During a 2020 campaign event, then-presidential hopeful Joe Biden was asked by an Iowa man if the former’s son Hunter Biden had ever had “access to the Obama administration.”
The future president, who had vowed to bring decorum and decency back to the White House, called the man a “damn liar” and “fat” and told him he was “too old” before insulting his IQ.
This act of projection from Biden should have been a warning. It was modus operandi for Joe, whose preternatural dishonesty was impressive even for a politician, to question the mental fitness of those who caught him in a lie. Biden had done much the same to a reporter during his 1987 failed presidential run.
Biden would go on to contend on numerous occasions that he never once even spoke to his son Hunter about the family’s influence-peddling business. Joe claimed never to have “discussed with my son anything having to do with what was going on in Ukraine. That’s a fact.”
As a Chicago ABC affiliate and the AP reported in an October 2019 story — helpfully headlined, “Joe Biden defends himself, son Hunter on Ukraine during Democratic debate following Trump accusations” — the former veep said he “never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine. No one has indicated I have. We’ve always kept everything separate.”
Not a single thing.
When the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, indicating that Joe had lied, virtually the entire left-wing media regurgitated the claims of former intelligence officials — including known liars like James Clapper and John Brennan — that the story smacked of Russian “disinformation.” The story, allegedly discredited, was then censored by Big Tech and big media companies.
Even Joe noted that the “vast majority of the intelligent people have come out and said there’s no basis at all.”
Well, we soon found out there was plenty of basis to the story. Hunter had hosted a dinner in a private room at Café Milano in D.C. with his dad and an executive from Burisma, the company that had enriched the Biden business. And in an email dated the next day, the Ukrainian exec thanked Hunter for the meeting with his dad.
In scores of other emails and texts, Hunter talks about his dad helping him secure payments and taking a cut. One of Hunter’s former business partners contends Joe was involved in the family business, as does Hunter’s former close friend, who testified under oath that Joe was on upwards of 20 calls with business associates.
At this point, there was overwhelming direct evidence that Joe was a willing participant, at the very least, in creating the impression that influence trading was happening and plenty of circumstantial evidence that the elder Biden was getting a 10 percent cut for the troubles.
As evidence of the president’s lies about his family’s influence-peddling business mounted, “fact-checkers” and the media began struggling to calibrate their defenses to correspond with the fresh information. While at first there had been “no evidence” that Biden knew anything — to say differently, was to peddle misinformation — suddenly there was “no evidence” that Biden had personally benefited from Hunter’s scheming (as if enriching your entire family wasn’t personal).
And this is when the partisan defenses of Joe began to see a dramatic decline in quality. One of my favorites was The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who was not alone, arguing: “We know how important family is to the president. So, do you hang up on your son?”
It was probably familial love that induced James Biden to write brother Joe a personal check for $200,000, that — by complete happenstance – was the exact amount James had received from the failed Americore family venture on that very same day. Talk about crazy coincidences.
It was around this time, as well, that White House language began subtly shifting from blanket denials to finely tuned Clintonesque turns of phrase about Joe never being “in business with his son.”
This week, the House Oversight Committee released financial documents illustrating that Hunter signed off on monthly transfers to Joe through Owasco PC, a Biden shell company that pulled at least $5 million from the Chicom energy concerns in 2017 and 2018. The Daily Mail reports there were at least three payments, from September to November 2018, or a few months before Biden announced he was running for president.
Listen, the Biden family operated through at least 20 shell companies — as one does when running a completely above-board legit business venture. It’s not easy to keep up. Or, as Jon Hamm’s character quipped in “The Town,” you need a Venn diagram for these people.
You might recall that in 2020, Biden had claimed Hunter never “made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about — China.” But Hunter had not only tagged along on an Air Force Two trip to China in 2013, he’d introduced his dad to the Chinese banker he was teaming up with for a private equity fund.
So I eagerly look forward to fact-checkers, media, and the White House clarifying why this is all just fine. It’s been a wild ride so far, so I bet the explanation is going to be amazing.