couldn’t see us, to have a discussion about his family and my family and business at a very high level where Jim Biden sat and Hunter Biden participated in?
CARLSON: . . . [S]o the former vice president has said he had no knowledge whatsoever of his son’s business dealings and was not involved in them at all. . . .
BOBULINSKI: Yeah. That’s a blatant lie. When he states that, that is a blatant lie. . . .
CARLSON: Tell us about the conversation that you had with him. {Joe Biden]
BOBULINSKI: . . . Hunter introduced me as, this is Tony, Dad, the individual I told you about that’s helping us with the business that we’re working on and the Chinese.
CARLSON: So it was clear to you that Joe Biden’s son had told him about this business deal?
BOBULINSKI: Crystal clear.
CARLSON: Crystal clear. Tell us about the conversation that subsequently occurred between you and Joe Biden. . . .
BOBULINSKI: Yes of course, like, I didn’t request to meet with Joe; they requested that I meet with Joe. And you know he’s putting his -- and Hunter says this in writing; it was reference multiple times, they were putting their entire family legacy on the line. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were dealing with a Chinese-owned enterprise run by Chairman Ye, CEFC, that had strong financial support and political support from the Chinese Communist Party. That’s how it was presented to me. That’s not my own words; that’s how they presented to me and read me in on it. . . .
And then there is Bobulinski’s explanation of the May 13, 2017 email, relating to this same joint venture, containing the famous line “10 held by H for the big guy.” The email is from Biden family representative James Gilliar to Bobulinski, with a copy to Hunter Biden. Bobulinski:
On May 13th, that email was sent from James Gilliar to me. I didn’t generate that email. James Gilliar generated that email. And in that email, James Gilliar goes through intimate detail of what each individual’s requests were from a compensation perspective and how the equity in the enterprise would be divvied up. Very important -- May 13th, that email was generated by somebody else to me. In that email, there’s a statement where they go through the equity; Jim Biden’s referenced as you know 10 percent, doesn’t say Biden it says Jim. And then it has 10 percent for the big guy held by H. I one thousand percent sit here and know that the big guy is referencing Joe Biden.
Bobulinski then states that in the final form of the deal signed a couple of months later the stake of Jim Biden had been increased from 10 to 20%. Bobulinski strongly implies that this additional 10% was being held by Jim for Joe:
In Oneida Holdings, LLC, the equity is broken up 20 percent Hunter Biden, 20 percent Jim Biden. There are LLCs that represented them. . . . Twenty percent James Gilliar; 20 percent Rob Walker and 20 percent me and my investment entity. What I’d ask the American people to read and look at is how from May 13th to the final Oneida document that got executed, did Jim Biden go from a 10 percent owner to a 20 percent owner? That’s not my question to answer. I’m sure there were discussions within the Biden family. I wasn’t privy to that discussion. But this is Jim Biden, the brother of the potential future president of the United States. It’s not a distant cousin.
A final piece of the puzzle is that the joint venture never went forward (due to the demise of CEFC), but in the meantime, as revealed by Matthew Boyle at Breitbart on October 22 (also based on emails provided by Bobulinski), CEFC had made a “forgivable” $5 million “loan” to the “Biden family.”
With that, the statements of the New York Times and of the Biden campaign look like carefully weasel-worded misdirection:
“There is no evidence in the records that Mr. Biden was involved in or profited from the joint venture.” So if Joe has his stake held by his son or brother, and therefore it doesn’t show under his name “in the records” it doesn’t count. And if Joe shared in a $5 million forgivable loan, that’s not a “profit” from the venture, presumably because it’s a loan. Got it?
“Mr. Biden’s tax returns, which he has released, show no income from any such venture.” The actual receipt of money came in the form of this “forgivable loan.” A loan is not a taxable transaction! Got it?
“The Biden campaign has rejected all assertions that the former vice president had any role in the negotiations.” Looks like they can’t be troubled to call up an actual participant in the deal who is willing to give them an eyewitness account of Joe Biden’s involvement in the negotiations; if the Biden campaign denies it, that is the definitive word as far as the Times is concerned, no matter how many emails and texts may corroborate various pieces of the eyewitness’s account.
Anyway, at this writing, the Times is out there looking ridiculous. Maybe tomorrow they will get around to addressing this matter.
Well, they are better than CNN. At the CNN site, I input the word “Bobulinski” into the site search function, and get the following result: “Your search for bobulinski did not match any documents.” Pathetic.