I do know Romanian corruption.
Once I left the country in 1987 after study of his fall economics, I made sure I bribed every security guard who searched my luggage at Bucharest Airport with a pack of Kent cigarettes.
But I neglected handy the package to the soldier on the tarmac after I was walking to my Lufthansa flight.
Soon he began screaming and waving a submachine gun at me. oops.
After the fall of the communist regime, the US State Department launched a program to assist Romania reduce corruption.
Vice President Joe Biden led this effort from 2009 to 2016.
This system was an enormous success: although Romania remained deeply corrupt, Biden’s relations received over 1,000,000 dollars from Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu.
He was convicted of corruption despite the fact that Hunter Biden flew to Bucharest to testify on his behalf before the National Anti-Corruption Directorate.
![Jacob Komer](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000010896849.jpg?w=1024)
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer stated Wednesday: “While Vice President Biden lectured Romania on anti-corruption policy, he was in truth a walking billboard where his son and family raised money.”
Comer noted that “money stops flowing from a Romanian citizen shortly after Joe Biden leaves the vice presidency.”
Former U.S. Treasury official Phil Stephenson testified in 2017 that Romania’s “very anti-corruption fight was corrupted.”
Romania is just the tip of the iceberg of profits that the Biden family – including Joe’s grandchildren – has raked in from shady foreigners.
An evaluation by the House Oversight Committee revealed “a pattern of the Biden family pursuing interests in regions of the world where the then vp played an enormous role and influenced US policy.”
![JOE BIDEN](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000010906766.jpg?w=1024)
The committee says the Bidens and their associates “formed a network of greater than 20 firms” that raised a minimum of $10 million from abroad.
“The Bidens took steps to hide, confuse, and conceal the payments they were receiving from foreigners.”
How did Biden get away with being a squirrel for so long?
US money laundering laws are in truth designed to cover up crimes committed by US politicians.
Federal agencies require banks to take much greater precautions when handling financial transactions involving “politically exposed individuals” – including just about all foreign politicians, their relations, friends, associates and anyone else who might take the money and run.
But as stated in the 2020 federal regulatory notice, federal banking agencies “don’t interpret the term ‘politically exposed individuals’ in relation to U.S. public officials.”
Banks and others filed 170 reports of suspicious activity related to foreign payments allegedly received by the Biden family or their associates.
I predicted here on March 24 that Biden could “face much greater danger” with the Treasury Department issuing these SARs.
![Treasury Department](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000010306735.jpg?w=1024)
But the red flags were ignored because Biden – like every other American politician – was presumed innocent.
Are our flesh pressers incorruptible? “Tell that to the Marines.”
Biden announced in June 2021 that “the United States will lead by example” in “fighting the scourge of corruption” and supporting “courageous residents around the world who demand fair, transparent governance.”
The White House statement promised to “crack down” on “illicit financing” that generates “pernicious foreign influence.”
Was there a secret asterisk firing someone named Biden?
Condemning corruption is the easiest technique to make crooked politicians appear honest.
![Capital](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000010090698.jpg?w=1024)
The anti-corruption campaigns of the US government are perennial fiction or a pretext for upheaval.
In 2010, President Barack Obama announced at the United Nations that the U.S. government was “leading the global effort to fight corruption.”
The next yr, House Republicans sought to finish US foreign aid to deprave regimes.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lamented that limiting handouts to countries that fail anti-corruption tests “could end in a staggering variety of needy recipients.”
Obama sent Biden to Afghanistan to admonish President Hamid Karzai to stop the corruption that was destabilizing the country and spurring the rebound of the Taliban.
No such luck. “Our biggest single project, unfortunately and unintentionally,” Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, later admitted, “can have been the development of mass corruption.”
In a speech to the Ukrainian parliament in 2015, Biden denounced the “cancer of corruption.”
![HUNTER BIDEN](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000010894344-1.jpg?w=1024)
![JOE AND HUNTER BIDEN](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000010894759-2.jpg?w=912)
But the previous yr, his son Hunter jumped on the Burisma Sauce Train, collecting a salary of $1 million for a ceremonial position.
Biden stated in 2019: “I did nothing flawed. I followed the policy of the US government to eradicate corruption in Ukraine.”
He failed miserably. The International Monetary Fund this yr deemed its $20 billion loan to Ukraine a fiasco, because of many years of “broken guarantees” and “systemic corruption” by the government.
Americans would have learned little or nothing about Biden’s foreign money machine had the Republicans not won the House of Representatives in November.
Comer said his investigation was still in the “initial stage”.
“Corruption is just one other type of tyranny,” Biden told the Romanian parliament in 2014.
Americans are still learning how our democracy is undermined by this type of Biden tyranny.
The one certainty is that there are numerous more “pernicious foreign influences” than Washington admits.
James Bovard is the writer of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.