‘My brother’s long-term relationships in the Senate proved to be the final nail in the coffin to be able to pull this thing forward…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A second scandal involving former Vice President Joe Biden‘s use of his office to benefit family members has piled onto the presidential hopeful’s recent political fires.
Politico revealed in a story posted Wednesday that Biden, while in office, helped a Florida state senator’s efforts to lobby for a ban on horsemeat as a favor to the vice president’s brother, Frank, who needed state funding for his charter-school business.
State Sen. Joe Abruzzo, who was a close associate of Frank Biden’s, also sat on the appropriations subcommittee that could earmark the school funding. Abruzzo, in turn, sought a quid pro quo as part of a side business he had lobbying on behalf of oil heiress and animal activist Victoria McCullough.
Abruzzo confessed to the ethically dubious arrangement alongside the younger Biden brother in a 2014 video for an equine conference: “I turned also to Frank and said, ‘We may need a little help from the vice president and the administration talking to some senators.’”
Frank Biden agreed that it was the use of his sibling’s influence that sealed the deal.
“My brother’s long-term relationships in the Senate proved to be the final nail in the coffin to be able to pull this thing forward,” he admitted in the video.
The story broke on the same day as reports surfaced about the scope of Ukrainian energy company Burisma’s efforts to lobby the Obama administration over a corruption scandal—which ultimately resulted in Joe Biden pressuring top officials to fire the investigating prosecutor.
In both episodes, members of the Biden camp now contradict the videotaped evidence and deny any impropriety in the convoluted arrangements.
However, as with the recent disclosure of Burisma emails under freedom-of-information laws, email records obtained by Politico in the horsemeat-gate scandal underscore the suspicious timing.
Joe Biden has maintained, without evidence, that Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin, whose firing he coerced, was widely regarded as corrupt—thereby justifying his own corrupt bargain to remove him.
Likewise, those involved in the horsemeat scandal claim the ends justified the means since it was “for a good cause”—benefiting the animals as well as their own financial situations.
And, once again, the former veep has called on the public—and anyone who might want to dig into the claims of impropriety—to simply trust him that he maintained an “absolute wall” between his office and his personal life, Politico said.
Nonetheless, observed Wednesday’s Politico article, “it was also part of a decades-long pattern in which the private business dealings of Joe Biden’s relatives have overlapped with Biden’s public duties.”
Democrats in Congress, while turning a blind eye to Biden, are seeking to impeach President Donald Trump for abuse of office after a partisan CIA operative working with House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., filed a whistleblower complaint.
They allege that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the Burisma board as a “consultant” with an estimated monthly salary of $50,000 or more.
However, Trump’s supporters have maintained that much rests on the president’s intent—and on determining the seriousness of the underlying allegations against the Bidens by following through on the Ukrainian probes of Burisma.
With impeachment set to enter a new public phase next week, Senate Republicans, anticipating a trial, were debating whether to call the Bidens as witnesses, Breitbart reported.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., openly supported the idea at a rally with Trump on Monday.
“I say this to my fellow colleagues in Congress, to every Republican in Washington: step up and subpoena Hunter Biden and subpoena the whistleblower,” he said.