BIDEN RECEIVED PAYMENTS FROM HIS SON'S FIRM
Republicans have uncovered evidence that could prove to be the smoking gun in their case against President Joe Biden: despite his claims to the contrary, Biden received direct monthly payments from his son’s professional corporation.
Biden received payments of $1,380 a month from Owasco P.C., Hunter Biden’s professional corporation, starting in September 2018 according to the records, which were obtained and released by the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee.
According to the committee, at least three such payments have been identified.
These findings conflict with the president’s earlier claims that he did not know of, never took part in, and never discussed business with his son.
Biden has made multiple statements about his son’s business dealings that have turned out to be false, including the claim that his son didn’t make money from China—a claim Hunter Biden himself admitted was false under oath.
“Payments from Hunter’s business entity to Joe Biden are now part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the committee, said in a video statement.
The White House and a lawyer for Mr. Biden did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The records were obtained as part of the House probe into Biden and his family, which centers on business transactions made while he was vice president and in the time between when he left the government and assumed the presidency.
The issue has been the subject of investigations by the House Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Ways and Means Committee.
In total, investigators have uncovered $21 million that went to Hunter Biden, the president’s brother James Biden, and the president’s daughter-in-law Hallie Biden, money sourced from payments by Romanian, Chinese, and Ukrainian businessmen.
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who were part of an investigation into the first son, have told Republicans that the investigation into the younger Biden was “slow-walked” and mishandled by the Department of Justice to protect the family.
The discovery likely sets the stage for a formal vote on the impeachment inquiry opened against Biden by ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
McCarthy opened the probe unilaterally without a vote of the full House.
Though a vote of the House isn’t required to open an impeachment inquiry, the White House has claimed that the inquiry is illegitimate due to its lack of congressional backing.
That could be set to change this week, particularly in light of the new evidence directly linking Biden to his son’s business ventures.
Earlier, House Republicans likely didn’t have the votes to open the impeachment inquiry, kept open by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), due to Republicans’ thin majority in the lower chamber. Eighteen Republicans in the 118th Congress came from districts Biden won in 2020.
Now, with this new evidence, these 18 could be more open to a probe than they would have been earlier this year.
—Joseph Lord
U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Nov. 8, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
SUPREME COURT REVIEWS MAJOR TAX CASE
Trump’s landmark tax reform is facing a constitutional challenge from a couple who tells the Supreme Court that one of its provisions violates the Sixteenth Amendment by taxing unrealized income from foreign businesses.
The Mandatory Repatriation Tax (MRT) is the provision that will be debated during oral argument on Dec. 5. Passed in 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) moved U.S. investors away from a model that taxed businesses’ worldwide income into one that allows them to repatriate foreign earnings without taxation.
Anticipating revenue loss, the TCJA applied a one-time tax at a much lower rate on earnings since 1986, when Congress passed another tax bill.
Charles Moore and his wife Kathleen argue that this law unconstitutionally taxed earnings they hadn’t yet repatriated from KisanKraft, an Indian company. Even though they hadn’t received money from the investment, they had to declare an additional $132,512 as taxable income in 2017 and pay an additional $14,729.
The Sixteenth Amendment’s wording and prior court precedent have established that Congress can only tax “realized” income, the Moores argue in their petition for writ of certiorari. Two lower courts rejected the Moores’ arguments, leading them to ask for a Supreme Court review.
Biden’s administration is defending Trump’s tax law by arguing that the Sixteenth Amendment’s wording doesn’t distinguish between different types of income taxes. It reads: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
Eisner v. Macomber was a 1920 case in which the Supreme Court said that a stock dividend did not constitute realized income. The Moores frequently cite that case but a district court ruled that the decision was confined to a stock-dividend context and didn’t apply to the MRT, according to the administration’s briefing.
—Sam Dorman
DETERRENT ACT
The House will vote on a bill this week that would dramatically increase reporting requirements on foreign gifts made to American universities and levy hefty fines against those who fail to comply.
The Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act would force universities and their employees to divulge more information to the government about overseas funding sources by amending the 1965 Higher Education Act to The Higher Education Act that currently requires foreign payments to be disclosed if they are $250,000 or more.
The act would lower that number to $50,000 for most transactions and zero dollars for payments from “countries of concern.”
It would also require the disclosure of foreign gifts at some key research institutions down to the level of individual faculty members.
The issue of foreign funding at American universities has been a topic of concern since 2019 when a Department of Education investigation found more than $6.5 billion in previously unreported foreign gifts to American universities.
Many of those gifts were made by entities with ties to adversarial powers including China, Iran, and Russia.
Those funds were often used by foreign powers to infiltrate U.S. universities, gain access to research, and manipulate American public opinion.
Such was the case with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Confucius Institutes, which were funded in part by the regime’s propaganda wing and served as a backdoor means of proliferating pro-communist sentiment on college campuses under the guise of cultural exchange.
Proponents of the bill say it is necessary to counter the increasing malign influence of the CCP and other adversarial powers.
Opponents worry that the bill is unenforceable and could be misused to present innocent people’s financial information in a way that suggests they are conspiring with foreign governments.
—Andrew Thornebrooke
WHAT’S HAPPENING
- The Supreme Court hears arguments in what some say may become the most significant tax case in a century. In question is the government’s ability to tax unrealized, unrepatriated tax earnings abroad.
- FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
- President Joe Biden flies to Boston to take part in three campaign receptions.
Former President Donald Trump is looking more and more likely to secure the Republican presidential nomination.
For the legacy media, Trump is back to being an inexhaustible font of content (if he ever stopped).
The Atlantic, a flagship publication of America’s liberal establishment, has trumpeted a new special issue on the possibility of a Trump victory. Its press release warns that another Trump term could have “grave and extreme consequences.”
Meanwhile, mass immigration, including illegal crossings at the Southern border, has demographically transformed the country at a pace that is frankly difficult to fathom.
The Center for Immigration Studies reports that 15 percent of Americans are now foreign-born, more than at any time in the nation’s history. The absolute numbers dwarf the figures from 1890, the last peak for foreign-born Americans as a proportion of the country; today, 49.5 million Americans are in that category, as opposed to just 9.2 million in 1890.
Those new Americans can be expected to affect American politics—not that the people who mold our system have failed to notice.
The Daily Caller News Foundation sheds light on George Soros’s efforts to capture Latino (or, uh, “Latinx”) votes during the 2022 cycle.
Last month, Trump administration veteran A. Wess Mitchell warned in Foreign Policy that the United States could soon be fighting a world war for which it is unprepared.
“In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the United States would be hard-pressed to rebuff the attack while keeping up the flow of support to Ukraine and Israel,” Mitchell wrote. He noted that China’s growing navy and America’s spiraling debt are likely to be serious impediments.
The Epoch Times’ Andrew Thornebrooke details a new report recommending that the United States build up its nuclear arsenal in light of growing threats from abroad.
Closer to home, conflicts over gender ideology are playing out state by state.
The Epoch Times’ Jackson Elliott outlines where biological males who identify as women can access women’s bathrooms and locker rooms.
The Epoch Times’ Kevin Stocklin explains that the top-down push for electric vehicles is meeting with resistance from the American people.
The evidence includes a new letter to the president from more than 3,800 car dealers, imploring him to “tap the brakes on the unrealistic government electric vehicle mandate.”
