Wednesday, October 30, 2019

France's Forgotten Jewish Kingdom of Septimania

Nadene Goldfoot                             
Septimania encompassed this area, the region of the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis that was under the control of the Visigoths in 462. It was roughly the same region of Languedoc-Roussillon.  Languedoc was a former southern French province where Jews lived from the early centuries CE.  They were later persecuted by the Visigoths in the 6th and 7th centuries, but protected by the nobles and later joined the Christians in the fight against Arab invasion.  These Jews were farmers, but also engaged in tax gatherers, bailiffs, etc.  Toulouse, Narbonne, Lunel, Beziers, Posquieres, Nimes and Montpelier were center of Talmudic study.    The land went to the Emirate of Cordoba in the 8th century then was conquered by the Franks, who called it Gothia or the Gothic March at the end of the 9th century.  


It was in about 1979 that Professor Arthur J. Zuckerman did some research into medieval documents  written in French, German, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin and then wrote a book about these findings, published by Columbia University Press.  With much advertizing, the book was forgotten about and became just another book written by an academic, not an exciting sexy novel.  It was just a story of the kingdom of Septimania, a kingdom of retired Roman soldiers that was full of Jews.

The story actually was started by "Makhir ben Yehudah Zakkai of Narbonne (725-765 c.e.) who was a Babylonian-Jewish scholar and later, the supposed leader of the Jewish community of Narbonne in a region which at that time was called Septimania at the end of the eighth century. His descendants, according to certain scholars, were for many generations the nasi or leaders of that important community Nasi means "Prince" in Hebrew.  It's a Talmudic term for the president of the Sanhedrin, and who was also the spiritual head and later, the political representative of the Jewish people.  

From the 2nd century on, the Nasi was always a descendant of Hillel, and was recognized by the Roman authorities as the Patriarch of the Jews.  Later, the title was also used in some centers like Spain, to designate the lay leader of the Jewish community, and so it became his surname.  
                                                

Narbonne is a southern French town.  Many Jews lived there from at least the 5th century, but were expelled in the 7th by the Visigoth king, Wamba.  Later on in the Middle Ages, the community was headed by a "Jewish King" by virtue of privileges said to have been granted in the 8th century by Charlemagne himself!  It remained prominent until the expulsion from France in 1306.  

Narbonne was the seat of a noted academy and many leading scholars lived there.   All this is known history in our Jewish encyclopedia.
                                                   
Pepin III, father of Charlemagne, alias King Charles
 Here is what our scholar, Professor Arthur J. Zuckerman had discovered.  Not all of it has been accepted by other scholars.  

                                                     
Moors in Seville, Spain 

 In the West Moslem progress was checked at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 by Charles Martel.


The king of the Franks was Pepin III (714-768 ) who  needed to drive the Moors out of Southern France and Spain, but couldn't get past the walls of Narbonne after 7 years of trying with a siege.  He had no navy and this was a seaport town, so the Moors couldn't be starved out.  He offered the Jews of the city 50,000 marks with they would open the gates of the city for a few minutes so they could storm in, but they refused, with good reason.  Failure in this act would mean the Moors would massacre the Jews.  So Pippin made a 2nd offer of giving the Jews the land of Septimania as an independent Jewish kingdom with its own king and army-all Jewish, just for opening the gates.

  It worked.                                   

In creating Septimania,  Pepin put a condition on the deal that the Jewish king had to be a descendant of King David of Israel.  That was fine with the Jews of Narbonne, but none of the males had this lineage.  They decided to send to Babylonia for a man to be their king who was a descendant and it was Natronai ben Zabinai, with a Persian name.  He was a renowned scholar, elected Exilarch when in his 20's, already a king in exile, so to speak.  He spoke 8 languages fluently, and had an eidetic memory so great that he had memorized the whole Babylonian Talmud.  He was so amazing that the Nabonne community of Jews thought he was the Messiah and called him that.  

Why?  It had been 700  years since the Temple in Jerusalem had fallen to the Romans, and prophecies said that the Messiah would arrive to establish G-d's kingdom on earth.  

Our Messiah, Natronai, had many other pressing thoughts on hand to deal with besides the claim of Messiah, however.  As soon as he had arrived he was swamped with other demands, laws, levying taxes, establishing courts, raising an army, all the things needed to govern.  

He was hit with a message from King Charles, the son of Pepin III.   Natronai, who cast his  Persian name aside and took the Hebrew name of Machir, had to give oaths of allegiance to this King of the Franks.  King Charles also made an other request of him.  He was to marry Charles's Aunt Alda.  This was a command, of course.  

King Charles, son of Pepin III, had his father's wishes up his own sleeve.  All this planning was for a reason.  Pepin had usurped the throne of the Franks from the MEROVINGIANS.  There was no royal blood in their veins.  Pepin had just used the title and no one had checked up on his pedigree!  Charles needed to establish a legitimacy of their dynasty.  This marriage of Alda to Machir, the direct descendant of King David, gave them royal blood for their descendants, they felt.

There's always a catch to the best of plans and this one was the fact that Aunt Alda was Catholic and Machir was Jewish.  Priests and rabbis would not perform such a mixed marriage.   They did it anyway somehow and managed to have a legitimate son making Jewish blood intermingle with the Carolingian kings of France.  Now this is speulative.  We have no idea how they managed to pull this off, if in fact they did.  "Charlemagne was the eldest son of Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon, born before their canonical marriage."

Bertrada was born sometime between 710 and 727 in Laon, in today's Aisne, France, to Count Charibert of Laon. Charibert's father might have been related to Hugobertides. Charibert's mother was Bertrada of Prüm, who founded Prüm Abbey along with Charibert. Bertrada of Prüm was possibly the daughter of Theuderic III.
Bertrada Broadfoot of Laon, at Versailles

Marriage and children

Bertrada married Pepin the Short, the son of Charles Martel, the Frankish "Mayor of the Palace", in 741. However, Pepin and Bertrada were too closely related for their marriage to be legal at that time; the union was not canonically sanctioned until 749, after the birth of Charlemagne.
According to French historian Léon Levillain, Bertrada was Pepin's first and only wife. Other sources suggest that Pepin had previously married a "Leutberga" or "Leutbergie", with whom Pepin would have had five children.
Bertrada and Pepin are known to have had seven children: three sons and four daughters. Of these, Charlemagne (c. 742 – 814), Carloman (751–771)and Gisela (757–811) survived to adulthood. Pepin, born in 756, died in his infancy in 762. Bertrada and Pepin also had Berthe, Adelaide, and Rothaide. Gisela became a nun at Chelles Abbey.

Queen of the Franks[edit]

A statue of Bertrada of Laon by Eugène Oudiné, one of the twenty Reines de France et Femmes illustres in the Jardin du LuxembourgParis.
In 751, Pepin and Bertrada became King and Queen of the Franks, following Pepin's successful coup against the Frankish Merovingian monarchs. Pepin was crowned in June 

At any rate, this closeness caused King Charles to ask Machir to work with him in his great campaign to drive the Moors from northern Spain.  It could be that Charlemagne had a Jewish uncle and the Jewish kings of Septimania were related by blood to the Carolingian kings of France.  Those of us into DNA studies know that they shared very tiny segments of DNA, if at all.  

By 793, Machir fell in battle, with his men carrying his Lion of Judah banner from victory to victory.  

According to Jewish history, Natronai was the Gaon of Pumbedita ( a Babylonian city on the Euphrates, seat of a famous academy founded by Judah ben Ezekiel in the middle of the 3rd century) in the early part of the 8th century, known as Rav Yenuka.  He was most severe with the  scholars of the academy, many of whom left for Sura, Persia.  The Gaon of Sura was known from 853-6.  He wrote many responsa, the top one being an arrangement of the daily 100 blessings prepared at the request of the community of Lucena, Spain.  These and others of his served as the 1st complete Order of Prayer prepared later by Amram Gaon.  He took a strong stand against the Karaites and their liturgy.  His responsa include notes of tractates of the Talmud.  

A Gaon is an intellectual leader, often with considerable temporal power, of the Babylonian Jewish community from the 6th to 11th centuries.  They headed the 2 leading academies, SURA and PUMBEDITA, and their influence extended for the greater part of this period over all Jews.  
                                                        

Charlemagne  or Charles the Great(2 April 742 – 28 January 814), numbered Charles I, was king of the Franks from 768, king of the Lombards from 774, and emperor of the Romans from 800. During the Early Middle Ages, he united the majority of western and central Europe. He was the first recognised emperor to rule from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier. The expanded Frankish state that Charlemagne founded is called the Carolingian Empire. He was later canonized by Antipope Paschal III

Who were the Franks?  "The Franks were a group of Germanic peoples, whose name was first mentioned in 3rd century Roman sources, associated with tribes on the Lower and Middle Rhine, on the edge of the Roman Empire. Later the term was associated with Romanized Germanic dynasties within the collapsing Western Roman Empire, who eventually commanded the whole region between the rivers Loire and Rhine. They then imposed power over many other post-Roman kingdoms and Germanic peoples, and still later Frankish rulers were given recognition by the Catholic Church as successors to the old rulers of the Western Roman Empire.
Resource:  THE JEWISH KINGDOM OF SEPTIMANIA NATRONAI BEN ZABINAI,MACHIR THEODORIC; MAY 14, 2015; MARCH 9, 2016 ISRAEL,RELIGION, THE TRUTH.  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhir_of_Narbonne
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrada_of_Laon
http://www.midi-france.info/1011_moors.htm


Sunday, October 13, 2019

Rabbi Dov Fischer's Essay on Donald Trump

Essay by Rabbi Dov Fischer                                                       
This is one I want to keep.  I've just said some of these very facts to the wife of the gentleman who sent it to me.  From an Orthodox rabbi who writes a wonderful essay.  Thanks, Victor. 


                                                                     

                        The Greatness of Donald Trump
                                   By Dov Fischer
Posted By Ruth King on October 12th, 2019
His demeanor makes some of us wince. His language makes many of us uncomfortable. Presidents in democracies reflect something about the people who elect them. In some cases, as with the aptly named House of Representatives, people sometimes even vote to be reflected by an assortment of lowlifes. Ilhan Omar reflects her district, as does Rashida Tlaib, as does [O-] Cortez. Hillary lost because even Democrats were revulsed by the thought that she reflects them.
Trump, too, reflects his electorate: we who put him there. In balancing all that he comprises, we focused in November 2016 on greatness. Eight years of Obama — incompetence, weakness, economic malaise, societal decay — left us focused on restoring greatness. Thus, even Christian pastors, devout Catholic theologians, and Orthodox rabbis vigorously support Donald Trump. The free world’s last great hope is America, and she was in peril.
What about his language, some of his dishonorable private deeds, flaws in his character?
Yes, excellence of personal character is desirable. A Mike Huckabee, a Mike Pence might offer an interesting successor model in 2024 after the Democrats manage to impeach Trump into an impeccable second full term. Yet we will look back on Trump’s presidency wistfully decades hence as we today look back on the Ronald Reagan years. The man, whatever his flaws, has proven to be a great president of historic dimensions.
                                                       
Young Trump 
Those who complain about Trump’s character invariably are the same “deplorables” who voted for the lying, cheating, false-faced Hillary. They had no problem with an ethical deviant who had committed felonious spoliation of evidence, lied about her emails (yoga and wedding dresses?), lied about Benghazi (an incoherent YouTube video with few views?), lied about her very name (named for a guy who became famous only after she was born?), lied about her trips abroad (landing amid gunfire in Bosnia, when in fact she was greeted by schoolgirls presenting her flowers), lying about and defaming the women whom her husband sexually assaulted, even lying and joking in a fake Southern drawl (back when her husband was Arkansas governor) about successfully defending a guy who raped a 12-year-old girl. They likewise had no compunction voting for her better half despite his raping Juanita Broaddrick, assaulting Kathleen Willey, exposing himself to Paula Corbin Jones, manipulating a gullible Monica Lewinsky — later explaining, “because I could.”
John Kennedy in fact was an unabashed serial cheater in the White House. Lyndon Johnson was an egomaniacal narcissist who expected staff to have meetings with him while he sat on a toilet. Franklin Roosevelt was a racist and the incredibly intense Woodrow Wilson was perhaps the worst of all racists ever elected to high office. The Left has no problem with their characters or whether or not they were “presidential” — because they were leftist, “progressive” Democrats.
Even now, as the “deplorables” select their candidate to lose to Trump in 2020, do they weigh character?
Robert O’Rourke (“Man, I was born for this”) is a Scottish-Irish child of White Privilege, a hit-and-run driver who was part of a computer-hacking crowd, who masquerades as Beto the Hispanic, sort of a skateboarding Zorro.
Elizabeth Warren lied baldly for years about her lineage just to take advantage of the “affirmative action” rules that got her a job at Harvard at the expense of an authentic minority candidate. Native Americans should sioux her and without reservations. And more Elizabeth Warren biographical lies emerge every day.
Joe Biden, even if he were not a despicable crook who leveraged his vice presidency to get his son and himself personally wealthy overnight, already had staked out a long and extinguished reputation for plagiarizing speeches, fabricating stories of pseudo-heroism amid wartime peril, and just making things up.  And if the measure of the man is character and whether he comports himself as “Presidential,” have we forgotten Biden’s puerile and maniacal laughing display during the Vice Presidential debate with Paul Ryan in 2012?
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, who now finally is finished as aorta be, endorsed Communist Russia and its bread lines that forced millions to stand for hours for a loaf of bread, and he himself probably would be home-ridden or dead now if he had his socialized medicine.
Kamala Harris slept her way shamelessly into public life as the very public consort of Willie Brown, even as Brown’s wife Blanche publicly told the media, “Listen, she may have him at the moment, but come inauguration day and he’s up there on the platform being sworn in, I’ll be the b***h holding the Bible.”
So that’s how important character is to the “deplorables.”
What makes Trump a man of historic greatness is that he wakes up every morning and continues doing his job with strength in the face of the worst character assassination imaginable, led by the Corrupt Journalist Corps. He still booms the economy. He still dares and stares down China on tariffs and trade. He still shows North Korea that he will not be hoodwinked as Bill Clinton and Obama were by promises devoid of results.
He stares down the Iranian Ayatollahs and tightens the vise, despite their bombastic threats and tactical efforts to get the weak-kneed, yellow-livered, gutless and cowardly Europeans to beg Trump to lay off. He stares down those Europeans, insisting mercilessly that they cough up the money those cheap and lazy skinflints never before would pay to support NATO.
So, unlike Obama and Arafat, no Nobel Prize for him. On Trump’s watch, Vladimir Putin no longer extends Russian hegemony into other countries. On his watch, Abu Mazen (Arafat’s henchman, Mahmoud Abbas) finally got cut off for allocating 7 percent of his annual budget — as much as $300 million, coming from monies sent by America and Europe — to support families of terrorists and to make convicted terrorists among the highest-income earners in “Palestine” under their “Pay to Slay” program.
Trump faces 24/7/365 lies, slander, and libel, and he just keeps going. He continues advancing novel approaches to solving the southern border mess that generations of Republicans, including Reagan, failed no less than did Democrats to address. With a porous border, deadly opioids have swamped us for years, brutal criminal animals like MS-13 have slithered in, and the most despicable of villains have smuggled in women and children for sex slavery. Yet, until Trump, no one took tough steps to secure the border. Then, faced with Obama judges in states of the federal appellate Ninth Circuit who routinely strike down his every lawful initiative, he has taken to filling not only two Supreme Court vacancies but also dozens of open federal appellate seats and even more federal district court benches with judges committed to the rule of law and the primacy of the Constitution.
Trump has done all this in the face of the most unbearable personal onslaught. He has had to deal with House Democrats trying to catch him on Russian collusion, Ukrainian collusion, taxes from decades earlier when he was a private citizen in the fields of casino and hotel construction and development. His lawyer, Michael Cohen, turned out to be a criminal who secretly taped clients like him. Trump gave Omarosa a chance to rehabilitate her reputation, and she betrayed that trust. He demonstrated personal loyalty by trying to repay Jeff Sessions for having been the first senator to endorse his presidential candidacy by naming him attorney general, and that loyalty backfired.
The service, brilliance, and true grit of William Barr demonstrates what that job entails in this unfortunate era of personal destruction, and Sen. Sessions was ill-suited for that role. Trump allowed Paul Ryan to gain his misplaced trust on how and when to push for funding a southern border wall. He initially deferred to Republican insiders by appointing Reince Priebus his chief of staff and Sean Spicer his spokesperson until he gained the experience to make better choices.
His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, seemed to him uniquely suited to deal with Putin, but Mike Pompeo’s tenure as Tillerson’s successor shows the difference between the early mistake of a newcomer to the game and the lessons Trump has learned on the job.
Most of all, Trump has survived and remained unbowed. Kathy the CNN comedienne thought it would be a laugh to hold a bloodied decapitated head depicted like the president’s. Madonna spoke publicly about blowing up the White House. A public Shakespeare Festival in Manhattan staged a suggestive assassination. Yet he goes on, even stronger.
The Democrats try to tie up his entire administration with one bogus investigation after another, subpoenaing family, friends, and government officials trying to get work done. And yet he goes on.
He recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moves the American embassy there from Tel Aviv, recognizes Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, throws the PLO out of Washington, pulls the U.S. out of the phony UN “Human Rights Council,” pulls the U.S. out of the disastrous Iran Deal, pulls the U.S. out of the self-destructive “Paris Climate Accords,” stops the nonsensical Trans-Pacific Partnership, brings jobs back to America, secures the nation’s aluminum and steel industries, reduces unemployment to its lowest in 50 years at 3.5 percent and likewise reduces Black and Hispanic unemployment to their all-time lows.
He opened new vistas in hydraulic fracturing in Alaska and expanded energy production in other ways that transmogrified America into so great a net exporter of energy that our economy is not impacted when half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production is closed down. He fights Democrat initiatives to extend abortion into the ninth month and even their policies to make newly born babies “comfortable” while mother and doctor decide whether or not to kill the newborn.
Nothing breaks him. Not libel and not slander. Not accusations by the likes of John Brennan, who voted for communist Gus Hall to be president, that this most patriotic of Americans is a traitor. Not endless state initiatives to keep him off ballots. Not attacks on his wife, his daughter, even the public mocking of his youngest boy. He wakes up every day and does his job with determination and gusto. At press conferences with world leaders, as the Corrupt Journalist Corps strike at him with embarrassing questions while his foreign visitors look on awkwardly, he stands his ground. He does not give an inch. He hits back twice as hard as they do.
Most of us never have had a job in which the personal attacks, the daily venom, create a pervasive and severely toxic atmosphere. But some of us have. Some people in those situations are driven to suicide. Others sustain breakdowns or get so flummoxed daily that they make severe mistakes or burn out. Others are driven to resign. But Donald Trump feeds off it and responds by campaigning vigorously and energetically for reelection.
The great irony is that because he is such a lifelong dealmaker, odds are that, if the Democrats had treated him with a modicum of civility instead of “Resistance,” he would have made “deals” with them that would have infuriated the ideological conservatives among us who were sick and tired of one Bush betrayal after another. He might have appointed his sister to the U.S. Supreme Court. He might have made a deal with Planned Parenthood. But they would not let him. They announced The Resistance from day one, thinking that a bunch of political degenerates like Pelosi, Schumer, [O-] Cortez, Tlaib, Nadler, Omar, Schiff, and Maxine Waters could break him.
They underestimated what history will declare: that Donald Trump actually was one of our greatest presidents, one who achieved more during his two terms than did most who preceded him, including Ronald Reagan.                             
 Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., a high-stakes litigation attorney of more than twenty-five years and an adjunct professor of law of more than fifteen years, is rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. His legal career has included serving as Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerking for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and then litigating at three of America’s most prominent law firms: JonesDay, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. In his rabbinical career, Rabbi Fischer has served several terms on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, is Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, has been Vice President of Zionist Organization of America, and has served on regional boards of the American Jewish Committee, B’nai Brith Hillel, and several others. His writings on contemporary political issues have appeared over the years in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, National Review, American Greatness, The Weekly Standard, and in Jewish media in American and in Israel. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit.
Resource:  https://rabbidov.com/


Sunday, October 6, 2019

Second Part About Why Trump Suggested China Check Out Biden

Nadene Goldfoot                                                 
Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz
Hunter Biden is the son of Joseph Biden, Senator.
Chris Heinz is the youngest son of 
  United States Senator Henry John Heinz III and businesswoman/philanthrpost Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões Ferreira.  Christopher Drake Heinz is an American businessman.  In 1995 Senator John Kerry married Teresa Heinz, widow of John Heinz (a Republican senator from Pennsylvania) and heiress to the Heinz Company fortune.  Therefore, Chris
Heinz is John Kerry's stepson.  

In 2013, a Chinese communist regime's bank signed a deal with a private equity firm in the USA, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, started by Hunter Biden.  This firm was run by Hunter Biden, Jr and the son of John Kerry, Chris Heinz.

It is John Kerry and stepson Chris Heinz who run this $2.4 billion private equity firm.  As a reminder, it was John Kerry who made the deal with Iran about nuclear use of weapons, etc, and Trump has squashed his deal as president.  

Joe Biden was also in China under Obama as well as in Ukraine.  He was in China on official business for Obama and took his son, Hunter, with him.  They flew over aboard Air Force 2  Joe met with President Xi Jinping.  When they arrived in China, Joe and Hunter Biden and his daughter, Finnegan, were greeted by Chinese children carrying flowers.  The delegation was then whisked to a meeting with Vice President Li Yuanchao and talks with President Xi Jinping. 

That's fine but they went over at either an inopportune time or an opportune one.  They got to China 10 days before the deal was signed.  Some timing!  Suggestive?  Helpful?  It was Hunter Biden who signed the deal for his hedge fund within days of his visit.  It benefited Hunter's hedge fund with the Bank of China.  This included some deal-making that was on the agenda.  Rosemond's deal is valued at $1 billion, and was later boosted to $l.5 billion.  

Rosemond Seneca and the Bank of China created a $1 billion investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), a name that showed who was involved.  Bohai or Bo Hai is the innermost gulf of the Yellow  Sea, and was a reference to the Chinese stake in the company.  The "RS" refers to Rosemont Seneca.  The "T" was for Thornton, the partnering firm, The Thornton Group who are the fund lenders.  

Hunter and and Chris Heinz were friends, probably because John Kerry and Joe Biden were colleagues in the Senate for decades.  

This involved the biggest fund lenders in China, commented a partnering firm, the Thornton Group.  

It probably is a waste of time to warn China about the Bidens doing anything corrupt.  Their laws are not necessarily like our laws.  Most likely their bank is profiting from the Bidens as well.  However, it could help President Trump to be able to explain Joe Biden's dealings  in and with China, since our Democrats are so hot to bare any dealings that Trump might have had anywhere, like Russia.  Most of the country is in shock at Trump's outburst to check China, and this is why.  Perhaps it is Joe Biden and John Kerry who were breaking USA laws.  


Hunter Biden, a partner with Heinz in the investment firm Rosemont Seneca, joined Burisma shortly after another of the firm’s partners, Devon Archer, also had accepted an invitation to the board.
Chris Heinz in 2014 then parted ways with both men, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer,  after raising concerns about corruption in Ukraine and questions about appearance.  At the time,  Joe Biden was serving in the Obama administration and cracking down on corruption in Ukraine.  
"According to the report, Biden said he joined Burisma at the urging of the former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who was on the company’s board, and because he believed helping to create Ukraine’s energy independence would help ​shield the country from Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Joseph Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, when he became the sixth-youngest senator in American history. Biden was re-elected six times and was the fourth most senior senator when he resigned to assume the vice presidency in 2009.
The Burisma post has become part of the focus of a whistleblower’s complaint that claims President Trump contacted Ukrainian President Volodymyr to investigate Hunter Biden and his father, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
Are Republicans  happy about this find?  Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said on Saturday it was "completely inappropriate" for President Trump to urge China to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.  This seems to be more of a spreading a protective tent over Biden because he had been  a senator for so long.  That is, if Trump had actually urged China to do so.  So far it's all hear-say.  

Update: 10/10/19 Also, check out this video on Hunter Biden in China:http://www.dickmorris.com/hunter-biden-aided-chinese-firm-blacklisted-by-us-lunch-alert/
 However, Ahead of President Obama and President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping holding a meeting at an informal retreat in June 2013, Collins cosponsored legislation that would expand American law to authorize the Commerce Department impose "countervailing duties" in response to subsidized imports through mandating the Commerce Department investigate in order to determine if currency manipulation counts as a form of subsidization. 
In April 2018, Collins stated her belief that the US needed "a more nuanced approach" in dealing with China but gave President Trump "credit for levying these tariffs against the Chinese, with whom we've talked for a decade about their unfair trade practices and their theft of intellectual property from American firms."  She expects toughness out of Trump with China but not too much of it.
Update: 10/10/19: https://nationalfile.com/breaking-nancy-pelosis-son-was-exec-at-gas-company-that-did-business-in-ukraine/?fbclid=IwAR1bHxTkFApjJpNJ8vqU0oRSDgtpUJ4XIKS7IMEJ7KG_gh9uaDyScNoQDe0  
Resource: Book:  CLINTON CASH, by Peter Schweizer,, Peter Franz Schweizer (born November 24, 1964) is an American investigative journalist, novelist, author, and political consultant. 
Book:  SECRET EMPIRES:  HOw THE AMERICAN POLITICAL CLASS HIDES CORRUPTION AND ENRICHES FAMILY AND FRIENDS by Peter Schweizer, excerpted in the New York Post.  Secret Empires provided details about the overseas business conducted by Hunter Biden, particularly in his employment with entities such as Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
Update: 10/13/19  https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/FMfcgxwDrlTfNltLdBmhlBztzWWGdzld Hunter  Biden intends to step down from position.on board of Chinese company. 
 https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Kerry
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7519043/Chris-Heinz-split-business-partner-Hunter-Biden-board-seat-Ukrainian-energy-company.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490
https://nypost.com/2019/09/29/hunter-biden-had-falling-out-with-business-partner-over-ukraine-gig/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5507429/Bidens-son-Hunter-deal-Bank-China-fathers-trip.html
Update:  https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2020/01/2017-scene-of-wanting-trump-impeached.html