Republicans are claiming President Joe Biden received a $10 million bribe ($5 million for Joe and $5 million for son Hunter) from an executive with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2017. These non-proven allegations were made on June 30, 2020, via an a FD 10-23, a form the FBI uses to note unverified information from an unidentified source, reports The Washington Post:
Republicans are hyping a secondhand allegation from a single source — an allegation that was in the hands of Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department in mid-2020 without leading to criminal charges or, it seems, any specific investigation…. There’s an enormous appetite on the right at the moment for evidence that the FBI and Justice Department are deploying a double standard or that Biden deserves to face criminal charges just as much as former president Donald Trump.
Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) told a House Oversight Committee hearing on June 14 the claims on the FD 10-23 are “just a three-year-old secondhand, hearsay, uncorroborated rehashing of Rudy Giuliani’s bogus allegations that he got from corrupt Ukrainian officials.”
The New Republic reported more on the origin of the Republican lie-filled story:
Giuliani and Donald Trump first pushed the conspiracy that the Biden family accepted a $10 million bribe to remove former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in 2016 to stop a probe into Hunter Biden’s role at the oil company Burisma Holdings.
Several Republican lawmakers say that not only does the FBI form they saw last week mention this bribe but that a Burisma executive has audio recordings of Biden and Hunter Biden accepting the money. Both Anna Paulina Luna and Marjorie Taylor Greene said that executive is Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky. This claim has been repeatedly debunked by multiple State Department and intelligence experts on Russia and Ukraine.
Newsweek destroyed the Republicans claim of the $10 million bribe:
Looking into the history surrounding the money though, it doesn’t seem that mysterious. Jill and Joe Biden earned more than $15 million between 2017-18 after the then-vice president left the White House, including a book deal with Flatiron Books.
In 2017, the pair reported a joint adjusted income of about $11 million. The next year, they earned $4.5 million.
Biden was also, according to The Washington Post, said to have earned $200,000 from speeches.
An exact figure for the book deal isn’t available. One report by Publisher’s Weekly from 2017 said: “Sources say the deal is valued at $8 million; Flatiron and its parent company, Macmillan, would not comment.”
…Again, we don’t know what the exact figure the Bidens earned after leaving the White House (Newsweek has reached out to Flatiron and Macmillan for comment), but it seems based on available evidence that the “mysterious” sum looks relatively well-explained.
Combine that with the fact that we don’t know whether there are secret audio recordings that prove the existence of a bribery arrangement (or any other financial agreement that could embarrass the president), and the argument that the $10 million appeared “mysteriously” seems less compelling.
(Sources: Newsweek, New Republic, The Washington Post, Image Credit: White House.gov)