This is Noah Rothman with you again today — and, for that matter, tomorrow. Jim Geraghty returns from a well-deserved break next week.
On the menu today: House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer released a memo on Wednesday revealing additional evidence pertaining to the compensation Hunter Biden received from foreign sources while his father served as vice president, and it’s a doozy.
More Shady Dealings Come to Light
The 19-page document contains allegations substantiated by redacted bank records that purport to show Hunter Biden was compensated to the tune of millions of dollars not just for being the son of the sitting vice president but for demonstrating the ability to bring the vice president to the table.
For example, in 2014, a shell company associated with Biden business partner Devon Archer received $3.5 million from Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina. When the Obama administration sanctioned Russians with connections to the Kremlin in response to Moscow’s first invasion of Ukraine, Baturina was not on the list. Hunter earned $142,300 from Khazakh oligarch Kenes Rakishev, allegedly to finance a sportscar, shortly after which then-vice president Joe Biden joined Rakishev and his son for a dinner meeting in Washington. Hunter Biden assumed his lucrative role on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma only after meeting with the firm’s executives in Lake Como, Italy. After that meeting, Joe Biden made his sojourn to Ukraine. The following year, Joe Biden attended a second dinner meeting with Hunter Biden and Devon Archer as well as Baturina, Moscow mayor Yury Luzkhov, and Burisma executive Vadym Pozharsky.
All told, the committee alleges that Hunter Biden and his business partners earned more than $20 million in shady payments from his associates in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and China while his father served as Barack Obama’s vice president. The committee’s findings suggest that Hunter Biden wasn’t selling the “illusion” of access to the highest echelons of the U.S. government at all. He delivered.
“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 in a statement. “It appears no real services were provided other than access to the Biden network, including Joe Biden himself.”
The House Oversight Committee has not yet alleged that the president benefited financially from these transactions, or that Hunter Biden’s clients either enjoyed access to other government officials or secured advantageous alterations to U.S. government policy as a result of his actions. Nevertheless, the sequence of events Comer lays out is troubling. Joe Biden’s defenders never fail to remind us that he is a doting father. It’s therefore reasonable to conclude that the president regards his son’s financial security as a contribution to his own interests – even in the absence of direct payments to Joe Biden himself.
Still, in a Fox News Channel appearance on Tuesday night, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy conspicuously dodged a question from Sean Hannity about whether the president had violated “the bribery statute.” The speaker’s caution suggests House GOP leadership is still inclined to be careful about the specific allegations they’re willing to hurl at the president. But defenders of the Biden family who rest their defense of the president’s conduct on those grounds are crawling out onto a thin reed.
If Hunter Biden was selling access to the vice president, was that access the only deliverable his foreign clients expected? Did they pay millions of dollars only for a grainy iPhone photo with the vice president? Even if no U.S. policy was amended to suit his clients, access to the vice president and other cabinet members isn’t nothing.
For example, the Comer memo alleges that Hunter Biden met with a Kazakhstani oligarch in February 2014, after which the oligarch asked Archer to arrange for then-secretary of state John Kerry to travel to Kazakhstan. Archer replied that he would “ensure” that trip happened only “if we have some business started as planned. Was Kerry’s late 2015 swing through Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, in any way influenced by this request? It may be impossible to prove either way. But if it was, there is a colorable argument that such an arrangement would constitute an emolument — or, at the very least, a misuse of taxpayer dollars.
Regardless, it all stinks. Which brings us to the looming prospect of an impeachment inquiry targeting Joe Biden.
The inexorable logic of House Republicans’ claims is that the proper remedy for the kind of corruption they are alleging is an impeachment inquiry. On this prospect, the GOP seems to be of two minds. In late July, Speaker McCarthy reportedly told his conference that no such inquiry would be sought by the House majority until and unless the evidence justified it. At the time, McCarthy seemed to his Republican colleagues to be unconvinced. Representative Bob Good, a conservative member of the House majority and a McCarthy critic, said that the gesture of even broaching impeachment was enough to satisfy more zealous members of the conference. But as the evidence of Joe Biden’s complicity mounts, that may not last.
Meanwhile, the party’s more moderate (and more electorally vulnerable) members in the House are still vocally skittish about the prospect of impeachment. “So, the question to me right now is do the investigations — are they producing enough facts and evidence that warrant taking it to the next step?” said New York representative Mike Lawler. “I don’t think it’s there at the moment, but these committees are doing their job.” Pennsylvania representative Brian Fitzpatrick agreed. To pursue impeachment now functionally converts that constitutional remedy for impropriety in office into “a vote of no confidence in the British parliament,” Fitzpatrick added. “I don’t want to see our country go down that path.”
That’s a valid concern, though it likely masks the more politically pertinent fact that the Senate is controlled by Democrats. Barring Earth-shattering, irrefutably damning evidence implicating Joe Biden in a bribery scheme, partisan dynamics ensure that any impeachment recommendation from the House would be a dead letter in the upper chamber of Congress. Nevertheless, what Fitzpatrick and other Republicans are getting at is that impeachment has become a toothless threat. It no longer deters corruption. And that’s a problem.
Given the emphasis the Constitution’s Framers placed on impeachment as a mechanism for dealing with corruption in government — from the executive branch and its officers to the judiciary — they probably would have expected to see more impeachments than we have seen over the last two centuries. In their experience, impeachment in the British context was an extraordinary but not uncommon remedy for everything from treason to bribery to gross maladministration. Enlightenment era thinkers who looked to the Roman republic for guidance would have seen numerous examples of onetime public servants tried on allegations of corruption — a phenomenon common enough that observers could be forgiven for thinking the Romans regarded it as a banal act of civic hygiene.
In the American context, however, successful impeachments are vanishingly rare. No one in elected or confirmed office sits awake at night fearing the prospect of their removal from office by Congress. Nor are they likely to be overly concerned that they may become the target of something as aspirational as a censure resolution, as Bill Clinton’s frustratingly positive reputation with the voting public indicates.
Without that mechanism like the one Representative Fitzpatrick rejects, Congress can only impose costs on malefactors in positions of power if the politics of the moment allow it. That has become untenable. The trepidation of the Republican conference’s moderates notwithstanding, the details emerging from the Oversight Committee’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances may soon force the congressional GOP’s hand. So, they’re faced with a conundrum: Do they risk it all on what is almost certain to be a failed effort to restore integrity to the highest office in the land, or must they let this appearance of corruption slide because the political costs are just too high?
Call it the $20 million question.
ADDENDUM: At least 36 people are dead on the Hawaiian island of Maui following terrible, fast-moving wildfires that swept across it and two other islands. Hundreds of Hawaiians are displaced today and thousands more are without access to power and emergency services. Images of the damage from the blaze indicate that the fires ran right up to the coast, forcing trapped and terrified Hawaiians to flee into the ocean if only to escape the heat and smoke. For those who want to help, the Washington Post has compiled a list of verified organizations accepting donations to help those who have been affected by the wildfires.