A favorite saying among insiders is that two weeks is a lifetime in politics, meaning anything can happen. In Joe Biden’s case, a mere five days was enough to turn his world upside down.
The news Saturday that more classified documents were found in his Delaware home ends a bizarre week that suddenly put Biden’s presidency in peril and further damaged the sagging credibility of the Department of Justice.
When reports emerged last Monday that multiple classified documents were found in an office Biden used after leaving the White House as vice president, the propaganda media circled the wagons around him by insisting he’s no Donald Trump. They had a point — up to a point.
But when reports two days later said a second batch of supposedly secret papers was found in Biden’s Delaware garage, the wall of media protection showed some cracks as the differences between the presidents’ cases narrowed. And when an additional classified page was found in Biden’s Delaware library, and a special prosecutor was appointed Thursday to investigate him, the defenders made a hasty retreat.
Then came Saturday’s finding, which proves the president was serially sloppy with America’s secrets.
The result is that Trump now looks like a lucky man while Biden looks like a man whose luck has run out.
It’s been a feature of Trump’s political career that he’s been fortunate in his enemies. Say “Hillary Clinton” and it’s enough said.
But Trump’s foolish standoff with Justice over classified documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago put him on course for criminal charges, especially when Attorney General Merrick Garland put a hard-charging special prosecutor on the case.
Biden clearly enjoyed Trump’s predicament, having earlier urged that his predecessor be prosecuted for his conduct leading up to the Capitol riot. Asked about Trump’s handling of classified documents in September, Biden crowed on “60 Minutes” that he didn’t understand “how anyone could be that irresponsible.”
Thanks to that quote and his own misconduct, Biden has come to Trump’s rescue, with his multiple document stashes making it nearly impossible for Trump to be prosecuted if Biden isn’t. All the more so because of the way Garland, solidifying his reputation as a bitter partisan hack, kept secret the first Biden document finding of Nov. 2 until after the midterm elections and seemed to be hiding each new finding until it was forced into the open.
In fact, it was only after leaks that Garland felt the need to even the presidential playing field and appoint veteran prosecutor Robert Hur to probe Garland’s boss. The curse of interesting times strikes again.
Yet to see Biden’s case as merely a legal, politically inconvenient parallel to Trump’s is to miss the much larger potential for trouble the president faces.
GOP will seek answers
All the president’s men and media helpers won’t be able to limit his predicament to the classified documents. For one thing, the timing of the discoveries couldn’t be worse, coming just as Republicans take control of the House with a pledge to end the see-no-evil approach Dems took to Biden family corruption.
Long before the document bombshells, GOP leaders vowed to follow the millions upon millions of dollars that Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, Joe’s brother, got abroad from selling access to Joe. Based on the contents of Hunter’s laptop, it’s certain that Joe benefited from foreign payments.
As Rep. James Comer of Kentucky put it, “We’re not investigating Hunter Biden. We’re investigating Joe Biden.”
The quest will be to find how much money Joe Biden reaped and what favors he did in return, primarily as vice president and even possibly as president.
The second reason why the document scandal can’t be isolated is because the papers, some of which reportedly involved foreign nations, were found in locations related to the family scandals. It’s as if the two separate streams are joined as one.
For example, Hunter lives in the Delaware house, raising concerns he might have seen the documents, which were not secured, and disclosed the contents.
Also, the first batch turned up in the Penn Biden Center, a sinecure the Ivy League school put together to give Biden a place to hang his hat when he left the vice presidency in early 2017.
Starting then, the University of Pennsylvania paid him an astounding $900,000 through 2019, despite just nine reported public engagements with students. In addition, The Post, citing public records, reports the university got $54.6 million in donations from China from 2014 through June 2019, including $23.1 million in anonymous gifts starting in 2016.
Many universities received big donations from China as the Communist regime tried to ingratiate itself in America — and sometimes plant spies — but the windfall to Penn coincided with Hunter’s business ventures in China.
Hunter, Joe enmeshed
Recall that in December of 2013, the son flew to Beijing on Air Force 2 with his father, who was the Obama administration’s point man on the country. By the time they headed home, Hunter had secured a $1.5 billion investment from a bank controlled by the government.
A similar pattern played out in other countries, especially Ukraine.
Not surprisingly, Hunter played a role in his father’s relationship to Penn. According to Fox News, laptop emails show the former vice president wanted his son to attend key meetings with then-university president Amy Gutmann.
One 2016 exchange has Hunter tell a business partner he might need to reschedule a meeting with the prime minister of the Ivory Coast because “the Guttman [sic] mtg is a must-attend for me per Dad.”
Other emails show discussions of a possible role for Hunter at the center.
Dozens of exchanges were between Hunter and Kathy Chung. She had served as an aide to two senators before Hunter recommended her to his father and she was hired in 2012 as Joe’s gatekeeper in the VP office.
Fox found at least two instances where Chung also helped facilitate Hunter’s influence-peddling schemes.
In October 2015, Hunter and Chung arranged a video conference between Joe Biden and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, at a time when Hunter hoped to do business with Slim.
Earlier that year, Fox reports, “Chung sent Hunter and other members of the Biden family an invitation to attend a State Department luncheon hosted by his father honoring Chinese President Xi Jinping.”
As Joe Biden was leaving the VP office in 2017, Hunter asked Chung to work for him directly. She apparently declined and followed Joe to the Penn Biden Center.
Chung reportedly was questioned by law enforcement about the classified documents found at the center. Gutmann fared better. After being nominated by Biden, she is America’s ambassador to Germany.
Regardless of Garland’s intent for the special prosecutor handling Biden’s document case, Comer, Jim Jordan and other GOP inquisitors are not going to stand down. Their probes will serve as fact-checkers and hold Garland accountable while giving the public hope the Biden family grifters will finally face the music.
