On the menu today: Our webathon is a good reason to look at Hunter Biden, and how one lucrative make-work job after another for the son of a powerful senator and vice president gradually grew into a tangled web of shady foreign businessmen, fabulously expensive gifts, spectacularly implausible explanations from the Bidens, a wide-ranging network of shell companies, and extraordinarily suspicions financial transactions involving the Biden family. (Hey, thank goodness eight Republicans brought all U.S. House of Representatives activity to a screeching halt this week, right? Matt Gaetz dismissed the House GOP’s investigation of Hunter Biden as “failure theater.”)
A Political Ticking Time Bomb for the Bidens
We’re running a webathon, focusing on National Review’s excellent coverage of the scandals involving the Biden family. Since this is “my day” in the fundraising effort, if you choose to kick in a little today, it will help me look good in the eyes of the NR Powers That Be.
No one has been more on top of the Hunter Biden story and all its legal twists and turns, day in and day out — and really, year in and year out — than our Andy McCarthy. From Hunter Biden’s “sugar bro,” to the chicanery of the plea-bargain effort, to the spectacular implosion of the plea deal, to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s dodging of questions, to the implausible explanations for the slow and hesitant actions of the “special” counsel David Weiss, to Hunter Biden’s increasingly absurd legal counter-offensives, nobody concisely explains the law, the procedures, the precedents, and the double-dealing better than Andy.
Between his writing and his podcast, The McCarthy Report, Andy’s a one-man army of insightful and incisive legal analysis. But he’s not alone. When it comes to the infamy of the president’s son, we’ve got a crack news team in — er, wait, maybe I should avoid the term “crack” — we’ve got an excellent news team in Ryan Mills, Caroline Downey, David Zimmermann, and others.
Dan McLaughlin laid out the absurd contrast between the hounding of Clarence Thomas and his family and the hand-waving forgiveness of the Biden family. Charlie Cooke explained how there is no conceivable innocent explanation for Joe Biden’s using a pseudonym in communications with his son about his son’s business, the formation of 20 shell companies to move money, and the 20 phone conversations with his son’s business partners. Rich illuminated how “the Biden ‘brand’ was the business, and the Bidens, as such, were beneficiaries. Foreign entities sent $24 million sloshing around Biden accounts, including almost two dozen shell companies, between 2014 and 2019.”
Allow me to take you back to September 2019, when I wrote what was, at that time, the most detailed and complete timeline of Hunter Biden’s checkered employment history, and all of his gradually accumulating ethical breaches, conflicts of interests, minor scandals, and unsavory business associates.
The extremely abbreviated version is that fresh out of law school, Hunter Biden became a $100,000-per-year consultant to MBNA (the biggest bank in Delaware), and within two years had been named a “senior vice president” — at age 28. He left the bank to found the lobbying firm Oldaker Biden & Belair, and then helped purchase a hedge fund where his uncle, James Biden, told the employees on the first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” That hedge fund had a particularly tumultuous history; Hunter Biden went on to co-found Rosemont Seneca, which took off like a rocket based upon its ability to secure meetings with wealthy Chinese investors. Then it was the Burisma board, Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming, the gifts of giant diamonds, and, well . . . you’re likely familiar with the more recent chapters of the story.
Just about every step of Hunter Biden’s career has seen him serving as a conduit between his father and someone wealthy and powerful who wanted to influence U.S. government policy. For part of this time, he was, in his own words, “smoking crack every fifteen minutes” during part of this time period. He had no practical experience with Ukrainian oil or natural-gas markets, or with Romanian real estate, or with electricity distribution in Hong Kong, or with managing Chinese investment funds, or with developing energy resources for a Chinese state-owned company, or with investment and construction in Russia. And yet he was hired to do vague or unspecified “work” on all of those things. And the Bidens insist that no one at any time ever expressed any interest in altering or influencing U.S. government policies.
In the Biden family’s version of events, large corporations, both in the U.S. and abroad, regularly hire crack addicts to consult on their most important decisions, and it’s just entirely coincidental that Hunter has the same surname as one of the most important officials in the U.S. government. In the world of the Bidens, you just decide to be an artist one day, throw some paint on some canvases, and then wealthy Democratic Party donors, with no political interests at all, spend $1.4 million on those paintings! And then, entirely coincidentally, one gets appointed to a presidential commission.
Hunter Biden’s multi-decade career as a lucratively compensated channel to his father was always a legal and political ticking time bomb for Joe Biden in the White House. Hunter’s unsavory clients even made other Biden staffers nervous. Adam Entous, writing in The New Yorker:
Hunter’s meeting with Li and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time, but some of Biden’s advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father’s visit, would expose the Vice-President to criticism. The former senior White House aide told me that Hunter’s behavior invited questions about whether he “was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn’t done in that White House. Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.” When I asked members of Biden’s staff whether they discussed their concerns with the Vice-President, several of them said that they had been too intimidated to do so. “Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a former adviser told me. Others said that they were wary of hurting his feelings. One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, “got deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It’s like you’ve hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him.”
Now, when a staffer raises the issue, “Hey boss, I’m worried that your son’s shady business partners could create an image problem for us,” and the boss either starts screaming at the staffer in a rage or he suddenly descends into a despondent gloom, it is a giant glaring sign that something is terribly wrong, and that no, there is no innocent explanation.
That David Ignatius column urging Biden not to run in 2024 included the sentences, “He should have stopped his son Hunter from joining the board of a Ukrainian gas company and representing companies in China — and he certainly should have resisted Hunter’s attempts to impress clients by getting Dad on the phone.” A lot of Democrats know, deep in their guts, that this whole situation stinks, but few want to admit that the Biden critics were right all along.
You know there are a lot of news organizations that never wanted to touch this story. You see the talking heads who, still to this day, echo the administration’s line that this is a story about “a father who loves his son.” On social media, the reflexive response is, “What about Jared Kushner?!” (We’ve written about that, too!) This ignores that the explicit promise of the Biden campaign in 2020 was that old Joe would deliver something better, something more ethical and upright in the “battle for the soul of America.”
Anyway, think of the webathon as that tip jar in your coffee shop. Kick in even a little, and you’ll get an appreciative smile. Or, if you’re not already a subscriber, sign up for NRPlus. Or think about making next summer’s vacation a jaunt to Alaska with the NR crew.
ADDENDUM: I know the effort to make Donald Trump the next speaker of the House is destined to go nowhere, but I, for one, think it would be an appropriate punishment for all involved.
A bit more seriously, over in that other Washington publication I write for, I looked at how Trump stayed out of the McCarthy–Gaetz fight. The former president, for all his considerable influence over the rest of the Republican Party, is hesitant to take a stance that would allow his detractors to paint him as going soft, going “establishment,” or at odds with the populist grassroots. For a little while, Trump was talking up the Covid vaccines, and it was one of the few times his fanbase booed him. Earlier this year, in a Fox News interview, Trump said of the vaccines: “I really don’t want to talk about it because, as a Republican, it’s not a great thing to talk about, because for some reason it’s just not.”
Trump rules the GOP . . . but the populist base steers Trump.