Where's Hunter?

In case you were wondering about the Hunter Biden corruption scandal, Matt Taibbi, certainly not a member of the vast right wing conspiracy, summarizes it in his Substack column today:

To recap: an oligarch whose company’s wealth was tied to embezzlement and graft was booted from power via revolution in February, 2014, causing his company’s assets to come under fire, both in Ukraine and abroad. With Zlochevsky’s former protector Viktor Yanukovich having fled Ukraine back to Russia, Burisma scrambled to shore up a new power base. Within six weeks of the revolution, the firm brought big names onto its board, including former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski, Biden, and Devon Archer, pal to Hunter and the college roommate of Christopher Heinz, stepson to John Kerry. They would later add former CIA counter-terrorism chief Cofer Black.

On April 23rd, 2014, Archer gave a boastful interview to the Russian-language newspaper Kapital, explaining that Burisma “reminds me of Exxon at its founding.” The interview included the following exchange:

Kapital: In the American media, you’re sometimes described as a person in the circle of the current US Secretary of State John Kerry, and Vice President Joseph Biden.

Archer: Journalists really do think that (smiles). I know those officials.

Essentially, a mob enterprise gearing up to defend itself against international lawsuits and seizure orders hired as decorative cover an ex-president of Poland, the son of a sitting U.S. Vice President, and a close family friend and business partner of the son of the American Secretary of State — not exactly subtle, and far beyond nepotism.

The Burisma board deals were a protection scheme, funded with stolen money and designed to scare off commercial rivals and would-be regulators alike. Archer and Hunter Biden, even if they never did a minute of work for Burisma, were being paid to provide a criminal enterprise with the appearance of American protection. Similarly, if Joe Biden never actually intervened on behalf of Burisma, Hunter’s presence on Burisma’s board made it possible for anyone to argue that he was.

Where’s Hunter? And what was he doing with Burisma? And what about our high tech censors?

Even in the most generous interpretation of what happened, however, Hunter Biden’s alliance with Burisma was a serious form of institutional corruption, and this is true even if odious figures like Rudy Giuliani want us to know it. Facebook and Twitter exercising a selective block on stories about the matter make it look worse. Either we put a lid on “salacious and unverified” reports or we don’t, but we can’t just do it sometimes, and always in the same direction.

Now they’re part of an all-out assault on any information detrimental to Biden’s electoral chances, and the last thing that anyone seems to care about is whether or not these tales involving Hunter Biden and Burisma are true, or important.

Of course, Biden will not address the issue. Journalists take their lives into their hands if they raise it. But, Taibbi has the last word:

They’re absolutely important, and the ongoing effort to suppress this story — which began some time ago — is itself an element of corruption.

This episode already demonstrates deep-seated institutional corruption via the extraordinary demonstration of the powers of America’s new censorship Death Star — a story in the public interest was not only physically blocked by tech oligopolies, but denounced as foreign subversion by a remarkably cohesive confederation of mainstream press outlets.