Most of us are glad to see the back of Joe Biden, but there are still little tidbits worth looking at that tell us so much about the incompetence and corruption of all his time in office.
RealClearPolitics has a good one, by Philip Wegmann, indicating that U.S. intelligence sources knew all about Joe Biden's corrupt dealings with Ukraine as President Obama's point man, before the country was invaded by Russia, because Ukrainian officials told them all about it.
It ended up in a CIA report ... and to no one's surprise, Biden deep-sixed it.
According to Wegmann:
It the specific request of then-Vice President Joe Biden, the CIA buried an embarrassing intelligence report detailing the poor view the Ukrainian government took of his diplomatic efforts and the business dealings of his own family in that country.
Biden had traveled to Kyiv in December 2015, ostensibly to meet with leaders of that fledgling democracy and to deliver a warning against “the cancer of corruption.” And during an address to the Ukrainian parliament, he did condemn the “pervasive poison of cronyism, corruption, and kleptocracy.”
But behind the scenes, Ukrainian officials expressed “bewilderment and disappointment” that the vice president had crossed the Atlantic “almost exclusively to deliver a generic speech.” Officials close to then-President Petro Poroshenko had hoped for guidance “in support of or against specific officials within the Ukrainian government.” They discovered instead that Biden “had no intention of discussing substantive matters.”
After Biden returned stateside, members of the Poroshenko administration “privately mused” at how American media treated “the alleged ties” of his family “to corrupt business practices in Ukraine.” It was, in their minds, “evidence of a double standard within the United States Government towards matters of corruption and political power.”
So the Ukrainians asked early about corruption and who was the worst that the U.S. would have known about and Biden couldn't care less about the topic.
Then Biden suddenly wanted prosecutor Victor Shokin fired, making all manner of noise about corruption, in what was obvious to the Ukrainians a bid to keep him from investigating Hunter Biden's cash cow, Burisma, where he sat on the board.
They saw right through it, knew exactly what his dirty game was.
And this take found its way into U.S. intelligence reports, which Biden scuppered.
"Thanks for understanding," one of Biden's minions wrote.
Perspective is important here: Has there ever been a designated special envoy -- think Averell Harriman, or Henry Kissinger, or even Warren Christopher -- who had those kinds of allegations of corruption coming out of his ears the way Biden did?
Barack Obama didn't seem to have a problem with it, because everything was justifiable by any means necessary.
But word would have gotten around from Ukraine, too, and to other countries, that American diplomacy was an exercise in pocket-lining and hypocrisy, cloaked in diplomatic pieties about human rights and fighting corruption.
They knew it was baloney. They probably told all their friends too -- rendering America weaker and less influential than it ever was in the post-World War II era.
In this atmosphere, is it any surprise that Vladimir Putin decided that with Biden in the presidency, it was time to invade Ukraine?
Image: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed
