On the latest episode of “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” the senator’s new podcast, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) carefully broke down the timeline of the Hunter Biden/Burisma scandal with co-host Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire, and spoke of the opposition to questions regarding said scandal.
The following bullet points are all quotes from Cruz:
- It starts early 2014. Joe Biden is the point person for President Obama on Ukraine.
- April 13, 2014, Devon Archer – Hunter Biden’s business partner – joins the board of Burisma.
- April 28, Britain’s Serious Fraud [Office] freezes $23 million for money-laundering from the oligarch who founded Burisma.
- May 12 – just a couple of weeks later – Hunter Biden is named to the board of Burisma.
- December 8th [2015], The New York Times article says that the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, is investigating Burisma holdings and the oligarch in charge. [Knowles clarified that Shokin was the prosecutor that then-Vice President Joe Biden would end up “getting fired.”]
- February 2, 2016, the oligarch’s home is raided and his assets are seized.
- Joe Biden calls the president of Ukraine on February 11, February 18, and February 19. So, three calls a little over a week after the oligarch’s home is raided and his assets are seized.
- February 21, Burisma’s lobbyist contacts the State Department and says, “Hey, we want a meeting with the Deputy Secretary of State, and by the way, did I mention Hunter Biden’s on our board?” This is in writing.
- March 2, a week later, Devon Archer [the other board member] sits down and meets with John Kerry, the Secretary of State.
- On March 15, the Assistant Secretary of State calls for the prosecutor to be fired.
- On March 22, during a call with President Poroshenko, Vice President Biden calls for the prosecutor to be fired.
- On March 31, [Joe] Biden arrives in Ukraine – he’s there personally – and he releases $1 billion in loan guarantees because the week earlier they had fired the prosecutor as he demanded.
Cruz later tweeted out a graphic of the timeline.
Knowles then summed up part of Cruz’s timeline, saying:
So, you’ve got … two guys on the board making millions of dollars. They then meet with the Obama administration and then all of a sudden, you get people in the administration calling for the prosecutor who’s investigating Burisma to be fired.
“Who is Hunter Biden? So, he has zero expertise in oil and gas. He’s not a geologist; he’s not a geophysicist,” Cruz stated. “He has no background that anyone knows of in Ukraine.”
According to Cruz, Burisma paid Hunter Biden “anywhere from – some of the reporting has said $50,000 a month … the baseline that we think they started him at was $600,000 a year … it went up to $83,333 a month, which is a million bucks a year.”
Cruz and Knowles then played a clip from a recent interview with Hunter Biden in which he says that if his name wasn’t “Biden,” it’s unlikely he would have been asked to work with Burisma.
Knowles and Cruz went on to criticize the way in which the House Democrats and the media are portraying the Biden corruption scandal as “debunked.”
“You had two and a half years of the Mueller investigation into Russia based on very, very flimsy evidence that fell apart day by day,” Knowles said. “Then you had the impeachment inquiry into Ukraine corruption by the Trump administration because President Trump suggested that Ukraine investigate the corruption of the last administration that we’ve just been talking about for fifteen minutes.”
“Yet the government has dedicated virtually no resources to investigating the actual corruption that is at the heart of this whole sham,” he concluded.
Cruz replied that “it’s worse than that” because “House Democrats blocked investigating it,” specifically during the House impeachment inquiry when they reportedly wouldn’t allow Republican witnesses.
Cruz added:
In the opening statement yesterday, Jerry Nadler – [he’s] one of the House managers, who leads the House managers – he said, “There are hundreds of thousands of companies in Ukraine. Why was Trump focused on this one?” Well, because it was the only company that we know of that had the son of the U.S. vice president make it a million dollars and impacting, potentially, U.S. policy. Look, Trump wasn’t interested in the abstract in every form of corruption in Ukraine – it wasn’t like he was worried about someone sticking up a 7-Eleven – this is corruption in the United States; this is potential corruption of the Vice President of the United States, and it is always legitimate, and in fact it’s the responsibility of the president, to ensure you investigate serious corruption like this.
In conclusion, Knowles stated that the Democrats appear to be “accusing the president of doing what they themselves did.”
Cruz agreed, saying that the while the Democrats are accusing Trump of withholding aid from Ukraine, former Vice President Biden actually “threatened to withhold” aid from Ukraine.
There’s much more to this episode, which you can watch in it’s entirety below: