Nevertheless, a New York Times article by Roni Caryn Rabin blames this “historic setback” mainly on a lack of COVID-19 vaccination and not enough “behavioral measures to prevent infections, such as wearing masks,” especially among “white populations.” Her supposed evidence of this is the following claims from Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University:

“While other high-income countries were also hard hit in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, most had begun to recover by last year, he said. …

“Those countries had more successful vaccination campaigns and populations that were more willing to take behavioral measures to prevent infections, such as wearing masks, he said, adding: ‘The U.S. is clearly an outlier. …

“‘The white population did worse in 2021 than communities of color, besides Native American and Alaska Natives,’ Dr. Woolf said. ‘I think that’s very telling: It reflects the greater efforts by Black and Hispanics to get vaccinated, to wear masks and take other measures to protect themselves, and the greater tendency in white populations to push back on those behaviors.’”

Other than the United States being an outlier when it comes to falling life expectancy in 2021, the rest of those claims are demonstrably false.

First, a greater portion of the U.S. population was fully vaccinated against COVID-19 than the European population throughout all of 2021. Even when limited to members of the European Union, the United States had a significantly higher rate of vaccination for the bulk of the year:

Second, whites had equivalent or higher COVID-19 vaccination rates than blacks and Hispanics throughout 2021:

• A CDC survey conducted at the end of April 2021 when “all U.S. adults were eligible to receive” the vaccines found that the vaccination rate was 59 percent for whites, 46 percent for blacks, and 47 percent for Hispanics.
• A survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in September 2021 found that the vaccination rate was 71 percent for whites, 70 percent for blacks, and 73 percent for Hispanics.
• A CDC survey conducted at the end of November 2021 found that the vaccination rate was 79 percent for whites, 78 percent for blacks, and 81 percent for Hispanics.

Third, masking was less common in certain segments of Europe during 2021 than the United States. For example:

• the European CDC recommended that children under the age of 12 not wear masks in schools, while the U.S. CDC recommended masking children down to two years of age, even while outdoors at summer camps.
• Sweden didn’t have a mask mandate and didn’t encourage masking except on public transport, leading Swedes to rarely wear
• The Netherlands didn’t mandate masks except for transportation and when required by building managers.

Moreover, a study conducted with data from 35 European countries during the winter of 2020–21 found a “moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe,” suggesting that “the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.”

Finally and most importantly, the strident assertions of the Times and Woolf are based on the childish notion that correlation proves causation, a fallacy that high schoolers are taught to avoid. That’s because a correlation can be a mere coincidence or caused by numerous other factors. Worse still, their correlations are erroneous.

Just Facts asked Woolf if the Times accurately reported his words, and he replied:

“When reporters ask me to explain why the US losses were so large, my custom is to say that more research is needed to definitively answer the question and to mention a range of potential contributing factors. Among them is how people responded to vaccination and pandemic control measures, but I usually mention a number of other factors and in all cases (try to) use conditional language such as ‘may have.’”

Just Facts then asked Woolf if he planned to ask the Times for a correction, and he didn’t reply.

In June 2021, NPR reported on a study from Woolf and company about the life expectancy decline in 2020 and asked him, “So, what’s the prognosis going forward in the United States?” Woolf replied, “I think life expectancy will rebound.”

Given his focus on vaccines and masks, Woolf’s failed prediction was likely based in part or whole on his observations of vaccine uptake and mask usage in 2021. Now that these measures failed to work or overcome other factors which may have driven down life expectancy, Woolf and the Times are calling for more of the same.

Randomized controlled trials are the only sure way to determine the effects of medical interventions. These are gold standard studies in which people are randomly assigned to receive or not receive a certain treatment.

Several such studies have been conducted on COVID mRNA vaccines and on cloth/surgical masks—and none of them found that these measures save more lives than they take. Concerningly, the authors of one of these studies won’t reveal data that speaks directly to this matter.

From Just Facts Daily

In a major reversal, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D–WV) struck a deal with Senator Chuck Schumer (D–NY) to enact a major climate, entitlement, and tax bill. This legislation has been praised by President Biden, Al Gore, and other proponents of highly progressive policies.

Dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” Senate Democrats voted to pass this bill only 11 days after releasing its 725 pages of text. House Democrats followed suit five days later. Democrats pushed this bill so rapidly through Congress that the Congressional Budget Office estimates it won’t be able to “provide a complete cost estimate for the legislation” until more than a week after Congress passed it.

Manchin’s press release claims the law will:

• “address record inflation by paying down our national debt, lowering energy costs and lowering healthcare costs.”
• “displace dirtier products” and ensure “American energy is affordable, reliable, clean and secure.”
• bring “good paying energy and manufacturing jobs back to America.”
• “make America more energy secure” and “financially sound.”
• not raise taxes on “families and small businesses making less than $400,000 a year.”
• “lower the cost of healthcare for working families and small businesses.”
• support “the everyday hardworking Americans we have been elected to serve.”
• adopt “a tax policy that protects small businesses and working-class Americans….

In reality, the legislation will do almost none of what Manchin claims it will—and often the exact opposite. If President Biden signs the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and it is not repealed by a future Congress and President, the law will:

• have no material impact on inflation.
• increase pollution by subsiding electric vehicles, which emit more toxic pollutants over their lifespans than normal cars.
• enrich “green” energy investors while doing little-to-nothing to help workers.
• raise energy costs and make America poorer by subsidizing products that are much more expensive.
• harm the manufacturing sector.
• enact hidden taxes that fall on Americans of all income groups.
• reduce incentives to work by giving people more welfare.
• increase the costs of prescription drugs for working Americans by pushing more of the research and development costs onto them.
• target wealthy people with IRS audits while letting the vast bulk of tax dodgers continue cheating the honest taxpayers of America

Inflation

Contrary to its name, there is no credible evidence the Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model—which is often touted by Democrats like Schumer—estimates that the bill’s effects on inflation are “statistically indistinguishable from zero, thereby indicating low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation.” Moreover, the model is biased in favor of the bill because it uses an admitted “assumption” that reducing carbon dioxide makes society “more productive.”

Likewise, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill could increase or decrease inflation by up to 0.1 percentage points in 2023, a result that is also statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Manchin, Schumer, and the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget claim that the bill’s tax increases will reduce inflation by decreasing the federal deficit. There is a grain of truth in this because the Federal Reserve has been aggressively printing money to finance the federal debt, a policy which fuels inflation.

However, any deflationary aspects of the bill must be measured against its inflationary elements. CBO notes that these include but are not limited to the “inflationary effects” of “health insurance subsidies” and “government purchases of goods and services.” In fact, CBO found that such dynamics can lead to a situation where the bill causes inflation “even when the overall deficit was reduced.”

More importantly, Manchin and Schumer’s statement that federal deficits spur inflation is a tacit admission that the deficit spending they previously voted for—which is far greater than the supposed deficit reduction in this bill—is fueling the high inflation that is punishing Americans. Since the start of the Biden administration less than two years ago, Manchin, Schumer, and nearly all Democrats voted for:

• the “American Rescue Plan,” which enacted $1.9 trillion in deficit spending mainly devoted to social welfare programs and bailouts for state and local governments and private union pension funds
• the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” which enacted $256 billion in deficit spending for roads, public transit, “clean school buses and ferries,” electric vehicle charging stations, etc

This was on top of the bipartisan “Covid relief” spending of 2020, which added $3.4 trillion to the national debt. Taken together, this is $5.5 trillion in deficit spending, or 18 times the supposed deficit reduction of the Inflation Reduction Act, which CBO estimates to be about $300 billion.

Put another way, the bill’s deficit reduction would undo about 5% of the inflationary damage that Manchin and company caused by deficit spending in the past 2.5 years.

That also assumes the enhanced Obamacare subsidies in the bill will end in just three years, a budget gimmick used to shroud the long-term costs of this policy. The bill raises taxes for 10 years but only funds this entitlement for three years. If Congress extends it, as lawmakers often do with entitlements, the bill will reduce the deficit by $87 billion, or less than one-third of CBO’s estimate.

Manchin’s press release decries “the severe threat of inflation and the consequences of unprecedented domestic spending,” but this bill increases spending on a host of programs detailed below. Far from a course change, Manchin is now voting for “taxing and spending” instead of mere “spending.”

Pollution

Contrary to Manchin’s claim that his bill will “displace dirtier products,” it heavily subsidizes electric vehicles, which emit more pollution over their lifespans than normal cars. Yet, Manchin’s bill codifies an alternate reality by rewriting federal law to define electric vehicles as “clean.”

The belief that electric vehicles are “clean” is based on a childish notion that ignores all pollution which doesn’t come out of a tailpipe. Assessing the environmental impacts of energy technologies requires measuring all forms of pollution they emit over their entire lifespan, not a narrow slice of it. To do this, researchers perform “life cycle assessments” or LCAs. Per the EPA, LCAs allow for:

the estimation of the cumulative environmental impacts resulting from all stages in the product life cycle, often including impacts not considered in more traditional analyses (e.g., raw material extraction, material transportation, ultimate product disposal, etc.). By including the impacts throughout the product life cycle, LCA provides a comprehensive view of the environmental aspects of the product or process and a more accurate picture of the true environmental trade-offs in product and process selection.

LCAs are subject to multiple levels of uncertainty, but an assessment published by the Journal of Cleaner Production in 2021 shatters the notion that electric cars are environmentally friendly. The LCA found that manufacturing, charging, operating, and disposing of electric vehicles increases “fine particulate matter formation (26%), human carcinogenic (20%) and non-carcinogenic toxicity (61%), terrestrial ecotoxicity (31%), freshwater ecotoxicity (39%), and marine ecotoxicity (41%) relative to petrol vehicles.”

Even before that LCA, the European Environment Agency admitted in 2018 that electric vehicles “could be responsible for greater negative impacts” on “human toxicity” than standard cars. On the other hand, the report notes that electric vehicles “potentially offer local air quality benefits” because the pollution from their manufacturing, charging, and disposal is usually emitted away from densely populated areas.

However, electric vehicles emit local pollution due to road, tire, and brake wear, and these forms of pollution are worse in electric vehicles than standard cars. Per a 2016 paper in the journal Atmospheric Environment, “Electric vehicles are 24% heavier than their conventional counterparts,” and this creates more “non-exhaust emissions” like “tire wear, brake wear, road surface wear and resuspension of road dust.”

LCAs have found that electric cars emit less carbon dioxide (CO2) than standard cars, but carbon dioxide is an organic, colorless, non-carcinogenic gas that has no toxic effects on humans until concentrations exceed at least 6 times the level in Earth’s atmosphere. Thus, CO2 has no bearing on which product is “dirtier,” to use Manchin’s word.

Beyond giving consumers $7,500 towards the purchase of each new domestically manufactured electric vehicle, the bill also provides $4,000 for used ones. This is on top of state handouts for electric vehicles, like $2,500 in MA and $4,000 in NJ. All of this money goes towards creating more pollution.

Jobs

Contrary to Manchin’s claim that the bill will bring “good paying energy and manufacturing jobs back to America,” it will enrich green energy investors while neglecting workers and harming the manufacturing sector.

As explained in scholarly publications like the encyclopedia Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, the financial benefits of “green energy” subsidies “largely accrue to the owners of capital” because:

• “energy development,” whether “green or fossil fuels,” is “capital-intensive,” which means it uses much more materials and equipment than human labor.
• growth in “the green jobs sector does not necessarily imply net job creation” since it reduces the jobs “that would have been produced from fossil fuels,” and thus, “net job creation may be zero (or negative).”
• consumers suffer because green energy mandates subsidize “inefficient technologies that are more costly,” and this reduces people’s standards of living.

The bill also increases taxes on certain large corporations, and half of these taxes would come from the manufacturing sector. Per CBO, this “would reduce the incentive for those large corporations to invest,” which means less productivity and lower standards of living.

Taxes

Contrary to Manchin’s claims that his bill does not raise taxes on “families and small businesses making less than $400,000 a year,” it does exactly that by enacting hidden taxes that fall on Americans of all income groups.

Hidden taxes are those that are not apparent because they generally don’t appear on purchase receipts, paychecks, or tax returns. Some examples include excise taxes, employer payroll taxes, and corporate income taxes. Although businesses write the checks for such taxes, they are ultimately borne by individuals via lower wages, higher prices, and lower profits.

In the words of the Congressional Budget Office, “the ultimate cost of a tax or fee is not necessarily borne by the entity that writes the check to the government.” Likewise, the Congressional Research Service explains that individuals “bear the burden of the taxes paid by businesses” because “corporations are not persons who can bear the burden of taxes, but merely legal entities through which individuals earn income.”

U.S. households paid an average of $7,000 in hidden federal taxes in 2018, and Manchin’s bill adds to this tab via taxes on corporations, crude oil, methane, offshore drilling, and more.

As such, Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the bill will slightly increase average taxes on every income group for the next 10 years. This includes families who make less than $10,000 per year to those who make more than $1,000,000.

Energy Costs

Contrary to Manchin’s claim that the bill will lower energy costs, it enacts a form of stealth spending (called tax preferences) to subsidize products that are far more costly than other options. Regardless of whether these additional costs are paid by consumers or taxpayers, they ultimately make America poorer and less competitive because they deliver less energy for every dollar spent.

Due to government interventions and the complexities of the electricity market, measuring the costs of energy technologies can be extremely difficult and uncertain. However, there are simple ways to estimate their relative competitiveness. One of them is to compare their market shares and how much government subsidizes and restricts them.

For example, solar provided 1.5% of all U.S. energy in 2021, while natural gas supplied 32%. This 20-times differential is in spite of 40+ years of aggressive government actions to bolster solar while constraining the use of fossil fuels through taxes and regulations. Some examples of how government has boosted solar include the following:

• Since 1978, the federal government has continuously provided tax credits for solar energy systems ranging from 10% to 30% of their production or capital costs.
• In 1998, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported, “For many years, state and federal governments, as well as environmentalists and utilities, have strongly supported the use of solar energy—especially in the U.S. Department of Energy’s research and development budget.”
• In 2011, the New York Times reported that “taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost” for “a compound of nearly a million solar panels,” and “similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009.”
• From 2007 to 2016, the federal government subsidized solar at 200 times the rate of natural gas.
• In 2016, EIA reported, “More than 70% of [energy-related] physical science grants went to solar energy research with virtually all of the remainder for other renewable energy (e.g., fuel cells).”
• Many states have required utilities to purchase electricity from customers with solar panels for much more than its actual value, thus transferring these costs to the electric bills of customers who don’t have solar panels.
• 30 states and the District of Columbia have required utilities to generate or obtain specified amounts of their electricity from renewables like solar, essentially forcing its use.

Collectively, these facts prove beyond all doubt that solar energy is not competitive.

Another simple way to estimate the relative cost of energy technologies is to look at the prices of energy in places with different energy mixes. California, for example, gets more of its electricity from solar than any other state and also has the highest electricity prices in the continental U.S., or 77% more than the national average. Moreover, this doesn’t account for all of the government spending on solar that is borne by taxpayers instead of consumers.

Another prime example is Germany, where wind and solar provide 33% of the country’s electricity, as compared to 12% in the United States. As a consequence of this and other factors, the average price of household electricity in Germany is about three times that of the United States.

Manchin claims his bill won’t move the U.S. “closer to the unstable and vulnerable European model of energy we are witnessing today,” but it takes the U.S. down that road by using taxpayers’ money to subsidize the same technologies that Europe has supported.

Worse still, Manchin’s bill hides those costs from consumers and voters by using tax preferences that don’t show up in electricity bills or appear as line items in federal budgets.

Welfare

Contrary to Manchin’s claim that the bill will “lower the cost of health insurance,” it will make taxpayers pick up the tab for enhanced Obamacare subsidies. Moreover, all of this welfare will go to people with incomes greater than 400% of the poverty line.

Per CBO, the bill “would reduce the incentives of some people to work, mainly because of the enhanced health insurance subsidies, pushing down output and pushing up inflation.” Likewise, the Penn Wharton Budget Model found that this handout “reduces the incentive to work.”

CBO estimates that some of this work-deterring, inflation-producing welfare will go to people with high incomes, like:

• 64-year olds with incomes up to $163,700 per year.
• young families with incomes up to $192,700 per year.
• older families with incomes up to $304,100 per year.

Prescription Drugs

Contrary to Manchin’s claim that his bill will “lower the cost” of prescription drugs, the bill will simply shift more of those costs onto working Americans.

The main reason why Americans pay more for prescription drugs than almost anywhere else in the world is because the governments of other nations use price controls and bargaining power to get rock bottom prices, while pharmaceutical companies are able to fund R&D and make profits by selling to Americans.

Manchin’s bill empowers Medicare, which pays medical costs for almost everyone aged 65 and older, to employ the tactics of foreign governments. This leaves U.S. workers to shoulder more of the tab for drug development and the profits that drive it. Medicare already does this with hospitals by paying them an average of 13% below their costs of caring for Medicare patients. Hospitals then make up the difference by charging the private sector exorbitant rates.

This is part of a trend in which politicians shift the costs of their welfare policies to the private sector. These are stealth taxes on Americans that increase the costs of their products and services.

IRS Audits

Contrary to Manchin’s claim that the extra IRS funding in his bill won’t be used to target people making less than $400,000 per year “because they are already paying their taxes,” the bill will let the vast bulk of tax dodgers continue to cheat the honest taxpayers of America. It also complicates tax code, which is a major cause of tax misreporting and a waste of people’s time and money.

In 2021, the IRS spent $13.7 billion and employed 78,661 full-time equivalent workers. Manchin’s bill would supercharge this agency by adding about $80 billion to it over the next 10 years. CBO estimates this would increase the 2031 IRS budget by more than 90% and would “more than double the IRS’s staffing.”

Biden’s Treasury Secretary and the IRS Commissioner have promised that they won’t use these added resources to audit people making less than $400,000 year, but that is where a massive amount of tax fraud occurs. This is especially true of people who work under the table, which is very common for illegal immigrants. A 2019 IRS study found that the tax non-compliance rate for people whose incomes were subject to:

• withholding is 1%.
• “substantial information reporting but not withholding” is 5%.
• “subject to little or no information reporting” is 55%.

Beyond outright fraud, one of the main reasons why people and corporations misreport their taxes is because the tax code is extremely complicated, a problem that Manchin’s bill makes worse. As explained by CBO:

The complexity of the tax system partly results from tax expenditures that are designed to affect behavior by taxing some endeavors more or less than others. … Complexity also arises from efforts to achieve certain equity goals. Provisions that phase out various tax credits and deductions at higher income levels are designed to target benefits toward people with the greatest need, but they make taxes more difficult to calculate.

Manchin’s bill does this in droves by implementing the provisions above and many more detailed by CBO. As explained by the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate, “tax law complexity leads to perverse results” because:

• “taxpayers who honestly seek to comply with the law often make inadvertent errors, causing them to either overpay their tax or become subject to IRS enforcement action for mistaken underpayments.”
• “sophisticated taxpayers often find loopholes that enable them to reduce or eliminate their tax liabilities.”

U.S. taxpayers (including businesses) spend roughly six billion hours per year complying with the requirements of federal tax law. This amounts to 48 hours per household, or the labor equivalent of more than three million full-time workers. Per the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate:

• these figures do not include “millions of additional hours that taxpayers must spend when they are required to respond to IRS notices or audits.”
• the cost of complying with federal income tax laws was $195 billion in 2015, or 10% of income tax receipts.

Manchin claims the tax code is “unfair” because “some of America’s largest companies pay nothing in taxes” and that his bill will fix this by forcing them to pay a “minimum tax of 15%.” However, progressive Ph.D. scholar Robert D. Atkinson explains that the reason why large companies pay “less than 15 percent in profit taxes is because Congress put in place tax provisions to encourage companies to invest in ways more aligned with the public interest.”

In brief, Manchin’s bill stokes the tax problems he bemoans and punishes successful Americans by siccing more IRS agents on them.

Summary

The very name of the “Inflation Reduction Act” and nearly everything Joe Manchin has said about it is a farce that betrays his promise to support “the everyday hardworking Americans we have been elected to serve.” Contrary to Manchin’s claims that his bill will:

• reduce inflation, there is no credible evidence it would do so.
• “displace dirtier products,” it heavily subsidizes electric vehicles, which emit more pollution over their lifespans than normal cars.
• will bring “good paying energy and manufacturing jobs back to America,” it will enrich green energy investors while neglecting workers and harming the manufacturing sector.
• lower energy costs, it enacts a form of stealth spending to subsidize energy products that are far more costly than other options.
• not raise taxes on “families and small businesses making less than $400,000 a year,” it does exactly that by enacting hidden taxes that fall on Americans of all income groups.
• “lower the cost of health insurance,” it will make taxpayers pick up the tab by forcing them to pay Obamacare subsidies for people with incomes above 400% of the poverty line.
• “lower the cost” of prescription drugs, it will simply shift more of those costs onto working Americans.
• ensure people “making less than $400,000 and small businesses will not be targeted” by the IRS “because they are already paying their taxes,” the bill will let the vast bulk of tax dodgers continue cheating the honest taxpayers of America.

About the Author

James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a research and educational institute dedicated to publishing rigorously documented facts about public policy issues.

Newly discovered emails prove beyond all doubt that the “true purpose” of Hunter Biden’s lucrative deal with a Ukrainian energy company was for Hunter to get “high-ranking US officials” to visit Ukraine and persuade the nation’s leaders to “close down” all criminal “cases/pursuits against” the firm’s primary owner, a notoriously corrupt oligarch with ties to Russia.

Documentation of this illegal scheme begins with a widely overlooked email on Hunter’s laptop in which a top executive of the Ukrainian firm describes the plan. Now, emails uncovered by Just Facts prove that Hunter and his partners:

• explicitly agreed to this deal.
• concealed the names of top U.S. officials to “be on the safe and cautious side.”
• affirmed that only Hunter could credibly promise to get those officials to shield the oligarch from criminal charges

Just one month later, then-Vice President Joe Biden did exactly what those emails specified by visiting Ukraine and threatening to withhold U.S. aid unless the prosecutor investigating Hunter’s cash cow was fired. Moreover, Biden did this by going after two “key targets” identified in the emails: the “President of Ukraine” and the “Prosecutor General.”

The Background

In April 2014, Vice President Biden traveled to Ukraine and gave a speech to its legislators in which he promised that the U.S. would help Ukraine increase its fossil fuel production to make it less dependent on Russian energy. In that very same month:

• the largest private natural gas producer in Ukraine, a company named Burisma, appointed Joe Biden’s son Robert “Hunter” Biden and his business partner to the company’s board.
• the primary owner of the natural gas company—a corrupt oligarch named Nikolai Zlochevskyi who had financial and political ties to Russia—personally approved Hunter’s hiring.
• Burisma began making a series of payments totaling at least $3.3 million over the next 18 months to a Delaware corporation, which paid $708,312.40 directly to Hunter and $2.5 million to entities associated with Hunter.
• the oligarch’s London bank accounts were seized by British officials in a money laundering investigation

Nearly a year later in February 2015, the U.S. State Department and the FBI learned that Zlochevskyi allegedly bribed Ukrainian prosecutors to shut down criminal investigations of him. Thus, the government of Ukraine replaced the chief prosecutor with a new one who reopened investigations into the oligarch. At this time, Burisma was paying $166,666.66 per month to the Delaware company that was paying Hunter.

The “Ultimate Purpose”

In November 2015, a top executive of Burisma named Vadym Pozharskyi wrote an email to Hunter and his partners in which he:

• criticized a proposal they sent to him because it was “lacking concrete tangible results that we set out to achieve in the first place” and did not “offer any names of top US officials” or “Ukrainian officials” to help the company’s owner (“Nikolay”) improve “his situation in Ukraine.”
• stated that if they left these names out of their proposal “to be on the safe and cautious side, I can understand the rationale.”
• instructed them to “proceed immediately” with enlisting “high-ranking US officials” to “visit” Ukraine and persuade “the highest level of decision makers” to “close down” all “cases/pursuits against” the owner.
• identified the “President of Ukraine” and the “Prosecutor General” as two of the “key targets.”
• repeatedly reminded them that closing down these cases was the “true purpose” and the “ultimate purpose” of their “engagement” with Burisma and “all our joint efforts.”

Despite the shocking nature of Burisma’s email, which was first revealed by Tucker Carlson of Fox News in October 2020, no other major news outlet has reported on it.

Just Facts, a research and educational institute, has now uncovered Hunter and his partners’ replies to that email among the 100,000+ emails on Hunter’s laptop. They show beyond all doubt that Hunter and his partners agreed to this deal, which Joe Biden followed to a tee.

“Hunter, You need to deliver that message.”

Immediately after the Burisma executive laid out what was expected of them, Hunter and his partners sent a flurry of emails stating that Hunter needed to tell Burisma that they understood the true purpose of the deal and “deliberately” concealed the names of the officials who would carry it out to “be on the safe and cautious side.” Hunter then emailed Burisma that they understood the job and could get it done.

Here are some of the key excerpts:

• Eric Schwerin to Devon Archer and Hunter Biden (11/2/15): “I would tell Vadym that this is definitely done deliberately to the be on the safe and cautious side and that Sally and company understand the scope and deliverables.”
• Devon Archer to Eric Schwerin and Hunter Biden (11/2/15): “Hunter, You need to deliver that message. I have walked this to the finish (aka starting) line but need some support to close.”
• Eric Schwerin to Hunter Biden (11/2/15): “Do you want me to draft something for you to email to Vadym from you?”
• Hunter Biden to Vadym Pozharskyi, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin (11/3/15): “Vadym– Let me have one final call with them and verify once more that they understand the scope so we can all feel that the retainer is in line with the work required.”
• Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin (11/3/15): “Thank you Hunter! And of course, if you and Devon feel comfortable that they will deliver what in real terms we are talking about, we should disregard the wording of the scope and move further with signing and starting actual work.”
• Hunter Biden to Vadym Pozharskyi, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin (11/5/15): “Vadym, Devon and I do feel comfortable with BS and the ability of Sally & Karen to deliver. You should go ahead and sign. Looking forward to getting started on this.”

In combination with the email from Burisma, these emails leave no doubt that Hunter promised to get “top US officials” to “visit” Ukraine and persuade the nation’s leaders to “close down” all criminal “cases/pursuits against” Burisma’s owner. Furthermore, the emails prove that two of their “key targets” were the “President of Ukraine” and the “Prosecutor General.”

Joe Biden’s Actions

One month after the emails above were exchanged, Joe Biden did exactly what they specified.

In December 2015, Biden visited Ukraine and later recounted on video that he told Ukraine’s president and its prime minister on that trip that he would withhold a U.S. government “billion-dollar loan guarantee” unless they fired the “state prosecutor.” “If the prosecutor is not fired,” warned Biden, “you’re not getting the money.” Biden then added, “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”

However, that firing did not happen right away, and two months later on February 2, 2016, the chief prosecutor secured a court order to seize some properties of the oligarch who was paying Hunter, including his land, houses, and a Rolls-Royce Phantom.

Just two weeks after the court’s seizure order, the president of Ukraine forced the prosecutor to resign. White House phone logs show that Joe Biden talked to the president of Ukraine at least three times in the week surrounding the firing. The phone log for the last of these calls states, “The Vice President also commended President Poroshenko’s decision to replace Prosecutor General Shokin, which paves the way for needed reform of the prosecutorial service.”

Contrary to Biden’s claim that the prosecutor stood in the way of reform, the president of Ukraine complimented the prosecutor for implementing reforms that his predecessors had “been opposing for decades” and then listed the specific reforms. The president then said that he only asked the prosecutor to resign because he “failed to gain society’s trust.”

Two months later in May 2016, Ukraine’s parliament approved the president’s appointee for a new chief prosecutor, who Biden described as “solid.” This new prosecutor, named Yuriy Lutsenko, was:

• the best man of Petro Poroshenko, the president who appointed him.
• sentenced to prison in 2012 for embezzlement and abuse of office.
• convicted in a separate 2012 case for illegal surveillance.
• pardoned by the previous president and released from jail in 2013.
• was forced to resign by Volodymyr Zelensky (the current president of Ukraine) for failing to prosecute anyone of note during his three-year

Six months after Biden’s “solid” prosecutor was appointed, he dropped all criminal charges against the oligarch. The prosecutor also applauded the settlement as a “success” because the oligarch paid $7.46 million in back taxes and penalties. Far from being a prosecutorial victory, the oligarch praised these outcomes and stated that they would allow his corporation to increase production and “attract international companies to Ukraine.”

Two weeks later on November 16, 2016, Burisma made its last documented payment to Hunter. In addition to the recent closure of all criminal cases against the oligarch, Donald Trump had just won an upset victory in the U.S. presidential election. This left Joe Biden incapable of using U.S. taxpayer funds to influence Ukrainian officials.

Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s illicit business deals is also evidenced by a 2017 encrypted What’s App message uncovered by the New York Post. In it, one of Hunter’s business partners wrote to another partner while discussing Joe Biden, “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face, I know u know that but they are paranoid.”

The False Excuse

Joe Biden claimed that he pressured Ukrainian officials to fire the nation’s chief prosecutor because the prosecutor was “backsliding” on “corruption.” This excuse has been widely echoed by the media, who allege that the chief prosecutor was not even investigating the oligarch who was enriching Hunter.

Those claims are belied by the facts that the:

• the Prosecutor General’s Office obtained a court order to seize property of the oligarch, including his land, houses, and a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
• Burisma’s email to Hunter and his partners specifically identified the “Prosecutor General” as one of the “key targets” that “top US officials” should convince to “close down” all “cases/pursuits against” the oligarch.
• the Prosecutor General, whose name was Viktor Shokin, signed a sworn affidavit stating:
  • “The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors.”
  • The president of Ukraine “was emphatic that I should cease my investigations regarding Burisma. When I did not, he said that the US (via Biden) were refusing to release the USD $1 billion promised to Ukraine. He said that he had no choice, therefore, but to ask me to resign.”

• the new Prosecutor General, who Biden praised as “solid,” did not prosecute anyone of note during his three-year

One of the more outlandish falsehoods about this affair comes from the Washington Post’s lead “Fact Checker,” Glenn Kessler. As alleged evidence that Prosecutor Shokin “was not investigating” the oligarch who was paying Hunter, Kessler claims:

In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt publicly criticized Shokin’s office for thwarting a British money-laundering probe into Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.

In reality, the U.S. ambassador was not criticizing Shokin but his predecessor, Vitaliy Yarema. This is proven by the fact that the British money laundering probe cited by the ambassador ended on January 21, 2015, and Shokin was not appointed chief prosecutor until the next month in February 2015.

The London Guardian, the Financial Times, and the New York Times all reported that the probe ended in January, raising the question of how Kessler could honestly botch this fact.

In a related article, Kessler scales up the rhetoric and claims that the ambassador “blasted Shokin for ‘openly and aggressively undermining reform’ and having ‘undermined prosecutors working on legitimate corruption cases’.” However, the ambassador stated that “corrupt actors within the Prosecutor General’s office” did this, not Shokin.

Furthermore, in the very same speech that Kessler misquoted twice, the ambassador began speaking about the present and said, “We want to work with Prosecutor General Shokin” and help him lead “the fight against corruption.” This further demonstrates that the ambassador was not castigating Shokin and wanted to partner with him.

Twitter, in turn, invoked Kessler’s bogus fact check to insist that the “prosecutor was not investigating Burisma at that time.”

Like Kessler, articles by CNN and Bloomberg take the ambassador’s words out of context to make it seem like he was lambasting Shokin instead of his predecessor.

In contrast to those false reports—court records, first-hand sworn testimony, and a smoking gun email from Burisma show that Shokin was aggressively pursuing the oligarch when Joe Biden forced his firing.

Keeping People in the Dark

Beyond denying the fact that the prosecutor was cracking down on Hunter’s cash cow, a wide array of journalists, government officials, and big tech executives kept the public in the dark about this and related matters. This was especially the case just before the 2020 presidential election.

Just a few of the many examples include the following:

• In July 2021, Politico reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) delayed an investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop “to avoid taking any actions that could alert the public to the existence of the case in the middle of a presidential election.”
• In October 2020, Twitter locked the New York Post’s account for reporting on Hunter’s laptop and pinned a post to the top of Twitter’s home page claiming that Joe Biden “played no role in pressuring Ukraine officials into firing the prosecutor,” a statement flatly disproven by the words of Biden himself.
• Multiple whistleblowers within the FBI have stated that officials in the FBI and DOJ used a deceitful assessment of Hunter’s laptop to “improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.”
• In October 2020, NPR managing editor Terence Samuels Public Editor wrote that NPR is not reporting on the NY Post’s expose of Hunter Biden’s laptop because “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
• In October 2020, Facebook executive Andy Stone wrote, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
• In October 2020, a group of former government intelligence officials led by James Clapper (Obama’s Director of National Intelligence) alleged without evidence that the contents of Hunter’s laptop could be or definitely are Russian “information,” while admitting that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
• Major media outlets and so-called fact checkers widely parroted that baseless claim while changing the phrase “Russian information” to “Russian disinformation” and failing to report that:
  • the same group of Obama officials who made that accusation also alleged that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, a charge disproven by a 2-year, $32 million investigation by an independent counsel which “did not establish” or “identify evidence” that the “Trump Campaign” or “any U.S. persons” “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
  • the DOJ Inspector General (an Obama appointee) “identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions” in warrant applications that Obama’s officials used to surveil the Trump campaign and added that he “did not receive satisfactory explanations” for these misleading warrant applications.

• In October 2020, Leslie Stahl of CBS’s 60 Minutes insisted that the contents of Hunter’s laptop “can’t be verified,” even though 60 Minutes brags that it conducts “hard-hitting investigative” journalism. Demonstrating the absurdity of that claim:
  • the recipient of one of the most incriminating emails on the laptop verified that same month that he was “the recipient of the email” and the “email is genuine.”
  • the NY Post pointed out that they published an array of pictures and emails from the laptop with “an extraordinary level of detail” that supports their authenticity, such as a picture of Hunter in a bathtub and a picture of a Biden family meal, along with emails to friends and family all bearing dates and times.
  • the New York Times slipped this statement about Hunter’s laptop into the 24th paragraph of an article published 18 months after the 2020 election: “The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”
  • CNN reported 18 months after the 2020 election, “We know the FBI has possession” of Hunter’s laptop, and “they believe it is his laptop—that the contents of it are his.”
  • the Washington Examiner commissioned a forensic examination of Hunter Biden’s hard drive which found its contents are “indisputably authentic, and there is no evidence of any hacking or file manipulation, according to an examination conducted by a former Secret Service agent who has testified as a cyberforensics expert in over 100 classified, criminal, and civil matters at the state, federal, and international levels.

This tidal wave of misinformation and censorship by media outlets, government officials, and big tech significantly boosted Joe Biden’s odds of winning the presidency. The effect was estimated by a November 2020 online survey of Biden voters in swing states commissioned by the Media Research Center and conducted by the Polling Company. It found that 45% of Biden voters “were unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son” and that:

full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate, flipping all six of the swing states he won to Trump, giving the President 311 electoral votes.

Summary

The emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop, combined with Joe Biden’s own words and actions, prove beyond all doubt that:

• The “ultimate purpose” of Hunter Biden’s multi-million deal with Burisma was to “close down” all criminal “cases/pursuits against” the firm’s owner.
• In November 2015, Hunter agreed to get “high-ranking US officials” to visit Ukraine and persuade the nation’s leaders to end all investigations into the owner. Two “key targets” of this mission were the “President of Ukraine” and the “Prosecutor General.”
• In December 2015, Joe Biden visited Ukraine and told its president and prime minister that he would withhold U.S. aid to their nation unless they fired the prosecutor general.

Those actions, which are complemented by a wealth of incriminating facts, align with textbook definitions of nepotism, bribery, extortion, and obstruction of justice.

Yet, major media outlets, big tech companies, fact checkers, former U.S. intelligence officials, and active government officials within the FBI and Department of Justice played major roles in keeping this information from the American people.

About the Author

James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a research and educational institute dedicated to publishing rigorously documented facts about public policy issues.