June 18: Hunter Biden’s $120 Million Energy Deal
Iran nuclear clues; Academia roundup; Bowman wants to "show the world I'm friends with Jewish People"
The Big Story
The Scroll will be off tomorrow for Juneteenth, and back to our regularly scheduled programming on Thursday.
Hunter Biden is now, like Donald Trump, a “convicted felon,” thanks to his conviction earlier this month on three federal gun charges. But the scandal with Hunter has always been the First Son’s various influence-peddling operations, through which Hunter cultivated foreign oligarchs to help him cash in on “the Biden brand.” A new trove of documents released to House investigators by Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer and reported on in Just The News offers new details on Hunter’s business dealings—and of the U.S. government’s knowledge of it.
The documents released by Archer come from a cache of 3.39 million documents seized from Hunter and his business partners by the FBI during a 2016 securities fraud investigation. They show that the FBI was aware as far back as 2016 of Hunter’s involvement in a planned $120 million megadeal to develop the Yuzivska Block, a natural gas field in what is now Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine, using Ukrainian oligarch cash and Hunter’s political connections.
The principals in the proposed deal were Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch who owned the natural gas firm Burisma, which employed Hunter on its board, and a new venture to be called Burnham Energy Security LLC, incorporated in Liechtenstein as a subsidiary of Burnham Asset Management, a firm controlled by Hunter, Archer, and a third business partner, Jason Galanis.
According to congressional testimony from Galanis and emails obtained from the FBI cache, Burnham Asset Management would receive 25% of net revenues from the venture but would not be required to put up any capital. Instead, Galanis testified to Congress, “Burnham was putting up the relationship capital of the Biden name in foreign markets like Kazakhstan and Mexico and elsewhere where oil concessions were sought from government.” In a 2015 email thread discussing the proposed deal with Archer and Burnham lawyer Clifford Wolff, Galanis made explicit that Hunter and Archer, a former adviser to the John Kerry presidential campaign and close friend of the Biden and Kerry families, were offering “non legal” protection to Zlochevsky. “At the end of the day, the other non legal protection is the relationship cover of HB [Hunter Biden] and DA [Devon Archer],” Galanis wrote. Hunter had introduced one of Zlochevsky’s top lieutenants, Vadym Pozharsky, to his father at a dinner at Washington D.C.’s Cafe Milano in April of that year.
The deal never came off. In September 2015, Galanis was arrested in a case related to a fraudulent tribal bond scheme involving Burnham-controlled entities, which eventually led to convictions of both Galanis and Archer. Hunter, a partner at Burnham whose involvement in the tribal bond scheme had been flagged by analysts at Morgan Stanley in 2014, was never charged. Indeed, on Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee released a copy of Hunter’s response to an April 20, 2016 subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission related to its fraud investigation into Galanis and Archer. In that response, Hunter’s lawyer requested that the SEC treat the matter “with the highest degree of confidentiality,” as it would be “unfair, not just to our client, but also to his father, the Vice President of the United States, if his involvement in an SEC investigation and parallel criminal probe were to become the subject of any media attention.” The SEC announced charges against Archer and Galanis on May 11, 2016; a Wall Street Journal article on the charges noted Archer’s ties to Hunter. That same day, in an email to Hunter about the WSJ article, Hunter’s associate Eric Schwerin wrote, “There are no allegations you had anything to do with this, only that you do business together. Still not good but not sure how we push back without inviting more questions."
On the same day Galanis was arrested, then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech urging then Ukrainian chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin to pursue corruption charges against Zlochevsky. Pyatt’s speech prompted a lobbying campaign from Burisma and Biden and Archer, with the latter duo hiring a public relations firm, Blue Star Strategies, to pressure State Department officials to back off Zlochevsky and Burisma (Archer testified in 2023 that Burisma wanted Hunter to help remove pressure from “D.C.” related to the Shokin probe). Shokin was ultimately fired after then Vice President Biden threatened to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to Ukraine—a “conspiracy theory” that was at the heart of the 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump. Galanis’ arrest and Pyatt’s comments appear to have derailed the deal, which was never revived after fall 2015.
Critics have long alleged that U.S. Attorney David Weiss, responsible for prosecuting Hunter on both felony gun and tax charges, intentionally allowed the statute of limitations to expire for Hunter’s tax crimes during the years in which his father was serving as vice president. The revelation that the FBI was quietly holding millions of documents related to Hunter’s attempts to cash in on his father’s name during those years certainly won’t do much to quiet those speculations.
Read the rest here.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Communists and antisemites lost big in the European parliamentary elections, writes Itxu Díaz
The Rest
→Iranian scientists may or may not be engaging in computer modeling that may or may not be related to the research and development of nuclear weapons, according to a Tuesday “scoop” by Barak Ravid in Axios. Huh? This apparent nonstory comes from U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials, speaking ahead of a joint U.S.-Israeli discussion on Iran’s nuclear program scheduled for this Thursday, with some of Ravid’s sources dismissing the Iranian modeling as nothing more than a “blip” and some describing it as a “worrying signal about Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.” In April, however, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies gave a much franker assessment to The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t get a straight answer in Washington,” Dubowitz told the WSJ about his inquiries into the Iranian nuclear program, “but I got a straight answer in Israel: ‘We have evidence, we have intelligence. They have begun preliminary work on the weapon.’”
Ravid also noted, in the same report, that the reason the United States was pressuring its European allies not to censure Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency was because the Biden administration had been holding indirect talks with Iran in Oman “in order to try to reach unofficial understandings about a temporary constraining of the Iranian nuclear program”—emphasis ours.
→Meanwhile, in academia …
On Sunday, Haaretz published a story detailing findings from Columbia University’s Antisemitism Task Force, which included reports of a professor instructing students to avoid the mainstream media because it’s “owned by Jews”; of a professor singling out a student with a Jewish-sounding last name to explain their feelings on Gaza in front of a class; and of professors offerings students extra credit for attending the Gaza Solidarity Encampment that took over campus in April.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education said that both the University of Michigan and the City University of New York had failed to comply with federal standards under Title VI in responding to complaints of campus antisemitism—and, per the administration’s usual formula, of “anti-Palestinian” bias.
Also on Monday, Julia Steinberg of The Stanford Review noted on X that the 2024 recipient of the Donald and Robin Kennedy Undergraduate Award—given to the “best undergraduate essay and/or thesis on any theme in Jewish studies”—was one Joey Friedman, whose award-winning thesis, “The Soul of the World Weeping Through Us,” is described on Stanford’s website thus:
This thesis explores Indigenous and Jewish diasporic wisdom to confront colonial violence and collective trauma. I draw upon the scholarship of Healing Justice activists as well as my own Jewish lineage to grapple with diasporic survival amidst colonial violence. From the rich tapestry of diasporic Jewish wisdom, I unearth insights about grief enshrined within the yearly ritual process of Tisha B’av and the poetic tradition of communal lament which offer spiritual and political frameworks for redistributing power in the face of colonial catastrophe. These threads inform a ritual performance grieving the Israeli occupation and destruction of Gaza, heightened since October 2023.
→Quote of the Day:
Do you have pics of us? So I can show the world I’m friends with Jewish People.
That was Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) texting an unnamed Westchester County Jewish leader in 2022 for help against two Democratic primary challengers in garnering support from the county’s large Jewish community, according to a new report in Jewish Insider (the leader refused, telling JI, “I was like, I don’t want to be his court Jew”). Bowman, a member of The Squad and a harsh critic of Israel since Oct. 7, won the 2022 race, but looks as if we won’t be so lucky this year. Polls show that Bowman’s pro-Israel Democratic primary opponent, George Latimer, is leading Bowman by 48% to 31%, with the election one week away.
→On Tuesday, President Biden announced the deportation protections for some categories of illegal immigrants that we covered yesterday. The new “parole in place” program will authorize the Department of Homeland Security to grant federal protections to the undocumented spouses and children of U.S. citizens who have been living in the country for 10 years by waiving the requirement that they first leave the country to apply for lawful permanent residency. The government estimates that this program will affect about 550,000 people.
→We’ve been hard on the Biden administration’s border policies, but is the president’s asylum executive order finally starting to work? Here’s Fox’s Bill Melugin in a Tuesday X post:
TODAY IN TABLET:
Jewish Juneteenth, by Alan D. Abbey
Black Jews mark the holiday their own way
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Communists, Antisemites Lose Big in European Parliamentary Elections
On the other side of the aisle, Israel’s supporters make gains
By Itxu Díaz
Three of the most antisemitic parties in Europe, according to a ranking prepared last year by the European Coalition for Israel, are, much to my regret, Spanish: Sumar, Izquierda Unida, and Podemos. All three are extreme leftists, more specifically, communists. Since 2018, all three have had cabinet ministers in the government of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. And all three were dealt a strong blow at the polls in the European Parliament elections that took place on June 9. I will shed no tears for them. I have seen them call for pro-Palestinian and antisemitic demonstrations in Spain three or four days after the Oct. 7 attack, indifferent to the terrible images of the atrocities, the rapes, and the kidnappings.
The three parties had dedicated a good part of their European election campaign to showing support for Hamas and attacking Israel, even though neither issue topped the agenda of the debate on the future of the EU. In fact, with the exception of the nationalist Vox party, whose leader, Santiago Abascal, met with Benjamin Netanyahu at the end of May to express his explicit support, none of the main Spanish parties made Israel a feature of their electoral campaigns.
So severe was the blow to the leftist parties, that the leader of Sumar and second deputy prime minister, Yolanda Díaz, stepped down from her position as general coordinator of her party, though not from her government post. (It’s probably no coincidence that she quit only the unpaid position.)
But the poor results of the Spanish communists are not an exception in Europe. Almost all of the most antisemitic parties in the EU, who dwell at the bottom of the European Coalition for Israel’s rankings, have received a slap in the face at the polls.
Let's take a look: The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) have lost half of their representatives in the European Parliament. The day after the Oct. 7 attacks, the PCP published a scandalous communiqué: “The events that are unfolding in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the result of decades of occupation and systematic disregard by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to a sovereign and independent state, of permanent violation of all UN resolutions and international agreements on the Palestinian issue.” For its part, Bloco de Esquerda maintained during its electoral campaign that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Other losers include Slovenia's Europeo Socialni demokrati (Social Democrats), whose leader pushed for recognition of the Palestinian state by the Slovenian government; Belgium’s Ecolo, which claimed Israel’s response to the attack was “disproportionate”; and Open VLD, the party of Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who became embroiled in several anti-Israel controversies after saying that Israel “must prove it is not using famine as a weapon of war.” De Croo finally resigned on June 10 following his party’s poor results in the European elections.
In France, Europe Écologie (the Greens), which accused Israel of “flagrantly violating international law and human rights,” became irrelevant, losing five MEPs out of the 10 it had. In Spain, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), the party of Prime Minister Sanchez, which has approved the recognition of the Palestinian state (against the majority opinion of Spaniards) and which includes in its government several ministers defending Hamas, has lost seats as have all its communist partners.
In Croatia, Vihreä Iiitto (Green League), which accused Israel of exercising “collective revenge against an entire civilian population,” has also lost votes and seats, as have Bulgaria's Bulgarian Socialist Party, the progressive Piráti in the Czech Republic, the green party (Grüne) in Austria, and the Labour Party (Partit Laburista) in Malta, among others.
It is worth noting that some of the parties that are ranked as antisemitic, such as the German Die Linke, and traditionally opposed to Israel, have shifted their position away from the Palestinian cause following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
On the other the side of the aisle, among Israel’s major supporters, Viktor Orban’s party Fidesz won the European elections in Hungary, and Spain’s Vox doubled its presence in parliament with six seats, Sweden’s right-wing Sweden Democrats kept their three seats in the European Parliament, and the Netherlands’ conservative Reformed Political Party (SGP) held on to its seat as well.
Members of the European Parliament sit in seven political groups, and the various parties that ran in the elections did so as part of one of these groups. According to the average scores of the European Coalition for Israel, the two groups with more than 85% support for Israel improved their results in the European elections. The European Conservatives and Reformists Group, led by Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, gained four seats and now has the fourth-largest bloc in the EU Parliament, while the Identity and Democracy Group, led by France’s Marine Le Pen, has gained nine seats and is already the fifth-largest bloc. Meanwhile, the largest bloc, the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats), a group with more than 60% support for Israel, has gained 10 seats, so they haven’t done badly either.
***
Although Israel was not the main issue in the European elections, it is certainly a fundamental one, because on a day-to-day basis the European Parliament has to take a stance on it, particularly with regard to its foreign policy. Up to this point, three currents coexisted within the EU: the moderate support for Israel of the European People’s Party conservatives, the unwavering support of Giorgia Meloni, Orban, and other leaders, and the support for the Palestinians, and thus for Hamas, of the communist blocs, the Greens, and a growing part of the left.
In fact, one of the people who stirred up a hornet’s nest in the European Parliament so as to challenge support for Israel is the Spanish Socialist Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign policy. In one of his most controversial statements, Borrell accused Israel of deliberately starving the Palestinians: “Hunger is being used as a weapon of war, yes, we can say it like that, yes. It is not a question of lack of supplies.”
Borrell belongs to the party of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who went from supporting Israel to recognizing a Palestinian state. Sanchez’s shift has swayed other socialists, starting with Borrell himself. In turn, Sanchez’s change of heart was brought about by pressure from his communist vice president, Yolanda Díaz, who has now received a serious shellacking in the elections.
The new EU parliamentary picture after these elections does not change substantially, because Ursula von der Leyen, after the victory of the European People’s Party, has offered the Party of European Socialists an alliance “against the extremes,” as she refers to the new emerging right parties, in order to keep her position as president of the European Commission.
However, although it may seem that once this foreseeable agreement is reached everything will remain the same, in reality, everything will be different, because dozens of new MEPs from the new right-wing blocs (what some media call “extreme right wing,” even though it is a vague, confusing, and inaccurate label in most cases) will have more of a voice than ever before in the history of the EU, and will also have the ability to block laws and votes.
In this context, the determined backing for Israel from the majority of conservative parties might make it possible to improve foreign relations and perhaps increase diplomatic support for Israel and the joint fight against Hamas terrorism, which is not very different from the jihadism that still strikes at the heart of Europe every few days. This common threat is causing an insecurity that is closely tied to the change of political direction we are experiencing, especially in countries where Islamist immigration has caused serious security problems, as is the case in France and Germany, where the so-called “new right” is growing the most.
Even more important than this remarkable increase in pro-Israeli parties in the European Parliament is the historic loss of voters suffered by the communist and environmentalist parties, which up until now have been the two main voices allied with Hamas terrorism in Brussels. With fewer noisy MEPs capable of sowing confusion around what is happening in Gaza, and too often using their European seats to spout antisemitic slogans, debates on EU foreign policy toward Israel will be calmer, more honest, and probably better for the common Western cause of ending terrorism, containing Islamism, and strengthening our democracies by keeping them safe from those who seek to destroy our way of life, our values, and our peace and security.
Re: Itxu Díaz’ article on European election results
While it was heartening to see the Left take such a pasting in Europe, the battle is far from won. These people can be given no qbuarter, because they are relentless in their diabolical pursuit, and will never stop until they’ve been relegated to the dustbin of history.
Ms. Von der Layden is the poster child for all that is wrong with them, and her #1 pet project is to crush free speech and silence dissent, as she pronounced unabashedly at the most recent gathering of the WEF overlords.
The battle is not over, it’s only just begun, and the people must remain vigilant and on high alert, ever ready to prevent these people from destroying civilization as we’ve known it.
Re: Bill Melugin‘s reporting on the apparent decrease in illegal border crossings:
I would wager, that “decrease” at the border is merely a direct result of a diversionary tactic which includes an increase in flights arranged by the Biden Admin’s DHS of illegals into country, coupled with an “arrangement” with the Mexican Govt (and perhaps other govts. as well), to assist in curtailing the number of crossings from their side until at least after the election.