Don’t expect boasts of “We’re No. 1” from the White House or Wilmington, but that doesn’t diminish the singular, ah, achievement. Both Bidens have earned their brushes with infamy.
Courtesy of Fox News, here’s a headline for the ages: “Biden, Hunter make presidential history as first father-son duo under separate investigations.”
The president paid his dues with his serially reckless handling of classified information, with the added bonus that the gentle probe of him inadvertently draws a comparison to how roughly Donald Trump is being treated by the same Department of Justice. When it came to the supposedly secret documents Biden had scattered around like so much birdseed, the feds couldn’t even be bothered to search for more, leaving the job to his lawyers for over a month.
It’s a sweet deal if you can get it.
No sudden SWAT team raid for Biden, no pictures of documents scattered on the floor, no Deep State agents whispering suggestions to reporters about the potential sale of America’s secrets to enemy states. Even the fact that the first documents were found on Nov. 2 was kept secret through the midterm election and for two months after.
The official party line remains that Good ol’ Uncle Joe just made a mistake. He meant no harm, and the FBI investigation will prove it!
A similar favoritism is playing out in slow motion in the ostensible tax and lobbying probe of Hunter, now in its fifth year. Instead of charging or not charging the president’s son, Attorney General Merrick Garland is proving he’s a bitter political hack by trying to bury the case deeper than Jimmy Hoffa.
Yet beyond the history noted by Fox, its headline also spotlights unfinished business when it cites the “separate” Biden investigations. If there is any honest justice left in Justice, sooner rather than later there will be a single investigation involving both father and son.
That is also something they’ve earned.
Joe and Hunter clearly were in cahoots on the influence-peddling scam that netted the family tens of millions of dollars. In fact, the more we learn, the more convinced I am that Joe’s role has been underestimated.
I believe the full truth, if we ever get it, will show that Joe was the mastermind and Hunter was the frontman and conduit for the payoffs. That’s the only arrangement that explains both the extraordinary amounts of money involved and why Joe still maintains the ridiculous lie he never even talked to Hunter about his son’s business.
The working theory for most people following the story has included the assumption that Hunter followed his father around the world as Joe, then veep, served as the Obama administration’s point man. According to this view, Hunter, the ultimate prodigal son, unscrupulously seized the opportunity to cut deals with foreign governments and companies in China, Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere.
Joe, meanwhile, gave the appearance of a loving, permissive father marked by grief and a serious statesman whose assumed integrity kept him far above grubby schemes. Remarkably, that image still has currency in some media and public quarters despite the fact that Joe managed to become very rich during a lifetime in government.
While he got modest spoils from his son’s business, according to information on Hunter’s abandoned laptop, they don’t come near to explaining the president’s extensive wealth.
That’s why Tony Bobulinski is such an important player. His bombshell statement that he met with Joe to discuss a big China deal, and his authentication of an email saying Joe was the “big guy” in line for a secret 10% cut, suggest a possible pattern that took place over years.
Bobulinski also said, and emails show, that Hunter called his father “my chairman” when discussing deals.
Joe’s playing dumb
In addition, the Daily Mail reported Friday about a plan for Joe and Hunter to participate in a phone call in late 2017 to set up a multimillion-dollar deal to sell American liquified natural gas to China.
Yet Joe still claims, like Sgt. Schultz, he knew nothing, nothing about Hunter’s business. It’s such an outlandish assertion that it raises questions about why he would go to such an extreme to declare his innocence. Even CNN is finally calling him out on it.
One possible reason he’s sticking to his story is that, if he admitted knowing about the schemes, he would face followup questions along the lines of “What did you know and when did you know it? And what did you do about it?”
That would be the beginning of the end of the charade and reveal perhaps the greatest corruption scandal in American history. Ultimately, it would show we have a president who has been compromised by taking money from our adversaries.
If true, a full trail of evidence would show that Joe, based on his personal knowledge of individuals in foreign governments and large businesses, would first identify the targets. Then it fell to Hunter and Joe’s brother Jim to make the pitches to them, with a promise that dear old dad was onboard and would deliver help, protection, favoritism, a good word — whatever was needed.
The value of such promises from the family of the vice president of the United States would explain why the targets were willing to pay the Bidens so many millions. The buyers, all of whom had checkered pasts and thus needed help, were getting the kind of American power that money had never been able to buy.
Joe’s likely prime role also could explain why Garland has been terrified of pressing forward with the Hunter case he inherited. It’s such a glaring conflict of interest for him to investigate the son of his boss that it should have been turned over to a special counsel from the beginning of Joe’s presidency.
But doing that would light a fuse because any prosecutor worth the name would quickly confront clear evidence that Joe took part in meetings and received some money from the schemes. From there, it would be off to the races about the extent of his involvement, with the president becoming a subject of the probe and ultimately a target.
Ironically, Garland might be stumbling into that very scenario because of Joe’s mishandling of classified documents. If special counsel Robert Hur sees any connection between the documents and the influence-peddling schemes, he would be compelled to merge the two cases — which could doom the Biden presidency.
Even if Hur and Garland try to cut Biden breaks, an energized GOP Congress will blow the whistle. The Oversight Committee, headed by James Comer of Kentucky, already has zeroed in on the “big guy.”
Citing whistleblowers and other evidence, Comer minces no words, saying: “I want to be clear: this is an investigation of Joe Biden, and that’s where our focus will be.”
Tick, tick, tick . . .
