Earlier this month, I wrote that President Biden was in denial about the ethical problems surrounding his family, particularly the way that his son, his brother, and apparently many other members of his family have collected more than $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies, seemingly cashing in on the family name and possibly peddling influence. You would think Biden’s denial was self-evident in the way that Biden didn’t merely insist that his son Hunter had never broken the law, but repeatedly insisting, “my son has done nothing wrong.” But it wasn’t too hard to find people who thought I was the worst person imaginable for making this contention.
This morning, in another demonstration of how Biden instinctively rejects things he doesn’t want to hear, NBC News reports that Biden literally refuses to listen to any advice about how to limit the political fallout from his son’s actions, which now includes a guilty plea to two counts of willful failure to pay income taxes.
President Joe Biden has made it clear to his closest aides in no uncertain terms that he not only will reject any political advice that he try to limit his son Hunter’s public visibility but that he also doesn’t want to hear such suggestions, according to three people familiar with the discussions.
His message, as one of the sources described it, was: “Hands off my family.”
The blunt directive helps explain why in recent months the father-and-son public appearances seem to have increased in tandem with intensified scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s legal troubles.
The NBC News report notes that one reason President Biden wants his son Hunter around him often is a concern of what Hunter will get up to if he isn’t around his father.
For Biden, keeping his son — a recovering drug addict — close means keeping him safe, people close to the president say. Behind the Hunter Biden photo-ops and the state dinner invitations, they say, is an existential concern that weighs on the president daily: If he loosens his grip on his son, who or what will replace it — and to what end?
“It’s consumed him,” a person close to the president said.
That would argue President Biden isn’t in denial in at least one way, recognizing that if his son has a lot of unsupervised free time on his hands, he is more likely to relapse into his addictions, and God knows what other bad decisions he may make, legal or illegal.
There is a conscious intertwining and blurring of the lines between Hunter Biden’s once extremely serious drug addiction and his other violations of the law. People who are “smoking crack every fifteen minutes,” as Hunter Biden described it in his own autobiography, are not known for diligently paying their taxes, or exercising prudent judgment in business associates. People with serious drug addictions desperately need money to get more drugs, and a person like Hunter BIden was constantly running into shady businessmen from places like China who just wanted to give him a nearly three-carat diamond as a gift — a diamond Hunter claims he subsequently lost. It is reasonable to surmise that some of Hunter Biden’s bad decisions in unsavory and, in at least one case, indicted business partners were driven by his addiction. But the instinctive sympathy that many people have for drug addicts should not be used as a shield to deflect from the legitimate concerns that Hunter Biden was selling his family’s name to any foreign entity willing to pay.