Fireworks Erupt as Democratic Senator Tries to Keep Ted Cruz from Asking Key Hunter Biden Questions
Democrats might have escaped the midterm bloodbath they so richly deserved, but the scandals surrounding President Joe Biden and his son are still making them nervous.
That much was obvious from a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where a question from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for a Biden ambassador nominee sparked an angry exchange between Cruz and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.
It gave a hint at what the country can look forward to when Republicans take over the House in January.
Wednesday’s clash erupted when Cruz used Biden’s own words in grilling George Kent, the president’s nominee for ambassador to Estonia.
Check it out here:
WATCH: Senator Jeanne Shaheen tried to stop @tedcruz from asking all the right questions about Hunter Biden’s corruption. pic.twitter.com/Jue2yvi2Do
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 30, 2022
Cruz’s questioning began a few minutes earlier than the video above, when he opened by stating clearly that “I want to talk about corruption.”
“I want to talk in particular about corruption in the current administration. And I have serious concerns about corruption of President Joe Biden that extends for considerable time, both his time as president and his time as vice president.”
Cruz then referred to first son Hunter Biden well-documented, multi-million-dollar grifting with Chinese business interests (grifting that’s all but ignored by the establishment media) before turning to Hunter Biden’s equally well-documented multi-million grifting in Ukraine (that’s equally ignored by the establishment media).
The Texas senator’s full questioning is here:
According to a New York Post report in May 2021, information recovered from Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop showed he was paid $83,333 a month, or $1 million a year, from May 2014 to serve on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma — despite not having any specialized knowledge in the field of energy or even the ability to speak Ukrainian.
The fact that his father was vice president of the United States at the time was obviously worth a lot. According to the Post report, the laptop showed Hunter Biden’s salary was cut in half in 2017, after Joe Biden was no longer the second most powerful man in the world.
But Cruz was focused on an event in 2016, when Joe Biden was still President Barack Obama’s No. 2 man, and Hunter Biden was an insanely well-paid board member of a company founded by Ukrainian oligarch and former government official Mykola Zlochevsky,
“The concern here is not Hunter Biden’s own problems, but rather it is official corruption from the then-vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, and now the president of the United States, Joe Biden,” Cruz said.
“Let me ask you, while his son was on the board of Burisma, making a million dollars a year, did Joe Biden do anything that benefited the corrupt oligarch who was paying his son?” Cruz asked Kent.
Kent, who served as the State Department’s chief of mission to Ukraine at the end of the Obama administration and had personally (but not publicly) expressed concerns about Hunter Biden’s activities, weaseled at first, but after Cruz repeated the question, he answered simply: “He did not.”
That’s when Cruz pounced, bringing up an instance — again, well documented yet studiously ignored — of Biden bragging during a 2018 meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations about using the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid in 2016 unless the Ukrainian government of the time fired a prosecutor investigating corruption that included Burisma.
FLASHBACK: Two years ago, Joe Biden bragged about holding up $1 BILLION in U.S. loans unless Ukraine fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma, the corrupt company paying Hunter $80k+ per month.
Why don’t Democrats want to investigate that??pic.twitter.com/bDhaKjFNZN
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) January 24, 2020
“Let me ask you something,” Cruz said to Kent. “Do you think Joe Biden holding a billion dollars hostage to force the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor that is investigating the corrupt oligarch who’s paying his son a million dollars a year, did getting that prosecutor fired benefit that oligarch?”
And that’s when Shaheen went into cover-up mode. The New Hampshire Democrat used her position chairing Tuesday’s meeting to interrupt Cruz’s question and prevent Kent from answering immediately.
The Cruz-Shaheen exchange was illuminating. Rather than dealing with the essence of Cruz’s question — a credible allegation of corruption involving the current president of the United States — she pretended it was making Kent “uncomfortable.”
“Why are you afraid of him answering the question?” Cruz asked.
“I’m not,” Shaheen said, her voice rising. “I just want to move on because …”
She trailed off there as Cruz kept talking, but the point was made — even though Kent did answer with some boilerplate denial of the premise of Cruz’s question and a claim that Biden acted “in good faith to reduce corruption and help the Ukrainian people.” Because of course they did.
But the real takeaway here is that Democrats want nothing better than to “move on” from questions about the Biden crime family and the corruption of the first son in countries that span the globe. They want nothing better than for their allies in the establishment media and Big Tech to ensure that Americans hear nothing incriminating about the doddering dishonesty of the man who now occupies the White House.
They’ll be able to keep up the cover-up in the Senate, where Biden’s party remains the majority.
But when Republicans take control of the House in January, there won’t be committee chairs like Shaheen to shut down questions that make Democrats nervous.
There are going to be bulldogs like Kentucky’s James Cormer and Ohio’s Jim Jordan on the House Oversight Committee demanding answers to the kinds of questions Shaheen was trying to squelch.
In a House finally rid of the control of Nancy Pelosi and her politburo, lawmakers with the drive to dive into the evident corruption of the Biden White House and the deep state control over the FBI are going to have the power to shine a light into the darkness that has overcome the United States government since January 2021.
Whether they’ll use it remains to be seen. But the clash on Tuesday between Shaheen and Cruz is an example of how Democrats are willing to use their powers in Congress to shield the president from questions about the scandals surrounding him and his son.
Come January, they won’t be able to do that in the House. And that has to make them very, very nervous.
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