‘It was just a bribe’ 

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday weighed in on newly revealed bank records showing the Biden family raked in at least $20 million from foreign nationals, arguing that the documents obtained by the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee show that President Biden took bribes as vice president.  

“That’s a tremendous amount of money. And nothing was done for it. It was just a bribe. It’s just a bribe – extortion and a bribe,” the 77-year-old former president told Newsmax host Eric Bolling during an interview at his Bedminster, N.J. golf club. 

“When you see him talking about the billion dollars for the prosecutor – I’m amazed nothing was ever done. You know, you talk about quid pro quo that was quid pro quo,” Trump added, referring to Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin, who was fired after then-Vice President Joe Biden threatened to pull $1 billion in US aid. 

The records released by the Oversight Committee also show the flow of $3.5 million transferred on Feb. 14, 2014, from Russian billionaire and former Moscow first lady Yelena Baturina to Rosemont Seneca Thornton, an entity controlled by Hunter Biden and his former business associate Devon Archer, which Trump indicated he believes actually went to Joe Biden. 

“I believe it was him, indirectly or directly,” Trump said while noting that he raised the issue during a debate with Joe Biden in 2020. 

Trump also suggested that the 80-year-old commander-in-chief, whom he referred to as “corrupt,” “crooked” and “compromised” numerous times during his half-an-hour sitdown with Bolling, may have received even more money from China. 

“But I believe that China has paid them a lot more than that. You look at University of Pennsylvania. You take a look at what’s going on over there where China pays millions and millions of dollars at Biden’s center and I guess they pay him a million dollars a year – I think they have it at $999,000 a year, that way you don’t have to maybe report because it’s under a million. But I believe we have a compromised person as president,” Trump said.  

“I believe that China has paid him a fortune,” he added, deriding Joe Biden as a “Manchurian candidate.”

“He’s so afraid of China. And the reason he’s afraid is because I believe they paid him a tremendous amount of money. And he doesn’t want people to find out about it,” Trump argued. 

The 2024 GOP presidential primary frontrunner further demanded that Republicans in Congress move quickly to impeach the president over the corruption allegations, and argued that the two criminal indictments leveled against him by the Biden Justice Department are retribution for congressional investigations into the Biden family. 

“One of the reasons they go after me is because the Republicans are going after them and going after them very, very powerfully. But something has to happen. I mean, it’s just it’s massive theft. It’s extortion. It’s – nobody’s ever seen anything like it. This is the most corrupt human being, this is the most corrupt family, for these things to be happening is not even believable,” Trump said.  

“And I heard a couple of Republicans – nice people – and they said, ‘Well, we have other things to worry about.’ We have to do this. We have to deal with it. What can be more important than this?” the twice-impeached former president said of potentially impeaching Joe Biden.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that Hunter Biden appeared to deliver “oligarchs from around the world” access to his father while he served in the Obama administration and that the first son’s overseas associates from Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukrainian allegedly attended at least one of two dinners at Washington’s Café Milano with the Bidens.

“It’s clear Joe Biden knew about his son’s business dealings and allowed himself to be ‘the brand’ sold to enrich the Biden family while he was Vice President of the United States,” Comer said as he released the first son’s bank records showing a tangled web of overseas transactions involving foreign money.