On Monday, Joe Biden doubled down on a key claim he’s previously made regarding Hunter Biden’s foreign business entanglements.
Going back to the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden has repeatedly claimed that he had no knowledge of nor ever spoke to his son regarding the latter’s various (possibly criminal) dealings with China, Ukraine, and Romania. That assertion was put to the test last Thursday after a WhatsApp message showed Hunter Biden shaking down a Chinese official while proclaiming that his father was in the room with him and ready to exact retribution if the money wasn’t handed over.
In response, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to confirm or deny whether Biden was present during the call while the White House Counsel’s office released a weasel-worded statement saying “As we have said many times before, the President was not in business with his son.”
As many pointed out, that’s not a “no,” and likely purposely so. But as recently happened with China, leave it to Biden to undercut everyone around him. When a reporter pressed him on the issue on Monday, he doubled down, leaving his lawyers no wiggle room.
There’s no ambiguity there. The nation’s oldest president just blurted out a definitive denial after a mountain of evidence presented itself over the last year showing he had to have spoken to his son about his business dealings. I’d assume his lawyers are beating their heads against their office walls right about now, but when you are dealing with a senile loose cannon, this is what you get.
Or perhaps Biden is just that confident he’s untouchable? That wouldn’t surprise me either, and why wouldn’t he? He’s gotten this far by misleading people without any accountability. What’s another probable lie added into the mix?
Moving back a bit, Biden did give a speech prior to his noteworthy denial, and there were a few things worth mentioning. Namely, the president took a baseball bat to Joe Manchin’s chances in 2024.
All Jim Justice (who seems to be the heavy favorite to win the primary) has to do is run that clip on repeat in ads and he’ll beat Manchin by 10 points. I suspect very few people in West Virginia want to re-elect a “friend” of Joe Biden, much less one who played the sucker for the Inflation Reduction Act.
Did Biden realize what he was doing? That’s always the magic question. Barack Obama was smart in the way he handled contentious races, keeping his distance. Biden is just delusional enough to think he’s actually beloved, even in West Virginia, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he gave that shoutout thinking nothing of it.
Of course, all this is predicated on Manchin actually running again. He hasn’t announced a re-election bid yet, and there have been rumors of him running on a third-party presidential ticket. He has to see the writing on the wall in his home state, right?
Then there was this clip of Biden praising Kamala Harris on the same day NBC News found her to be the most unpopular vice president in the history of their polling.
It’s like he wants to take his own vice president down. Given his health issues and the corruption scandals raging around him, why in the world would he go out of his way to tie Harris to his awful policies? Again, maybe it’s just chutzpah, or maybe he’s trying to pass the buck, but whatever it is, it’s a bad decision.