[See also Andrea Widburg's post on Joe Biden lying about his involvement with Burisma here.]

Among the Bidens, coincidences abound.

So sure enough, the New York Post, in its daily journalistic diggings, found this beaut from deep inside the bowels of Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop computer.

The Ukrainian energy company that was paying President Biden's son Hunter $1 million a year cut his monthly compensation in half two months after his father ceased to be vice president.

From May 2014, Burisma Holdings Ltd. was paying Hunter $83,333 a month to sit on its board, invoices on his abandoned laptop show.

But in an email on March 19, 2017, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi asked Hunter to sign a new director's agreement and informed him "the only thing that was amended is the compensation rate."

"We are very much interested in working closely together, and the remuneration is still the highest in the company and higher than the standard director's monthly fees. I am sure you will find it both fair and reasonable."

After the email, the amount listed on Hunter's monthly Burisma invoices was reduced to $41,500, effective from May 2017.

Gee.  Joe in office?  The money flows.  Joe out of office?  Much less cash to be paid.  Funny how that happens.

And no, this wasn't based on some oil or natural gas bust going on in Europe, energy prices being volatile things that can affect profits of companies.  Nope, prices of natural gas imports in Europe were largely flat at the time (see the second chart on the "interactive" tab), meaning Burisma's profits were likely steady at the time.  Burisma is a secretive private company run by Ukrainian oligarchs, so there are no books to look at to check to see if profits were down and everyone had to have a pay cut.  In 2017, Burisma was actually expanding operations, which doesn't happen to companies that are losing money, so it's unlikely that that pay cut was based on market conditions.

According to Reuters:

In an upbeat 2017 promotional video, Burisma presents itself as an energy company looking to expand beyond Ukraine's borders. Photographs of Hunter Biden and the other four board members appear over the company's "key corporate governance principles: leadership, efficiency, remuneration and transparency."

Coincidences, coincidences.  It sounds as if maybe the company had less use for Hunter with old dad, "the big guy" as Hunter put it, out of office.  No office, no influence — sorry, Hunter, you're just not as "expert" as Joe says now that Joe is out of office.  Take this salary cut and be happy.

It's an old political game we've seen before, again and again: money flows from someplace to some downwind entity that appears legit whenever the Democrat in power is in office.  Money ebbs when there is no influence to be bought.

We saw that with the Clinton Foundation, whose donations collapsed in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was defeated for the presidency by one Donald Trump.  She never got over it, and don't imagine that at least some of it was the now vanishing money from people who suddenly weren't so turned on to the Clinton Foundation's Potemkin projects as they claimed they had been before.  Remember Haiti?  Scandals never turned these donors off, but Hillary Clinton not winning her election most certainly did.

According to a 2018 editorial from Investor's Business Daily:

[T]he most glaring indictment of the Clinton Foundation came from what happened last year, after Hillary Clinton lost the election — and effectively ended her political career.

First, the Clinton's almost immediately shuttered the Clinton Global Initiative and laid off 22 employees.

Now, fresh financial documents show that contributions and grants to the Clinton Foundation plunged since Hillary lost her election bid. They dropped from $216 million in 2016 to just $26.5 million in 2017 — a stunning 88% fall. Throughout Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, the foundation pulled in an average of $254 million a year. (See the nearby chart below for a timeline.)

If the Clinton Foundation was as good as defenders claimed, why did all its big-time donors suddenly lose interest? The only reasonable explanation is that donors weren't interested in what the foundation supposedly did for humanity. They were interested in the political favors they knew their money would buy.

That's modern influence-peddling.  Gone are the days of black bags handed to pols under the table.  Now it's influence-buyers handing the cash to intermediaries with plausible denial, watching the cash get where it needs to go, all in exchange for...something.  Hunter himself said old Joe skimmed 10% off the top in some emails and took a 50% cut in others.  The Clinton Foundation, meanwhile, has seen a tiny uptick in donations since the last campaign season.  The swamp game continues.

It's disgusting stuff, very unethical, surely illegal, and something the doddering old fraudulently elected president needs to answer some congressional questions about.  Hunter's payouts were closely linked to Joe's political fortunes and Hunter admitted that if his name weren't "Biden" the company would probably have no use for him.  They didn't even have use for him when Joe was out of office.  The whole thing was about leveraging Joe's power of office for personal gain, both for Hunter and Burisma.  And now, it's clearer than ever to see.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of cropped images by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, Acaben via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, PxFuel public domain, ABC News YouTube screen shot, and Voice of America, public domain.

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