Could be…
Tony Bobulinski, the high-flying investor who is the House GOP’s star witness in the Oversight Committee’s ever-expanding probe into Hunter Biden, has become the one Biden business associate that Republicans would like voters to believe.
“Of all of the guys that were involved in the Hunter Biden orbit, Tony Bobulinski appears to me to be the one solid guy that tried to do the right thing and was honest,” Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) told Lou Dobbs earlier this month.
But as Republicans examine Hunter Biden’s questionable business ties, it turns out Bobulinski is connected to one particular character perhaps more unsavory than any other figure in the inquiry’s constellation: Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg.
Vekselberg is a Ukrainian-born energy magnate who’s been a close ally of Vladimir Putin’s for decades. And in 2017, Vekselberg reportedly funneled $500,000 to an LLC run by Donald Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, supposedly with the intention of influencing the new administration to let Russia illegally occupy parts of Eastern Ukraine.
U.S. law enforcement has placed sanctions on Vekselberg multiple times, citing Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine, and the oligarch’s ties to Putin. (Vekselberg tried to evade those sanctions with the help of an American attorney.)
But Republicans are trying to look past Bobulinski’s ties to Vekselberg, as they paint Hunter Biden—dishonestly and without actual evidence—as a corrupt figure facilitating payments to his father. And they want voters to take Bobulinski’s word about Biden’s shady business dealings.
Given Bobulinski’s personal history and connections to people like Vekselberg, however, Democrats think that would be outright foolish. In fact, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said on Monday that Bobulinski’s biography raises “giant red flags.” Other impeachment witnesses have also directly disputed Bobulinski’s unproven claims about the Bidens, including a former business partner who characterized Bobulinski’s allegations to FBI agents as “wishful thinking” and “unicorns and rainbows.”
“Fuck Tony for, for trying to—I mean for taking little pieces of emails or, you know, and not showing the structure of an LLC or taking pieces of conversation that he recorded,” this witness told FBI agents. “I don’t know what’s in it for Tony but, but that email looks bad.”
All the same, Bobulinski will appear Tuesday for a private interview before the House panels exploring potential impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden. And during that interview, Bobulinski is expected to reiterate claims that he believes some of the cash from an ill-fated Chinese energy venture with the president’s son made its way to the current Oval Office occupant’s bank accounts back in 2017. (No parties have produced evidence confirming any pay-to-play relationship involving Joe Biden, and reporting has thrown cold water on the notion.)
What Bobulinski seems less inclined to discuss—given his failure to respond to repeated inquiries for this story—are his past connections to Vekselberg, a prominent Russian oligarch who sought repeatedly to influence Trump’s administration, including with payments to promote a proposal that would allow the Kremlin to retain control of the illegally occupied Crimean peninsula.
That proposal, which Trump attorney and fixer Cohen ferried to the White House in January 2017, also happened to contain the seeds of another plan, one that would later bloom into Trump’s first impeachment: ginning up suspicions about Hunter Biden’s ties to the troubled Ukrainian state-owned energy outfit, Burisma.
The pro-Putin plan claimed, falsely, that the U.S. was shielding Ukrainian government figures involved in a massive offshore money laundering scheme, thanks to “political cover by Joe Biden.”
“His son Hunter is active in the gas business in Ukraine which will suffer if relations between Russia and Ukraine are restored,” the plan said, adding that “the disclosure simultaneously of these thefts of U.S. aid will render the current Ukrainian administration unable to contest” the so-called peace deal.
Remember, Cassidy Hutchinson testifed that Mark Meadows clandestinely met with Bobulinski in October of 2020, shielded by Secret Service agents.
Oh, and by the way, there’s evidence that Bobulinski lied to the FBI too.
I think we know who this man is, don’t you?