Why are Republicans accusing Joe and Hunter Biden of bribery?

The increasing legal jeopardy facing former president Donald Trump, and news of the plea agreement between the Department of Justice and President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, has led Republicans in Congress to make increasingly outlandish accusations against the 46th president and his family, even as evidence to support their claims continues to be lacking.

The drumbeat of allegations against the president has focused on his son’s overseas business transactions, none of which have involved the elder Mr Biden.

At a press conference on 11 May, a string of House Oversight Committee members claimed to have evidence showing that Mr Biden and members of his family have committed multiple federal crimes.

Flanked by a horde of fellow members of the House Oversight Committee ranging from relatively moderate Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina to opponents of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy such as Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, the assembled GOP representatives tried to make the case that Mr Biden and his family had profited off of his tenure in public service.

At the time, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and his colleagues told reporters that Hunter Biden, Mr Biden’s brother James, and other members of the president’s family have been involved in “shady business deals that capitalised on Joe Biden’s public office and risked our country’s national security,” and Mr Comer specifically called out the president’s son for having had a “lucrative financial relationship” with a Romanian national by the name of Gabriel Popoviciu during the period his father was vice president.

Mr Popoviciu retained Hunter Biden, who is a Yale-educated lawyer, to represent him in an effort to fend off criminal charges related to a land deal in the Romanian capital, Bucharest. The funds transfers that Republicans suggested were evidence of wrongdoing began in 2015, the year Hunter Biden began representing the Romanian businessman.

Those accusations against the president and his son came just a week after Mr Comer and Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley began making claims about an FBI form, which allegedly documented an unverified tip they’d received in 2019 regarding what they’ve described as an alleged bribery scheme involving Mr Biden.

Mr Grassley, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, went even further in a press release, claiming that the FBI had received information indicating that Mr Biden accepted a bribe in exchange for official actions during his time as vice president.

Republicans who’ve spoken about the FBI document have indicated that the bureau’s informant was someone who’d been told about the accusations by Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm which employed Hunter Biden as an attorney and later as a member of its board during the Obama administration.

It was the younger Mr Biden’s employment on Burisma’s board that formed the basis for an outlandish accusation hurled against his father in 2019 by allies of former president Donald Trump, and it appears the allegation against the now-president remains the same.

Essentially, what Republicans are alleging is that Mr Biden urged Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko, to fire his country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, citing Mr Shokin’s failure to address corruption in his country, in order to protect his son from an investigation Mr Shokin was conducting into Burisma.

Mr Shokin later claimed that this was the reason he was fired, and Republicans — most notoriously ex-Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani — have said Mr Biden’s work urging Mr Poroshenko to sack Mr Shokin was a personal errand, even though Mr Biden was expressing the wishes of the US government, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and other Western entities when he communicated the Obama administration’s demand that Mr Shokin be shown the door.

Years later, Mr Trump — egged on my Mr Giuliani and others — triggered his first of two impeachments when he pushed Mr Poroshenko’s successor to announce sham investigations into Mr Biden and his son in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in US defence aid.

Though Republicans have not identified the alleged FBI informant who spoke with Mr Zlochevsky, the Burisma founder, it is almost certainly Mr Giuliani, the disgraced ex-New York City mayor whose law licenses in New York and Washington are suspended as he faces disbarment proceedings for his efforts to help Mr Trump remain in office after losing the 2020 election.

The allegations levied by this source also include claims that Mr Zlochevsky paid both Mr Biden and his son $5m each in bribes.

While the GOP figures who continue to crow about Mr Biden’s supposed participation in this alleged bribery scheme have repeatedly denied that the allegations come from Mr Giuliani, recent public statements by the disgraced attorney show that the claims being floated by Republicans now are the exact same ones that he pushed more than three years ago.

On a 5 June episode of his America’s Mayor Live radio show, Mr Giuliani described a 2017 meeting with “a group of Ukrainians” about “something that the Justice Department turned down”.

“They wanted to explain a number of things … that Joe Biden was – that Joe Biden was involved in a major bribery scheme on behalf of a crooked member of the former pro-Russian government, and that his son was involved in it. And that he virtually had confessed to it,” he said.

Mr Giulani’s description of that 2017 meeting matches up exactly with Mr Comer’s description of the FBI form during an appearance on Newsmax the next day.

The disgraced ex-mayor elaborated further on the allegations on his show, claiming that a “tape” his Ukrainian contacts asked him to listen to laid out what he described as Mr Biden discussing a bribery scheme.

“And they played the tape. I watched the tape. And I said, ‘Please play it again,” before I said anything. I remembered my definition of bribery, and the tape fits every part of that definition. Offering something of value. Or withholding it. The $1 billion loan guarantee. Very valuable to Ukraine at the time because they were going to go broke if they didn’t get it. In return for firing the prosecutor for an official action. Poroshenko fired the prosecutor. Biden released the billion dollars. That’s a class-book case of bribery in any country, anywhere in the world. Including the United States,” he said.

Yet the “tape” he refers to was not any clandestine recording, but a speech the then-former vice president gave at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.

At the time, Mr Biden described his work carrying out US policy by encouraging Mr Poroshenko to fire Mr Shokin.

“I remember going over, convincing our team … that we should be providing for loan guarantees. … And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from [then-Prime Minister Arseniy] Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor [Shokin]. And they didn’t…They were walking out to a press conference. I said, ‘Nah, … We’re not going to give you the billion dollars.’ They said, ‘You have no authority. You’re not the president.’ … I said, ‘Call him.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars.’ … I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b***h-. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” he said.

Mr Shokin was indeed fired, but it was not simply at Mr Biden’s behest.

The then-vice president’s work convincing the Ukrainian leader to deep-six the prosecutor was actually part of a monthslong campaign by US officials, including then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt and then-Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, both of whom had called for Mr Shokin’s ouster in public remarks dating back to October 2015.