“There are no right-wing facts or left-wing facts. There are facts.”
That is author Peter Schweizer’s retort to the statement of former FBI agent Tim Thibault, who told a congressional committee that his main contribution to the FBI’s probe of Hunter Biden was to “shut down the use of a confidential source whom he discovered was actually a right-wing author whose information he feared would taint the legitimacy of the investigation.”
Thibault, who resigned from his post after facing intense scrutiny over allegations he helped shield Hunter Biden from criminal investigations, didn’t name Schweizer in his testimony but did to the New York Times back in May.
The background, as Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers discuss on the most recent episode of The Drill Down, is that Peter’s organization, a nonprofit group called the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), was called by the public corruption unit of the FBI for information that GAI had gathered on Hunter Biden’s business dealings that Schweizer published in his books Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption.
“There’s nothing crazy or untoward here,” Schweizer says. GAI provided the public records and corporate filings that researchers used to piece together the story of Hunter Biden’s involvement with Ukrainian energy company Burisma and a Chinese government-connected energy firm called CEFC, both of which paid Hunter millions of dollars while his father was Vice President.
Thibault’s admission raises still more concerns. Everything GAI gave the FBI, Schweizer stresses, was public information. “We don’t use anonymous sources in our work,” Schweizer adds, so “I’m not buying that he was concerned about the integrity of the FBI investigation. Nobody has ever challenged any of the facts that we discovered and wrote about.”
The congressional committees looking into these allegations have found still more troubling facts. Last year, the U.K. Daily Mail reported a financial discrepancy between the income Joe Biden reported to the IRS in 2017 and 2018 and what he declared on the financial disclosure he had to fill out when he entered the 2020 presidential race. The tax returns showed $12.6 million in income for Joe Biden’s LLC for 2017 and 2018, but the financial disclosure form showed only $7.4 million.
Biden’s business entity is called “Celtic Capri, LLC,” a name that comes from the Secret Service code names used for him and his wife Jill Biden during the Obama administration.
“That’s Doctor Capri to you,” Eggers quips.
The question is what happened to the $5.2 million difference? Why did that number fall 40% on the financial disclosure versus what the Bidens reported to the IRS?
Schweizer’s theory is that “by 2019 he (Joe Biden) is getting a lot of scrutiny for his son’s foreign deals, and he just wanted some of that income to disappear,” he said.
Eggers points out that a confidential human source for the FBI has alleged in a 1024 form that Biden received a $5 million payment from the founder of Burisma. Schweizer adds that evidence also contains an email from May of 2017 from CEFC about a $5 million payment from that company “for the Biden family.”
For more from Peter Schweizer, subscribe to The Drill Down podcast.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.