Newsroom
A former White House stenographer has doubled down on allegations against US President Joe Biden and a VP trip to Cyprus in May 2014, with the whistleblower blatantly speculating that a kickback payment from Burisma came out of the island.
Obama-era stenographer Mike McCormick has been accusing Biden, who was vice president in 2014, of committing crimes by using American taxpayer money to enrich his family through Washington-backed gas deals in Ukraine.
McCormick pointed to a timeline of what he called suspicious trips in spring 2014, including a visit to Cyprus in May of that year, accusing Biden and current national security adviser Jake Sullivan of “promoting a kickback scheme with Ukraine.”
This week US House Republicans suggested that an investigation into the Bidens showed suspicious activity that can prove corruption, following revelations that several family members have received money from foreign actors.
“I don’t think anyone in America… would think that it’s just a coincidence that nine Biden family members have received money,” Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said during a highly-anticipated conference on Wednesday.
Critics say there is no proof
But critics including some Republicans have raised doubts over the accusations, saying no proof was provided about payments referenced in a memo that linked to Romania and China.
Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, fought back accusing Comer of spending “the last five months making wild predictions without proof, asking inane questions out loud and falling short every time — including today.”
“Today’s so-called ‘revelations’ are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens,” Lowell said.
Whistleblowers say tips were ignored
But media pundits say the US government is missing evidence because officials fail to listen to evidence from whistleblowers.
McCormick thinks the focus of the investigation ought to include Cyprus, where Biden and Sullivan flew in May 2014 following a trip to Kiev a month earlier and just after Hunter Biden was given a seat on Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company registered in Limassol.
The stenographer says he was a witness on an April 2014 flight to Kiev when he got his first suspicion, which grew after the trip to Cyprus the following month did not include reporters.
McCormick says a new allegation from a whistleblower points to a wire transfer suggesting Biden got money directly from Ukraine gas activity.
“This allegation goes to Joe getting money directly, and it came from Ukraine,” McCormick said, adding that the tip involved two sources and was shared from a Ukrainian prosecutor to his US counterpart, former federal prosecutor Bud Cummins.
Now a whistleblower, Cummins who appeared Wednesday on NewsNation, says he reported bribery claims back in 2018.
“Some people in Ukraine came to me and said that the prosecutor general was looking for a vehicle to get a private discrete meeting with peers in the Department of Justice to make a presentation,” Cummins said.
But the whistleblower says DOJ officials “completely ignored the offer” and further began to assume that communication was already taking place directly after he was “cut out of the loop.”
“And it also occurred to me that they might have just be turning a blind eye and they didn’t want it investigated,” Cummins added.
Cummins also says he was shocked when he later found out that his phone had been tapped at the time.
“Yeah, that was shocking to me when I read that,” McCormick said, adding there were now a lot more whistleblowers.
McCormick also believes the money came directly from Burisma’s owner, who did his banking in Cyprus.
The former stenographer speculated that Biden went to Cyprus because of the alleged energy scheme, saying “my evidence says that Joe Biden was there a week after his son was named on the board of Burisma.”
“This whistleblower may have the evidence that says this money went directly to Joe,” McCormick told Fox.
“If it did, it came out of Cyprus,” he added.
