America's Talking - FBI Informant Says Ukrainian Exec Spoke of Bribe to President Joe Biden, His Son

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

President Joe Biden and his son Hunter "coerced" a several-million-dollar bribe from Burisma Holdings to protect the company and get a Ukrainian executive prosecutor investigating Burisma fired, a long-awaited FBI document made public Thursday alleges. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today is the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Carper. How are you, Casey? Casey Harper here reporting for duty. Awesome on is Casey Harper. Dan, how was your month-long vacation? Tell me all about it. Trying to turn the tables on me, Casey. Only one of us takes those month-long vacations. I was on a work trip. I don't know. That's not what I heard. That's not what I heard. That's not what you're interested. Instagram, Bahamas photos said, but I guess I can let it slip. Never been to the Bahamas, Casey.

Never, don't plan to either. But why don't we, we have a lot of news to talk about. So why don't we get into that? We are recording this on Friday, July 21st. Casey, there's been a lot of news this week about allegations that the president Joe Biden when he was vice president and his son Hunter received money from foreign business interests in exchange for their influence, including a bombshell FBI report that was released yesterday in which an important.

claims that then vice president Biden quote unquote coerced a seven a several million dollar bribe from brisma holdings to protect the company and get a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating brism fired there was also congressional hearings this week with s irs whistleblowers into the Biden investigation bring us up to date on everything that's going on here well I mean yeah there's so so many big revelations so many big hearings as you said and really really this week, I think, was a major turning point for this Hunter Biden, Joe Biden investigation for a couple reasons. First, what has always in the past been a Hunter Biden investigation with some loose ties to the president has now, in my mind, become a Hunter Biden and President Joe Biden investigation. Based on the evidence we've seen the IRS whistleblowers say that it was Biden's Department of Justice that interfered on behalf of Hunter Biden to protect him in this investigation, right? that Biden's political appointees or his Department of Justice, people working for him, were kind of shutting down and interfering with this Hunter Biden investigation.

So that implicates him there, if it all turns out to be true, right? Of course, there's kind of a big allegedly on a lot of this stuff. But the second reason it really has become just as much about Joe Biden as Hunter Biden is this incredible FBI document that you referenced. So it's called a confidential human source or see, called the CHS document, right? That's the abbreviation. Federal law enforcement loves acronyms, you may know. So the CHS document, where they have a confidential human source, based on the way this document is written up, this human, the CHS, this source, this informant,

was very close with Burisma. And actually, it seems like they may have actually worked for Burisma, maybe as a consultant or something. It's not totally clear. But Burisma is a very large Ukrainian energy company. that Hunter Biden worked on the board, right? He worked on the board with him. And so here's a quote from that. The informant says that Burisma hired the former president or prime minister of Poland to leverage his contacts in Europe for prospective oil and gas deals. Okay, yeah, yeah.

And they hired Hunter Biden to, quote, protect us through his dad from all kinds of problems. So that phrase, protect us through his dad from all kinds of problems. So you hear, this is an FBI document, the informant saying that Hunter Biden's explicit job was to leverage his father, who was vice president, during when a lot of this was going on. And so the president has by this FBI document really been implicated. Now it's not so much, oh, sad little Hunter Biden who had a drug problem was being a little sketchy. It's now there's much more hard for and public evidence that the president himself was involved in all this. Right. And that document from that confidential human source, CHS, was released by Republicans in Congress, right?

The FBI had this document. Senator Chuck Grassley. Senator Chuck Grassley, thank you. So it's really Congress, Republicans in Congress, who have been sort of pushing this investigation in front of the public. The FBI has had this information for a while. So the question is, what's the Department of Justice going to do about it? It seems like the Department of Justice has been sitting on this information. for quite a bit, and it's only, you know, Republicans who are having, conducting their own

investigation that have pushing it and pushing it forward. Is this going to go anywhere with Joe Biden's Department of Justice? Right. I mean, that is a kind of a scary question, a sad question, because, you know, more every, it seems like, you know, every few months, more evidence comes out showing that the Department of Justice has become so politicized. I mean, and not even just the FBI, though the FBI in many people's minds is top of that list. And we've talked about that a lot on this podcast and written about, you know, written about it at the center square.com. So it remains an open question if the DOJ is really going to do anything. I think, you know, we saw how aggressively they treated, um, former president Donald Trump, but then didn't really go after President

Biden, even though he had the same classified documents or even Mike Pence had the classified documents. Now, Trump was much less willing to cooperate with the FBI and with, you know, federal law enforcement and return the documents. And that's kind of their justification. But that's, you know, that's another example of something like this. I think it's hard to say for sure, but it seems like we may have never had anything happen regardless of this if some of these documents hadn't been published. And Senator Grassley is, you know, he's a long time House Judiciary, or a Senate judiciary chairman. He is not some partisan Trump era member who came in. He's not an America first pick. He's been in the Senate for a very long time. He's very respected. He's one of the most

respected members in the Senate. And so this is not just kind of the Freedom Caucus or some Trump Republican, you know, two or three dozen Republicans trying to make something happen here. I mean, if Chuck Grassley is releasing these documents and saying something is wrong, that within Washington, that's a pretty big deal because Grassley is really respected. He's not some what someone could write off as a far right person, even though he is, you know, he is a Republican. So I think this is getting more. steam and because these documents being made public, people who wanted to say something could actually have something to point to now because we've been hearing for a long time from

lawmakers that all this, you know, Brezma and Hunter Biden and this document, but now that it's made public, you can read it for yourself and you can trust it. It's not just partisan, you know, partisanship. It's real. So it's going to increase the pressure on the DOJ. Practically, who knows what's going to happen to Hunter and the president. I think what it does practically, though, is it gives Trump some cover because, you know, he's facing a lot of his own legal problems, which are threatening his own campaign. I mean, in some ways, they've propelled this campaign, but they could also threaten it. And I think he has a really good case at this point to say, look how unfairly I've been treated. The DOJ is totally corrupt. Look, they didn't go after

this Burisma stuff. They got a sweetheart deal. And now they're coming after me. In a couple minutes we have left, let's talk about those, the IRS whistleblowers who testified before Congress this week, specifically about the Department of Justice, what they said was pushback. Plus, and there also was a new monetary figure that was put out there during this congressional hearing about how much money the Bidens may have received. Right. Yeah, the whistleblower hearing was really interesting.

Again, talking about credibility. These are two guys who've been at the IRS a long time across multiple administrations combined 27 years of experience, right? So these are IRS, you know, lifers, you could say. And they laid out a lot of the details that maybe have kind of been missing from some of this investigation. And they tallied up $17 million that came to the Biden family and their business associates, which I think the CenterSquare.com, we were one of the first people to report this.

But the previous number had been something like at least $10 million. But now we have on the record, it's $17 million. And the way that James Comer, the House Oversight Chairman, he describes it, he says there's about 20 shell companies from 2014 to 2019, connected to the Biden family and their business partners. And this money would go into these companies and kind of get moved around. to hide it, right? Which is not, you know, not uncommon for if this really is some kind of scheme like that. The money came from, you know, Ukrainian sources, Chinese, Romanian, to the

tune of 17 million. And so the Irish whistleblowers, I mean, there's so much there, but they laid out some of the specific numbers. And they both testified that they felt Hunter Biden received some kind of preferential treatment and there was an abuse of power in the investigation to favor Hunter Biden. We will continue to follow this story at the center square.com. But we are out of time. Casey Harper. I'm Dan McAelab. Thank you for listening and please subscribe.