The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to formalize the party’s ongoing impeachment probe into President Joe Biden’s alleged corruption and influence peddling. The resolution was passed on a 221-212 vote, along party lines. 

Every present Republican voted in favor of the impeachment inquiry, while every Democrat voted against. There was one Democrat absentee. 

Biden released a statement regarding the inquiry, saying that House Republicans are wasting their time on a "baseless political stunt" that "is not supported by facts."

The GOP began investigating Biden’s alleged misdeeds after the party retook control of the house following 2020’s midterm elections, with the House Oversight Committee and House Judiciary Committee leading the probe. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced an impeachment inquiry in September, claiming that the committees had uncovered a “culture of corruption”surrounding the Biden family.

Citing witness testimony and files retrieved from a laptop belonging to Biden’s son, Hunter, Republicans allege that the Biden family received around $24 million in payments through shell companies from business figures and politicians in China, Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine while Biden was vice president. Some 150 of these transactions were flagged as “suspicious” by the US Treasury Department, according to the committees.

Hunter Biden plays a key role in the allegations, with the president’s son accused of striking business deals with multiple foreign clients in exchange for access to his father. Hunter’s former business partner, Devon Archer, told the Oversight Committee in July that Hunter’s position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, was given to him solely to guarantee that the company would have influence over US policy. 

President Biden denies any knowledge of or involvement in his son’s business activities, despite emails between Hunter and his clients suggesting that Hunter arranged meetings. Archer also alleged that Joe Biden dined multiple times with Hunter’s clients, and that Hunter received money transfers immediately after at least two of these encounters.  

With the inquiry formalized, Republicans say that they will have greater investigative powers, particularly when it comes to compelling witnesses to testify. Earlier on Wednesday, Hunter Biden defied a subpoena to testify before a closed-door hearing of the Oversight and Judiciary committees, stating that he would only answer questions in a public session. 

Such a session would be broadcast live by news networks, and would give Democrats the opportunity to filibuster and deliver speeches in defense of the Bidens. Classified information could also not be discussed in a public hearing.

Prior to the vote, Oversight Committee chair James Comer said that “we expect to depose the president’s son, and then we will be more than happy to have a public hearing.”

https://www.rt.com/news/589021-congress-votes-on-biden-impeachment/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.........

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35SD91ywghw

MOST CORRUPT VII: Joe Biden - Part II - Forgotten History

 

Joe Biden established himself as a very flexible politician when it came to his positions on important issues. His lack of honesty and political integrity were established early in his career, as was his willingness to use his office for personal gain and vengeance. Hosted by Colin D. Heaton. Forgotten History is a 10th Legion Pictures Production.

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.........

 

 

By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News

 

It is now two and a half months since the House Oversight Committee opened hearings to consider the grounds for an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden for his increasingly apparent involvement in the extravagant corruption and influence-peddling schemes of his wayward son Hunter, his brother James, and other members of the Biden family.

The full House finally voted on this matter last Wednesday along strict party lines, 221 Republicans to 212 Democrats.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., a.k.a. “the Big Guy,” will now be formally investigated on accumulating evidence that he was a participant in and/or a beneficiary of Hunter’s years of manifestly criminal conniving while Pop was Barack Obama’s vice-president and during the post-veep interim before Joe moved into the White House.

The first two pieces in this Consortium News series on the impeachment proceedings can be read here and here. By the time we published the second of these we had concluded, “This is likely to prove a test of our troubled republic’s relationship with reality.”

So it shapes up to be.

 

‘No Evidence!’

“This whole thing is an extreme political stunt. It has no credibility, no legitimacy, and no integrity. It is a sideshow.” That is Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, on the House floor last week.

“No credibility, legitimacy, or integrity”: Get used to these terms. We have heard them many times already and will hear them scores more in the months to come.

The White House appears to be in state of barely controlled panic. The Big Guy remains silent — as if, at this stage in the proceedings, he can simply ignore what is going on around him and it will all go away.

After the House vote was announced last Wednesday, A Fox News reporter asked Karine Jean–Pierre, the White House press secretary, about evidence that the president had lied about his involvement with Hunter’s businesses.

Biden’s not-quite-competent flak-catcher exploded: “But there’s no evidence. Wait, wait. There’s no evidence. There’s no evidence that the president has done wrongdoing [sic]. There’s none. Absolutely none. None. And that’s just a fact.” [Emphasis mine]

The New York Times story about Wednesday’s vote was subtitled: “Republicans are pushing forward with a formal investigation even though their yearlong scrutiny of the president and his family has turned up no evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors.” [Emphasis mine]

The subtitle to The Guardian’s article said: “Republicans have failed to produce evidence showing president financially benefited from family business dealings.” [Emphasis mine]

The definition of an incantation is a “recited formula of words designed to produce a particular effect.”

In the annals of propaganda, were there any such thing, this incessant repetition of patent untruths would merit many pages.

If “control of the narrative,” “perception management,” and media manipulation of public opinion triumph over in-plain-sight evidence of guilt admissible in a courtroom or a Senate trial, propaganda will have won “the battle for the human brain,” as a NATO paper put it a couple of years ago.

We will at that point live in a lawless society with no resort to a credible judiciary.

But I don’t see this as the outcome. The president’s chances of political survival appear to decline steadily as the case against him advances.

 

A Sop for Pop

This has been an unusually eventful interim as l’affaire Biden proceeds.

Six days before the House vote, the Justice Department unsealed a nine-count indictment charging Hunter Biden with tax evasion, failure to file returns, and “false or fraudulent” returns when he did file them during his dissolute, influence-peddling years, 2016 to 2019. Three of the violations are felonies.

In my read the new indictment is more of the same from David Weiss, the corrupt special counsel who has been protecting the Bidens for years: The document is full of rip-roaring language but makes no mention of Hunter’s violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is the front door leading to Pop’s collaboration as Hunter sold vice-presidential access to the Ukrainians, the Chinese, the Kazakhs, and others.

It will be interesting nonetheless to see how this sop to demands for justice plays out. My prediction: The new indictment is Weiss’s groundwork for another excessively lenient plea bargain such as the one he fashioned last summer but failed to get past a conscientious judge.

The question is whether such a plan would withstand sharpening congressional scrutiny — or whether it would worsen the mess that now surrounds the Bidens and their allies.

The House Oversight Committee had subpoenaed Hunter Biden to sit for closed-door questioning by the time the grand jury indictments were made public. This session was scheduled for last Wednesday, hours before the House impeachment vote. Hunter is now threatened with a contempt of Congress citation for failing to appear.

The younger Biden instead gave a press conference in front of the Capitol during which he got two things done.

One, he altered the Biden regime’s story for the second time. As readers will recall, the president’s first claim — he never discussed Hunter’s business with him — evolved some time ago into, “The president was never in business with Hunter.” Last week Hunter had it this way: “Let me state as clearly as I can: My father was not financially involved in my business.”

If you net this out, it amounts to an implicit admission that Pop lied in his earlier versions of the Biden family story. It was on this point that a Fox News reporter sent Jean–Pierre into near hysterics last week.

Two, during his appearance at the Capitol with microphones before him like bouquets of flowers, Hunter Biden lapsed into the tinniest of Pop’s many public-relations ploys: He played the pity card by pimping his personal difficulties.

“They ridiculed my struggle with addiction; they belittled my recovery,” he complained of those running the impeachment proceedings. “And they have tried to dehumanize me — all to embarrass and damage my father, who has devoted his entire public life to service.”

I don’t see how much of this spaghetti will stick to the wall, but the tableau tells us something important. The Biden family will stay as far outside the corridors of justice as it can in coming months, avoiding hearings, courtrooms, and legal proceedings for the simple reason it cannot win in any such context.

I have not yet heard of a court of public opinion trumping a court of law, but, desperate as the Bidens are at this point, it seems the only strategy available to them.

As to the House vote last week, let us note: It did not decide to impeach Joe Biden and has not formally accused him of any crime or infraction. It voted solely to begin a formal investigation into the president’s alleged culpability. Should the House vote to impeach, it will send the result to the Senate, where a trial, if the upper chamber decided to hold one, would take place.

The Evidence

While there is more to come, the House already has in hand very considerable email and text message archives, 36,000 pages of bank records, and 2,000 pages of the Treasury Department’s “suspicious activity reports,” which cover international bank transfers.

There is also testimony from Hunter’s business partners, federal agents, federal attorneys, and Mykola Zlochevsky, the chief executive of Burisma Holdings.

We will hear more of all this in months to come. The intent last week was simply to give the House formal authority to proceed with its investigation, subpoena witnesses, and reply to the legal challenges it anticipates from Biden and the rest of the Democratic elite.

At the same time, the House made clear those areas where it would focus its attention in months to come. These include what Hunter Biden and James Biden took in from their dealings with various foreign entities and where it went, the numerous occasions when Pop met with Hunter’s foreign partners, and — not to be missed — the extent to which the Biden White House and the Justice Department have to date obstructed or suppressed investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.

There is also the $10 million Biden père et fils allegedly took from Burisma in an even split, as described by Zlochevsky in several interviews with an F.B.I. informant, and a payment of $240,000 James made to his older brother – now the president – immediately after a Chinese equity investor paid Hunter several million dollars.

If the evidence of this latter payment proves out, it would have been the “10 percent for the Big Guy” noted in Hunter’s email messages. Biden’s attorneys are trying to pass this off as the repayment of loans, but as Ziegler testified last week in response to this assertion, “There was nothing to verify that they were loans.”

Hunter or Re-election?

One of the fallacies promoted by those given to endlessly insisting there is “no evidence!” incriminating Joe Biden, absolutely none, has it that there must be proof that he took money from Hunter as these various allegations indicate.

This is another dimension of the false narrative marshaled to protect the president. “Where’s the money?” Biden arrogantly asked when the alleged Burisma bribe was first made public.

It is a good question but not the only question. Confirmed evidence of such payments will certainly seal the case against Joe Biden, but it is not essential to a guilty finding. The law already stipulates that if family members make use of and benefit from a political figure’s position, the politician can be a beneficiary of criminal bribery and would in such a case stand guilty of the crime.

One lingering question to be watched in coming weeks is whether, as the Biden White House’s desperation mounts, the president will sacrifice his officially beloved son to his prospects for re-election come next November.

Even Democratic Party hacks such as Jerry Nadler and the insufferable Jamie Raskin, while insisting the president is clean, have begun to suggest that what were previously designated Hunter’s shenanigans now look more like crimes.

It is difficult to say whether Bidengate, lets call it, will divide the family in this way, but we cannot put this past a man whose service, as Hunter referred to it, has always been in his own interest.

https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/17/patrick-lawrence-impeachment-biden-under-formal-investigation/

 

WE HAVE EXPOSED BIDEN'S CROOKERY SINCE.... A LONG LONG TIME AGO...

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.........

US presidential scion Hunter Biden stormed out of a congressional hearing debating holding him in contempt for his failure to appear at a previous hearing on Wednesday, after surprising House Republicans with his presence.

Flanked by his lawyers Abbe Lowell and Kevin Morris, the son of President Joe Biden caused a stir when he sat down in the front row of the hearing room as the House Oversight Committee was debating a resolution to hold him in contempt of Congress over his refusal to attend a scheduled deposition last month.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) was first to address the new arrival, asking rhetorically, “Who bribed Hunter Biden to be here today?”

“You are the epitome of white privilege — coming into the Oversight Committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. What are you afraid of?” Mace continued, declaring that Biden had “no balls.” He “broke the law,” both “deliberately” and “flagrantly” when he flaunted the congressional subpoena, she said.

“Hunter Biden wasn’t afraid of involving Joe Biden in shady business deals with our foreign adversaries” when the elder Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president, but he was “too afraid to show up for a deposition,” Mace concluded, suggesting the 53-year-old be “arrested right here, right now, and go straight to jail.”  

After Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida) defended the younger Biden, arguing the committee chair had given him the option of testifying in a public hearing instead of the deposition, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) began to speak, triggering Biden's hasty exit.

“Hunter Biden didn’t show up for his subpoena, Hunter Biden showed up today to make a clown show of himself, to show that he is nothing but someone that will not obey the law,” Greene observed. “Not only is he a criminal, but he’s a coward.” She contrasted his actions with those of former president Donald Trump and his children, who sat for hours of questioning when subpoenaed.

Lowell echoed Moskowitz's defense of his client in a statement to reporters outside the hearing room, insisting Biden was a “private citizen” whom Republicans had nevertheless “sought to use...as a surrogate to attack his father.” He claimed repeated offers to supply information to the relevant House committees had been rebuffed. 

Biden skipped the December deposition in favor of a press conference outside the Capitol that same day, during which he declared the president was “not financially involved” in any of his dealings and accused House Republicans of attacking his character and invading his privacy. 

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan had rejected Biden's lawyers' offers to testify in a public hearing, arguing Democrats would use the occasion to interrupt with stunts aimed at distracting the public.

https://www.rt.com/news/590418-hunter-biden-hearing-contempt-congress/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.........

During a Wednesday United States House of Representatives Oversight and Accountability Committee meeting regarding whether President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden should be found in contempt for failing to show up to answer questions after receiving a House subpoena, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) directed an astoundingly ridiculous comment toward Hunter Biden who was sitting in the front row of the audience.

“You are the epitome of white privilege,” Mace told Biden.

Hold on. Seriously? Hunter Biden is the son of the current United States president who before that was vice president for eight years and before that spent 36 years as a US Senate member. As a senator, Biden even served as chairman of the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees. Aside from a four-year absence from political office between his time as vice president and as president, Biden has spent all of the last 51 years in the upper echelon of American elective office.

That sure looks like a more likely source of Hunter Biden’s privilege than his “race” or the hue of his skin. This is especially so given the massive amount of evidence that has come out indicating that Hunter Biden, despite limited relevant skills and a debilitating drug problem, was able to rake in millions based apparently on nothing more than his connection to his father — a matter at the heart of the meeting at which Mace addressed Hunter Biden.

What privilege of the “white” children of cashiers, salesmen, and others struggling in relative anonymity to make ends meet does Hunter Biden epitomize? Obviously, none. Mace’s race-based comment is nonsense.

 

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/rep-nancy-maces-white-privilege-nonsense/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.........

 

 

 

By Olga Sukharevskaya, ex-Ukrainian diplomat

 

Hunter and the hunted: How Joe Biden is being linked to corruption, terror attacks, and political assassinations in Ukraine

 

 Recent statements by a Ukrainian dissident have revealed worrying ties between the US President’s family and certain elements in Kiev 

Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, there’s been much talk about the family of US President Joe Biden and alleged corruption schemes connected with Ukraine. The story itself isn’t new, but facts have recently come to light which make it clear why the American leader and his fellow Democrats remain intransigent on the Ukraine issue. 

In the footsteps of assassins and those who hire them

Andrey Derkach, a former Ukrainian parliamentarian who became widely known for publishing recordings of conversations between ex-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko and high-ranking foreign officials, including Biden (who was then US vice president), gave an extensive interview earlier this month to journalist Simona Mangiante. During this conversation, he disclosed sensational new details about the “special ties” between the Biden family and the Ukrainian authorities.

According to Derkach, “President [Vladimir] Zelensky’s office was involved in distributing the Poroshenko-Biden recordings and helped organize the media coverage [of the story].” At the time, Zelensky and his team were interested in exposing his political rival by any means possible.

Everything changed after the start of the 2020 US election campaign and the arrival of Biden as president. “In a situation when Zelensky and [Ukrainian presidential aide Andrey] Yermak are begging Biden and [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken for money, a [news] story about how they had once created problems for Biden’s election campaign is a big problem for them,” Derkach explained.

So, instead of exposing the corruption in the previous Ukrainian administration, the Bidens (along with Zelensky and his team) turned against anti-corruption fighters. Derkach, who has been forced to hide in Belarus, was stripped of his citizenship by the Ukrainian authorities and sanctioned by the US. But that’s not all. In addition to criminal investigations and sanctions, Derkach says he has faced assassination attempts ordered by top officials in Kiev and Washington. 

”On January 19, 2022, US Secretary of State Mr Blinken arrived in Ukraine to meet with Zelensky. Quite a lot of people attended this meeting – at least 14 people. At the meeting, Mr Blinken told Zelensky the following: ‘You urgently need to resolve the issue with Derkach’. Zelensky began talking about some people from the opposition. But Blinken said, ‘If you don’t resolve this issue with Derkach, then we will resolve the Derkach issue with our partners.’ Those who were at the meeting were taken aback, because the position of the US secretary of state was quite harsh. Just think of it, the task for the president of Ukraine is to resolve the issue with Derkach,” the former deputy said.

It is noteworthy that in 2021, the Ukrainian police discovered plans to assassinate Derkach and the head of the group of prosecutors in the Burisma energy company case, Konstantin Kulik, but did not initiate a criminal case. The investigation tracked down the criminal gang from Eastern Europe hired to carry out the hit, as well as their base in Transcarpathia. The assassin himself was supposed to be an Albanian, but the information was leaked, and the gang escaped.

There was also an attempt to assassinate former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. According to former US Associate Attorney General and ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Shokin (whose dismissal Joe Biden has openly bragged about) was poisoned with mercury while on a trip to Greece. Nikolay Korpan – a doctor at the Austrian Rudolfinerhaus private clinic who treated presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 – reportedly confirmed this to Giuliani. According to Korpan’s findings, while the permissible amount of mercury in the blood is no more than two units, Shokin was found to have 9.2 units and was starting to experience liver failure. It was clearly a murder attempt.

The number of witnesses in the Burisma case – a company though which Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden earned profits via alleged corruption schemes – is also steadily decreasing. Shortly before she was due to testify as a witness in the case, the wife of Nikolai Lisin – a former partner of Nikolai Zlochevsky – was found dead in her apartment. She had been responsible for accounting at Burisma and had been aware of transactions carried out in the interests of the Bidens. Lisin himself died in a car accident back in 2011.

In light of this, it seems Derkach is right to say that anyone who talks about Biden’s corruption in Ukraine is in danger of being physically removed.  The same can be said about his opinion that there is “a single organized crime group: Biden, Blinken, [Victoria] Nuland, the ‘deep state’ represented by the Department of State. And then there is their ‘extension’ – either in the form of Poroshenko, or of Zelensky and Yermak.”  As Derkach says, Zelensky and Yermak “attacked” the “organized crime group” headed by former President Poroshenko and took their place. “They have brought their own particular innovations into these matters. They have become even more cynical and cruel.”

Hunting for Ukrainian gas

What are the Bidens and their partners in the Democratic Party trying to hide by waging war against whistleblowers in Ukraine?

The fact that Hunter Biden abused his father’s official position, receiving a profit of several million dollars through corrupt schemes and violating US legislation on foreign agents, isn’t the only problem. There’s much more to it than that. 

In order to understand the scale of the potential profits for the Biden family, we need to go back to 2012. The Yuzovsk shale gas field is located on the territory of the Donetsk and Kharkov regions. The total area of the deposit is about 7886 sq km. According to the State Geologic and Subsoil Survey of Ukraine (UGS), the proven resources of the field are up to 10 trillion cubic meters, and it can deliver around 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year. In May 2012, the British-Dutch company Shell won the tender (organized by the UGS) for the right to conclude an agreement on its development. On January 24, 2013, Ukraine signed a production sharing agreement with Shell. Incidentally, US company ExxonMobil had participated in the tender along with Shell, but the Europeans won. 

At the end of November 2013, when then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign an Association Agreement with the EU, mass protests broke out in Kiev, which became known as the ‘Euromaidan’. One of the officials who greatly supported the protesters and encouraged the establishment of pro-Western power in Ukraine was Biden’s colleague, Nuland, who was dubbed the ‘Maidan midwife’. The State Department official was so active in Ukraine that she became embroiled in numerous scandals. She was known for handing out cookies in the center of Kiev, cursing the EU, and boasting that the US had invested $5 billion into “building democracy” in Ukraine.

On February 22, 2014, the Ukrainian parliament removed Yanukovych from power, in a move of dubious legality. Aleksandr Turchinov became interim president, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, backed by Nuland, became prime minister. In April 2014, the Ukrainian army started an “anti-terrorist operation” in Donbass, and Shell was forced to stop the development of shale gas deposits. 

Meanwhile, on May 12, 2014, Burisma announced that Hunter Biden had joined its board of directors. The energy company was headed by Ukrainian oligarch Nikolay Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s minister of natural resources under Yanukovych. While he held that post, Zlochevsky’s firm received nine licenses for the development of various energy deposits, thereby increasing its annual production volume sevenfold. The oligarch’s activities drew the attention of Interpol, since Zlochevsky had ties with Maltese businessman Pierre Pillow. He was involved in laundering huge sums of money in Maltese banks and helped Zlochevsky open accounts for Hunter Biden in Satabank, known for its dubious operations.

In 2018, Burisma took up the development of shale deposits located in the exact same area where the military conflict between Kiev and Donbass was raging. At least $10 billion – i.e. the sum of the contract with Shell – was at stake.  

But the story didn’t end there. Sergey Zavorotny, adviser to former Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolay Azarov, described the Bidens’ alleged schemes involving reverse gas flows. Derkach’s records state that while he was US vice president, Joe Biden pressured Poroshenko to leave Andrey Kobolev as CEO of Ukraine’s Naftogaz. In turn, Kobolev appointed Amos Hochstein – who may be called Biden’s “wallet” – as an independent director of the Naftogaz supervisory board. It is at this time that the reverse gas flow scheme was organized.

The scheme implied that “Russian gas crossed the Ukraine-Slovakia border through a built-in 1.5 kilometer-long pipe and immediately returned to Ukraine, but with an added cost of $50 per one thousand cubic meters. Biden, Kobolev, and Amos Hochstein collected one and a half billion dollars using this scheme," Zavorotny also claims.

Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko drew attention to the fact that the perpetrators of the corruption scheme were never punished, and said that “the investigation was not carried out under the new president. The president changed, but all the policies that were carried out externally in regard to Ukraine, as well as inside the country, have remained the same.”

Shale and underwater explosions

While intense fighting was underway in Ukraine, Burisma launched the first shale gas production line in Donbass. Hunter Biden arranged that process, while Hochstein “organized” the reverse gas flows. At that time, Hochstein became the US Special Envoy for Nord Stream 2.

Everybody knows what happened to Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines, built to supply energy to Germany. We won’t accuse anyone in particular, but will only let the interested parties speak for themselves. 

In a recent interview, Derkach recalled the criminal case against Burisma lawyer Andrey Kichi, who tried to give a $6 million bribe to law enforcement officials in order to close the Burisma case. On April 21, 2022, with the consent of a Burisma representative, a Ukrainian court transferred the $6 million in cash to the military unit of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine. According to Derkach, “after a certain period of time, Nord Stream exploded, there were assassination attempts. The heads of the Ukrainian special services do not hide the fact that they commit terrorist acts and political assassinations using off-budget cash. Once again, Biden’s business partners who are involved in the corrupt business in Ukraine also finance terrorist acts, thus avoiding responsibility for corruption in Ukraine.”

These claims are yet to be proven, but the hostility towards the Nord Stream project by representatives of the US administration is indisputable. In his investigation of the explosions, renowned US journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh wrote that the Democrats directly threatened to destroy the gas pipelines. As President Biden stated during a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in February 2022, “If Russia invades [Ukraine], there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” Twenty days before that, Under Secretary of State Nuland had said: “I want to be very clear: if Russia invades Ukraine one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

It’s not known whether this implied attacking the gas pipelines, but after the sabotage, Secretary of State Blinken said: “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from [Russian President] Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile, we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure that the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”

As a result, the European gas market has undergone a huge transformation in the past couple of years. By the end of 2023, LNG accounted for 42% of the EU’s (including Türkiye’s) gas imports. This comes down to about 165 billion cubic meters of natural gas, when converted through regasification. Half of it – i.e. 77 billion cubic meters – was supplied by the US. According to a report by shipbroker Branchero Costa, the US is now the largest exporter of LNG, accounting for 21.7% of global shipments. In total, the US exported 88.9 million tons of LNG last year, which is 12.0% more than in 2022. To compare, the US exported 72.5 million tons of LNG in 2021, and just 48.2 million tons in 2020. What more can we say?

Nuland is convinced that turning Russian gas pipelines into “a pile of metal at the bottom of the sea” should make everyone happy. Her optimism, however, is not shared by environmentalists. Britain’s The Times cites Hans Sanderson – a senior researcher at the Department of Environmental Science in Aarhus University, Denmark – who said that the explosions stirred up a quarter of a million tons of heavily contaminated sediment, which created two giant ‘clouds’ of pollution, each about 15 miles in diameter, containing 14 tons of lead and a smaller but deadly amount of TBT, an extremely poisonous pesticide once used to clean the hulls of ships. Moreover, there are 7,000 tons of mustard gas weapons at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. According to Marie Helene Miller Birk – a marine biologist and co-founder of the environmental education charity Ivandet – toxins could have entered the Baltic food chain from the bottom of the sea. 

And it’s not just nature that paid a heavy price for “independence from Russian gas.” In November, Germany’s Finance Ministry froze additional government spending until the end of the year. This affected almost all budget allocations, including the financing of measures to prevent the growth of energy prices, and the economic stabilization fund. As German Economy Minister and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said in the Bundestag, “We provide military and economic support to Ukraine, as well as to European countries that continue to support Ukraine. Therefore, we spend money – the money is no longer here, and we have to admit that it does not enter our economy.”  Habeck admitted that the German economy had lost its competitive advantage due to the rejection of Russian gas, and energy prices in the country have increased. 

By Olga Sukharevskaya, ex-Ukrainian diplomat

 

https://www.rt.com/russia/591201-us-president-corruption-ukraine/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....................