For months, while the impeachment hoax dragged on, powerful committee chairmen in the Senate have been quietly but openly pursuing an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and Ukrainian officials’ interventions in the 2016 election.
I hope Ukraine cooperates 🙂
#BREAKING: The Treasury Department has complied with GOP senators’ requests for highly sensitive & closely held financial records about Hunter Biden & his associates & has turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them. (1/2)
The Treasury Department has complied with Republican senators’ requests for highly sensitive and closely held financial records about Hunter Biden and his associates and has turned over “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” to them, according to a leading Democrat on one of the committees conducting the investigation.
For months, while the impeachment controversy raged, powerful committee chairmen in the Republican-controlled Senate have been quietly but openly pursuing an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs and Ukrainian officials’ alleged interventions in the 2016 election, the same matters that President Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani unsuccessfully tried to coerce Ukraine’s government to investigate.
Unlike Trump and Giuliani, however, Sens. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee; Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; and Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have focused their efforts in Washington, seeking to extract politically useful information from agencies of the U.S. government. They’ve issued letters requesting records from Cabinet departments and agencies, including the State Department, the Treasury, the Justice Department, the FBI, the National Archives and the Secret Service.
Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement — highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering.
The senators’ requests to the Treasury have borne fruit, according to the ranking Democratic senator on the Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, who contrasted the cooperation given to the Republican senators with the pervasive White House-directed stonewall that House Democrats encountered when they subpoenaed documents and witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.
“Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests — no subpoenas necessary — and producing ‘evidence’ of questionable origin,” Wyden spokesperson Ashley Schapitl said in a statement. “The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans’ sideshow at lightning speed.”
Sen. Ron Wyden during President Trump’s impeachment trial on Jan. 30. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
The “rapid” production of sensitive financial information from the Treasury Department in response to congressional requests is apparently uncommon. A source familiar with the matter said the Treasury began turning over materials less than two months after Grassley and Johnson wrote to FinCEN on Nov. 15, 2019, requesting any SARs and related documents filed by financial institutions regarding Hunter Biden, his associates, their businesses and clients.
Just a couple of weeks later, Wyden and Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, complained to FinCEN in a letter that “information requests from Congress, including legitimate Committee oversight requests related to Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), often take months to process, and we understand that certain such requests have yet to be answered at all.”
“Sen. Wyden’s warning was spurred by concern that the agency would prioritize Republican requests over Democratic requests,” Schapitl said of the December letter to FinCEN. “Treasury’s subsequent actions have made his concerns even more urgent.”
With the Senate impeachment trial concluded and the Democratic primaries in full swing, the efforts of the Republican-led investigation may soon appear at the center of the political stage. The flow of information from the administration to Senate Republicans has prompted concerns among Democrats that any damaging information uncovered may be deployed at a time of maximum political advantage for the Trump campaign.
“Republicans are turning the Senate into an arm of the president’s political campaign, pursuing an investigation designed to further President Trump’s favorite conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and smear Vice President Biden,” Schapitl said. The Biden presidential campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A series of letters and public statements shows that since last autumn the senators have been pursuing a wide-ranging joint inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business affairs in Ukraine at the time his father, Vice President Joe Biden, was leading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy and into the activities of Ukrainian officials and a Ukrainian-American Democratic political operative during the 2016 election.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter at a basketball game in 2010. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Aside from the statement from Wyden’s office, there has been scant information about what investigators have uncovered, if anything. Wyden’s statement stopped short of saying whether the “‘evidence’ of questionable origin” produced in compliance with the senators’ request included SARs.
The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 mandates that banks generate SARs to report to FinCEN any transactions that they know or have reason to suspect violate federal criminal laws or are connected to money laundering. SARs are among the most confidential, closely held documents in federal law enforcement. They are forbidden to be disclosed or have their existence disclosed by banks or government authorities, are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and are privileged in most cases from discovery by civil litigants.
Because SARs may be, and indeed are required to be, filed simply on the basis of a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity, the existence of a SAR doesn’t indicate that illegal activity has actually occurred.
The Republican Senate staff conducting the investigation did not respond to inquiries, and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee declined to comment. Treasury, State and Justice did not respond to inquiries. The FBI declined to comment.
The National Archives and Records Administration said that it had not turned over any records to the Senate yet, but that a review of the request by the White House and the office of President Barack Obama, which has purview over some of the records, is ongoing. “NARA has been in regular contact with committee staff,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
The Secret Service, which only received its request from the Republican investigators after the acquittal vote of the president on Wednesday, could not be immediately reached for comment.
From their letters, it’s clear that the senators’ inquiry into the Bidens deals with the same subject matter that Trump and Giuliani’s pressure campaign sought to place under scrutiny. Their interest in suspected Ukrainian influences on the 2016 election, however, has a different point of emphasis.
Instead of the debunked CrowdStrike conspiracy theory that Trump alluded to on his call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky or similar unsubstantiated theories positing that Ukraine was somehow behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the senators have focused on a controversial January 2017 Politico article that alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election to help Hillary Clinton defeat Trump.
The article relied heavily on the allegations of Andrii Telizhenko, then a diplomat in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, who said he was asked by Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic Party consultant, to get dirt on Paul Manafort, who was then the campaign manager for Trump. Telizhenko has since cast himself as a central figure in Giuliani’s Ukraine investigations.
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joe shmoe
4 years ago
year of the boomarang
Jamfer Jones
4 years ago
Hunter becomes the hunted. That has a nice ring to it. I think the patriots are losing patience with the DOJ and want to see somebody indicted OR ELSE.
I always said BARR is not the right guy for this job……………..if it takes too long for someone this corrupt (BIDENS, CLINTONS, DEMS) to be indicted or brought up on charges, then you KNOW the person in charge (BARR) is either NOT doing their job, or they have been bought and paid for OR maybe something else is going on that WE, THE PEOPLE are not going to like very much.
Why are the others being left out ??? Kerry son, Pelosi son, Finstein, etc. ??? also why just that country; why not China too? and the other nations where this has been done. Foreign aid with quid pro quo corruption by the Democrats lining their, family, cohorts pockets
My original question has never been sufficiently answered: If investigating the Bidens in the Trump administration’s corruption probe in Ukraine is off limits because quid pro Joe is a political opponent in the 2020 election, why did Sanders, Warren, and Klobuchar not recuse themselves from the impeachment vote in the Senate trial of Trump, a political opponent of theirs in that same election?
Shhh… you’re not supposed to be thinking.
Only feelings are allowed.
John Acord
4 years ago
Nothing new, right out of the Alinsky Rulebook for Radicals, accuse your opponents of the same crimes you are committing.
CanadaGoose1
4 years ago
Too bad Biden’s veteran son didn’t survive cancer as seems to be the better son.
durabo
4 years ago
Pigs will fly before the Bidens (bof’em) are indicted, tried and convicted for corruption, since there are two strata of legal justice: one for Us, the People; the other for politicians, professional jocks, entertainers and glitterati.
As George Orwell so beautifully wrote, “All animals are equal, but some animals are MORE EQUAL (emphasis added) than others.”
TomSJr
4 years ago
How about the IRS??????????????????? Can we make the Bidens’ tax records public like the Dems wanted Trump’s?????????????? HUH?
cylde
4 years ago
obama was fond of claiming there was no evidence of anything because it was all hidden by the deep state at his direction. We have new directors now.
AR154U☑ᵀʳᵘᵐᵖ DEPLORABLE 2020
4 years ago
DVader
4 years ago
Sounds like another Clinton Foundation/Uranium One ‘investigation,’ which evidently found nothing notable.
Maybe Trump will ensure that honest investigators are on the job this time instead of the criminal POS morons that investigated killary during the POS yard ape’s occupation of the WH!!!!
Since I was referring to the Clinton Foundation/Uranium One ‘investigation’ that’s been happening during the Trump Administration, you mean Trump hasn’t done that already? What’s Huber been doing?
You must be following the libturd outlets for sure. The most that has happened is the FBI asked for documents but maybe you can point to the REAL information on where a current investigation is ongoing by Trumps administration? There never was a real investigation performed. Maybe you can pull the report out of your files? Seems like every moronic libturd believes they have the answers to every intricate investigation when they don’t have clue. Sure is funny after $35 million and 2.5 years while nothing was found during a real investigation on Trump you believe that inquiries into the uranium going to Russians was a formal investigation.
patd
4 years ago
The ignorant criminal libturds opened a can of worms that they won’t be able to close now!!!!!
Randy H Eldredge
4 years ago
Democrats opened the can of worms! Little did they know thw blood-worms in the can would escape and attack them! Of course they are whining like whipped dogs now!
Mathew M
4 years ago
I’m highly suspicious of this why does the Treasury Department have to do this and not the IRS, he filed his taxes? this stinks like another batch of fake news sent forth by the corrupt Obama/Biden admin. This kid is nothing special he has NO National Securities he’s a nobody just another corrupt politicos brate kid
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