Zero Hedge — Forget 'Creepy' - Biden Has A Major Ukraine Problem

Corruption Watch.

Regular readers may recall that MNE has been on this for along time.

Zero Hedge
Forget 'Creepy' - Biden Has A Major Ukraine Problem
Tyler Durden

RT — ‘Son of b***h got fired’: Joe Biden forced Ukraine to sack prosecutor general ‘in six hours’

Joe Biden opens his big mouth again and shows that the US -installed post-coup Ukrainian rump government is a US puppet.

US "leadership."

RT
‘Son of b***h got fired’: Joe Biden forced Ukraine to sack prosecutor general ‘in six hours’

Greta Mautner — How Come the Biden Family is Above US Laws?

Corruption watch.

NEO
How Come the Biden Family is Above US Laws?

Greta Mautner

Fort Russ — US Cyber Attack Imminent: Biden threatens Putin with 'retaliation'

Joe Biden shoots off his big mouth again. The US is acting like a spoiled brat on the world stage, and it has been since it instigated conflict in Vietnam to keep Emperor Bảo Đại in power, but especially since 9/11, in attacking secular states in Central Asia and MENA to effect regime change. HRC portends to be even worse based on her record. That's what happens when policy is run by politicians instead of statesmen. It's a subset of Moronism, along with the mainstream approach to political economy and economic policy.

BTW, this is an unsubtle hint that the US now feels entirely justified in using subversion in the upcoming presidential election in Russia in order to effect regime change there as one of the major American policy goals. We'll see how that goes.

Fort Russ
US Cyber Attack Imminent: Biden threatens Putin with 'retaliation'
RT - translated by J. Arnoldski

See also

Popov: Anti-Russian Sanctions will ruin Europe first


RT
Kremlin: Russia faces unprecedented cyber-threats from the US

Ollie Richardson — US Vice-President Biden’s Son Continues to Buy Gas Assets in Ukraine

Entrepreneur Hunter Biden has acquired equity securities of a company in the country which his father, Vice-President of USA Joe Biden, called the most corrupt in the world.

Joe, tell us it isn't so.

This is what snared Harvard economics professor Andrei Shleifer in a corruption case that cost Harvard millions to settle.

Neither Harvard nor Shleifer have admitted guilt in the matter. But a federal court ruled in 2004 that Harvard had breached its contract with the U.S., and that Shleifer and an associate were liable for conspiracy to defraud the government.

Last August, Harvard paid $26.5 million to settle the lawsuit, in addition to $2 million that Shleifer paid himself.

Global Research
US Vice-President Biden’s Son Continues to Buy Gas Assets in Ukraine
Ollie Richardson

James Risen — Biden Lectures Ukraine on Corruption While His Son Is Reaping Rewards From It

When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev , Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country’s leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs.

But the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.

Hunter Biden, 45, a former Washington lobbyist, joined the Burisma board in April 2014. That month, as part of an investigation into money laundering, British officials froze London bank accounts containing $23 million that allegedly belonged to Mr. Zlochevsky.
Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, an independent government agency, specifically forbade Mr. Zlochevksy, as well as Burisma Holdings, the company’s chief legal officer and another company owned by Mr. Zlochevsky, to have any access to the accounts.

But after Ukrainian prosecutors refused to provide documents needed in the investigation, a British court in January ordered the Serious Fraud Office to unfreeze the assets. The refusal by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to cooperate was the target of a stinging attack by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who called out Burisma’s owner by name in a speech in September.… 

New York Times (reprinted in Russian Insider)
Biden Lectures Ukraine on Corruption While His Son Is Reaping Rewards From It

James Risen

Semen Doroshenko — Confirmed: Joe Biden extensively "counsels" Poroshenko; his visits mean Donbass escalation

Obama's emissary to his Ukrainian vassal.

Fort Russ
Confirmed: Joe Biden extensively "counsels" Poroshenko; his visits mean Donbass escalation

Semen Doroshenko, PolitNavigator -
Translated for Fort Russ by J. Arnoldski

“A Turning Point for Obama”: How the President Learned to Love the National Security State — Elias Esquith interviews Charlie Savage

Snippets.

Bush and Cheney were CEOs by background. They did not put a lot of lawyers in policymaking roles around them. The lawyers they did pick, especially in their first term, tended to have these pretty idiosyncratic views of executive power; and, as a result, they’re able to put in these wide-ranging changes, to have the the government run like a business. Overnight, it’s like, “we’re going to have military commissions”; no further ado; no second-guessing.

Obama and his administration are quite the opposite. Obama and Joe Biden, of course, are both lawyers and showed a clear tendency to put lawyers into policymaking roles around them. And this has consequences, having government-by-lawyer and not government-by-CEO. Lawyers are very incremental; lawyers have to really engage with the other side, because they have to prepare for everybody’s argument; they have to value process. That means they are going to be cautious about changing the status quo. They’re going to be cautious about dislodging what Bush has equipped to them.…

I definitely think it’s an interesting factor that people who are out in the world don’t fully understand.

I think there’s a very [mistaken] understanding of how the government works — which is that the president just does these things. Obama just does it. Once you work [in D.C.] for a while, you understand that that’s widely oversimplified. Most of the time, the president never knows about what’s going on. It could appear [so] at the most superficial level, but it’s really the 150 or so senior and mid-level executive branch officials that he’s appointed who are making these decisions and grappling with these dilemmas.

What you’re adding to that when you bring up [the deep state] is that, underneath, there’s this permanent state of security officials who have their own sort of world and expertise and turf and bureaucratic interests. All these forces encounter each other in ways that don’t reduce to “Bush did this” and “Obama did that.”

Salon
“A Turning Point for Obama”: How the President Learned to Love the National Security State Elias Esquith interviews Charlie Savage, author of Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency

Problems rising for Hillary Clinton and now challengers are emerging. This could get interesting or awful.

Problems are rising for Hillary Clinton. From the furor over her State Department emails, which were sent over her private email accounts, sharing/distributing emails; to her personal wealth, the Clinton "elitism" factor and people's general perception of trustworthiness, alignment, she's got problems.

Join me on May 30th at 10am on Federal Hill in Baltimore, MD for a special announcement. http://t.co/fX2b4u0hok pic.twitter.com/kUYSB8Bh3D

— Martin O'Malley (@GovernorOMalley) May 19, 2015

Now there are challengers emerging, too. Okay, Bernie Sanders may not be able to go all the way, but he is forcing her to change her rhetoric and focus on much broader progressive issues, which just does not jibe with her record nor that of her husband's.

There's also talk of Baltimore Mayor, Martin O'Malley entering the race and even whispers of Joe Biden stepping in. The more vulnerable she starts to appear that could cause the dam to burst open with a number of challengers. This could get interesting or, awful.