Biden dangerously draining Strategic Petroleum Reserve like 'campaign credit card, industry warns

President Biden is recklessly draining the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to insulate his party from the political fallout of high oil prices before the upcoming midterm elections, claims the president of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, Tim Stewart. 

Stocks of crude oil in the SPR fell 6.9 million barrels in the week ending Sept. 16 to 427.2 million barrels, the lowest level since August 1984, according to Department of Energy data.

"This is the first time in history, honestly, that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been used as a campaign credit card to buy down political risk for the midterms," Stewart said Friday on the "Just the News, Not Noise" TV show. 

"Let me put it in perspective if I could," he added. "At the current rate, the U.S. is selling more oil out of its emergency reserves than the production of most medium-sized OPEC countries like Algeria or Angola. We're selling twice as much per day than we're producing out of Alaska. That puts us somewhere between Exxon and Conoco in terms of ... the impact we're having on the daily supply — and this is happening without new oil going into replace it."

As Just the News revealed recently, the president's son Hunter Biden sought to land billions of dollars in deals in 2017-18 helping executives in communist China gain access to U.S. natural gas, oil and energy infrastructure, according to internal business documents and interviews with congressional investigators.

Show cohost John Solomon, who broke the story of Hunter Biden's pursuit of U.S. energy deals on behalf of Chinese clients, asked Stewart for his reaction to "the idea that the president's son ... could be working behind the scenes quietly to take our great energy wealth, send it over to China, while the boss, the president, the 'Big Guy' that they refer to in the documents, he's trying to lower our reliance [on fossil fuels] and keep us from using our energy wealth here."

Noting that "the oil and gas trading business ... is very, very complex," Stewart said: "I've been in this business for 25 years or so. And I can tell you, I am no more qualified to be a trader or a broker than an influence-peddling son of a former vice president. [Hunter Biden] had nothing to offer except for access, and access to his father, who in turn could make a call. And that's really what's wrong with Washington right now. And that is why this story is so so troubling to many of us."

Stewart decried the "sheer hypocrisy" of Joe BIden "spending decades beating up on the oil and gas industry, profiting by it for that four years when he's not in public office, and then coming back in and trying to to hamstring and to kneecap our industry again."

Like Stewart, New York Rep. Claudia Tenney is also blasting Biden for sacrificing U.S. energy security to his own partisan political interests.

“For purely cynical political reasons, Joe Biden needed to lower the price of gas before this midterm election, to try to bring back the numbers for the Democrats and to try to bring back his abysmal poll ratings," Tenney told the John Solomon Reports podcast.