“The Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center, a Biden adviser named Michael Carpenter, now finds himself embroiled in a national controversy that threatens to take down a president. But it isn’t his first time.
Carpenter is implicated in the high-profile scandal since classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency were stored at the Penn Biden Center on his watch. The scandal has led to the quick appointment of a Special Counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
(…) Dr. Carpenter, readers might remember, was flanked to Biden’s right at the Council on Foreign Relations panel in 2018 where Biden infamously announced that he threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine if it did not fire the prosecutor charged with investigating the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
Burisma, of course, just so happened to be employing his son Hunter Biden on its Board of Directors for the hefty stipend of over $80,000 a month. Of course, we are to dismiss the obvious ‘quid pro quo’ implicated in the former vice president’s demands.
Such a ‘quid pro quo’ is a normal part of diplomacy (“sticks and carrots”), but it would become a scare word during the Trump impeachment hoax. If you recall, a “whistleblower” named Eric Ciaramella had relayed second-hand information that Trump was attaching aid to Ukraine to assurances from then-president Volodymyr Zelensky that Biden’s demand for the prosecutor be fired get properly investigated.
That was it. The Democrats, desperate to wound and potentially rid the U.S. government of their nemesis Donald Trump, nonetheless launched theatrical impeachment hearings over the matter.
The unnamed star at the center of the impeachment theater was the “whistleblower,” believed by investigators to be pictured with Dr. Michael Carpenter below.
Carpenter, interestingly, is a Biden adviser with expertise on Russia and Ukraine, as well as on weapons trafficking, according to his bio at the Atlantic Council.
It is unknown what is in the classified documents discovered at the Penn Biden Center and at Joe Biden’s Wilmington Delaware home. However, CNN has reported that the classified documents involved Ukraine.
“Among the classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president discovered in a private office last fall are US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom,” a source told CNN.
“A total of 10 documents with classification markings were found last year in Biden’s private academic office and they were dated between 2013 and 2016,” the report added.
Joe Biden in 2016 had pressured the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma’s leadership for corruption.
A series of documents from the Obama-Biden administration showed that representatives for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with the State Department in February 2016 to discuss the corruption allegations.
Burisma’s representatives invoked the former vice president’s youngest son, Hunter, in order to try to get a meeting with the State Department. The FOIA documents obtained in a lawsuit by John Solomon did not indicate if the meeting ever took place.
On one of the last days of his term as vice president, Joe Biden traveled to Kyiv. FOIA documents hosted at the U.S. State Department show one possible explanation why.
Viktor Nebozhenko, a political scientist, was cited in an email from then Foreign Service Institute director Karen Robblee to former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch speculating on the timing of Biden’s visit and what it could possibly mean.
“Donald Trump said that he will carry out an audit of investments in security and democracy in Ukraine,” Nebozhenko said. “For 8 years the US Administration has turned a blind eye to our corruption and gave a lot of money through the IMF and various funds. And all this has disappeared somewhere. Trump, as the new director of the company under the name of the United States, wants to know where that money went.” (Read more: Trending Politics News, 1/21/2023) (Archive)