In Chicago, Democrats took the curtain-opening night of their national convention to inflate the Biden presidency into the stuff of Mount Rushmore. We doubt that this is the inflation Biden will be remembered for, even by Democrats, whose leaders have arranged to have the nation’s disappearing president flown to a beach a couple of thousand miles away while they spend these next three days pretending the Biden presidency never happened — or, at least, that their new champion, Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, had nothing to do with it.
A more realistic portrayal of Biden has been composed by the House impeachment investigation into Biden family influence peddling. That inquiry, jointly conducted by the Republican-led Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means committees, has produced a 291-page report extensively documenting the monetization of the “Biden Brand.”
That’s the euphemism that Joe Biden’s collaborators — his son Hunter, his brother Jim, and their associates in the family business — used as they sold access to Biden and his political influence to agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes. Most alarmingly, that includes communist China, which accounts for much of the staggering $27 million that the self-dealing enterprise generated between the years 2014 and 2019 alone.
The report’s details are not new, but there is jaw-dropping effect in reading them marshaled together.
There is Hunter scooping up a tidy $3.5 million from the Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, with the then-vice president hopping on one of Hunter’s “business” calls and telling Baturina to “be good to my boy.”
There is Hunter prying $1 million from crooked Romanian real-estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu to intervene on his behalf with the government in Bucharest, even as his father lectured that government to step up its anti-corruption efforts. It’s a play the Biden Brand practically perfected — running it again in Ukraine.
Even ignoring his drug addiction and personal recklessness, Hunter had no value added other than his last name to Burisma, the corrupt energy company controlled by Mykola Zlochevsky, and his deputy Vadym Pozharsky. Yet they paid him millions to sit on Burisma’s board, an obvious purchase of access to the vice president as Zlochevsky, holed up in Dubai, dodged Ukrainian and British investigators.
Sleazy, but these chapters pale in comparison to the Biden Brand’s intimacy with the regime in Beijing. Not only trading on his father’s name but hitching a ride on Air Force Two, Hunter introduced the then–vice president to Jonathan Li, whose regime-backed firm — with such partners as the Bank of China and the China Development Bank — forged an investment fund with Hunter and his associates. In 2014, the then–vice president participated in plans for a partnership between a firm controlled by Hunter and what the report describes as “a $300 billion Chinese financial services company closely connected to the Chinese Communist Party.” Before talks broke down, it was anticipated that Joe Biden would sit on the board once his term as vice president ended.
And the Bidens hit pay dirt with CEFC, an energy conglomerate that doubled as a regime influence operation. CEFC gave the Biden family and its business partners $3 million for sourcing potential deals during Biden’s vice presidency. CEFC paid millions to Hunter and his associates, who planned a 10 percent cut for “the big guy.” An astonishing $5 million began flowing just days after Hunter warned a CEFC executive that he was sitting next to his father and the two of them were demanding to know “why the commitment had not been fulfilled,” vowing that they would make “him regret not following my direction.”
The report illustrates the complex web of LLCs that the Bidens and their associates used to conceal the flow of payments from foreign agents to Biden family accounts, a pattern reminiscent of classic money-laundering schemes. The influence peddling worked domestically, too, with family members leveraging Joe Biden’s positions of public trust to obtain over $8 million in “loans” from Democratic benefactors, most of it not paid back and much of it not actually supported by loan documentation.
Obviously, this wide-ranging scheme should have been the subject of an aggressive law-enforcement investigation. Instead, the Biden-Harris Justice Department straitjacketed investigators who tried to pursue leads, forbade the questioning of witnesses about the president’s connections to the family business, and tipped off defense counsel to the agents’ pursuit of incriminating evidence. Biden-Harris DOJ prosecutors tried to spin the case as solely focused on Hunter, whose tax problems were notorious.
Dragging their feet year after year, DOJ first tried to disappear the case with no charges. When IRS whistleblower investigations exposed that stratagem, Biden-Harris prosecutors tried to make the tax and firearms charges go away through a sweetheart plea. The president’s son was finally indicted only after that gambit imploded when a federal judge questioned its terms. But by then, it was mission accomplished — DOJ had waited so long to file charges that any crimes arising out of Joe Biden’s term as vice president were time-barred under the statute of limitations.
House Republicans never had the numbers to seek impeachment articles against Biden — they barely got the impeachment inquiry approved. A serious impeachment investigation would, of course, have started with Biden’s dereliction of duty on the southern border and his usurpations of congressional power, which the Supreme Court has routinely slapped down. But the Biden influence-peddling scheme easily qualifies as impeachable conduct.
Obviously, none of this featured during the first night of the convention, but it is an essential part of any record of the Biden-Harris administration.