Your son Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from a Russian billionaire who was married to the former mayor of Moscow. He also had a joint bank account with a Chinese national that financed $100,000 in credit card purchases around the world. This all happened while you were Vice President. Why would people connected to the Russian and Chinese governments want to give your son millions of dollars?
In June you said you were vetting your own potential Supreme Court picks and promised you would release your own list. Now you say you won’t release a list. Why go back on your pledge?
Your running mate Kamala Harris said last year that she was open to adding as many as 4 seats to the Supreme Court. Now more leading Democrats are saying your party should pack the Supreme Court if they get the chance. Are you refusing to answer whether you will go along with this radical plan because you are too weak to stand up to it?
In January 2017, you said that Democrats should not block President Trump’s nominees for the Supreme Court. You said you believe the Constitution “requires” the Senate “to give the nominee a hearing and a vote.” In 2016 you said “would go forward with the confirmation process” of a Supreme Court nominee “even a few months before a presidential election … just as the Constitution requires." Now you say the Constitution requires the exact opposite. How do you reconcile that change?
In 2008 you promised Americans that if they made less than $250,000 they would not pay a penny more in taxes. You broke that promise and imposed new taxes that directly impacted middle-class Americans. Now you’re claiming you won’t raise taxes on anyone making more than 400,000. Why should voters believe you now, especially since you’ve said you will reinstate the individual mandate tax?
Your plan would raise the U.S. business tax rate higher than China’s rate. Won’t that make it more expensive for companies to do business in America and ultimately send jobs overseas?
In 2008 you and Barack Obama promised to fully fund the federal COPS program, which provides resources to local law enforcement. But funding for this program was cut while you were vice president, despite your promise. Why did you fail to keep your word?
When you were running for president in 2007, both you and Obama pledged to renegotiate NAFTA, a promise you did not keep when you were in office. You recently blamed Republicans for this, saying they wouldn’t go along with it, but Democrats controlled Congress in 2009 when the Obama Administration announced it would not even try to change NAFTA. So why did you fail to keep your word?
When you voted to give China “most favored nation” trade status in 2000, you said you did not foresee “the collapse of the American manufacturing economy” because of it. But by one estimate, it led to the loss of 1 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Do you acknowledge that your vote to give China most favored nation trade status was a mistake that hurt American workers?
The 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic infected 60 million Americans when you were VP, and the federal government depleted its strategic stockpile of N95 masks in response. A fact check by USA Today found that your administration made no effort to replenish the stockpile of masks, despite warnings from experts. Do you accept responsibility for that failure, which left America unprepared for another pandemic?
Your campaign says it is a “lie” that “the Biden-Harris ticket is the most radically pro-abortion” ticket “in U.S. history.” Are there any restrictions on abortion that you support, and if so, please be specific?
You said the N-word 13 times during a 1985 Senate nomination fight, when you were quoting something attributed to someone else. Do you think that was appropriate to do? Is that the only time you’ve said the N-word?
The release of a joint report by the Senate committees on homeland security and finance raised important questions about obviously unethical foreign profiteering by members of the Biden family.
In particular, former Vice President Joe Biden’s ne’er-do-well son Hunter received a remarkable amount of money from highly suspect foreign entities, including ones controlled by the Chinese government. On at least one occasion, the elder Biden appears to have directly facilitated his son’s tawdry dealings. On another, the current Democratic presidential nominee ignored an obvious appearance of a conflict of interest that compromised the moral authority of U.S. diplomacy.
Not to be outdone, Joe Biden’s brother James and sister-in-law Sara cashed in as well, creating an international financial web that Politico a full year ago dubbed “Biden Inc.” Finally, and rather sickeningly, the new report shows multiple payments from Hunter to Russian and Eastern European women suspected of links to an “Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring.”
The legality of some of these dealings is at least questionable. But the ethical stench is undeniable. And while a father is not responsible for the actions of his grown son, Joe Biden’s role as at least a silent enabler raises serious questions about his judgment, not to mention his susceptibility, at least at the margins, to forms of foreign emotional blackmail.
The Senate committees’ report is a compelling account of Biden Inc., and even then, it isn’t exhaustive — because it alludes to plenty of other disturbing material related to Hunter’s dealings with China that remain to be analyzed. But what’s there already should concern every voter enough as it is. The dealings of Hunter, James, Sara, and Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer involved arrangements not just with multiple Chinese government-controlled entities and the People’s Liberation Army but also with corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs, the wife of Moscow’s former mayor, and a Kazakh power player, with millions upon millions of dollars flowing among numerous Biden family and foreign holdings.
None of this is immaterial to Joe Biden’s fitness for the presidency. As his son sought all this business with Chinese entities, the vice president ferried Hunter Biden on Air Force Two when Joe took a diplomatic mission to China. Again, Hunter Biden was no child accompanying his father: He was a wheeler-dealer adult with no obviously legitimate role on the trip. Hunter Biden emerged afterward with a deal estimated to approach $1.5 billion, of which an unknown amount apparently entered his own pockets as the deal’s broker.
Joe Biden should be forced to explain why he took his son on that trip and also why he didn’t ask him to avoid such sketchy financial arrangements with elements of a communist, largely hostile major global rival.
Meanwhile, the report makes clear what Washington Examiner writers long have explained — namely that Hunter Biden’s membership on the board of the Ukraine-centered Burisma company created significant headaches for U.S. diplomacy. With Joe Biden as the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, two top diplomats told the vice president’s team (or, once, the vice president directly) that his son’s position created “the perception of a conflict of interest” and “enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine.”
Biden knew full well of his son’s board service, but he did not recuse himself from heading the administration’s Ukraine-related efforts. In failing to recuse himself, he showed woefully deficient judgment. A supposed statesman as experienced as Biden obviously knows that merely by trumpeting connections to powerful U.S. officials, corrupt foreign actors can leverage those connections for favors or for immunity from sanction or prosecution — even if the American official is genuinely pushing anti-corruption measures, as Biden did in Ukraine. In other words, the son’s business dealings might have directly retarded the father’s legitimate goals for U.S. foreign policy.
There is no good excuse for Joe Biden’s ethical blindness about his son’s and his brother’s sleazy foreign profiteering. It is not enough to say that the vice president himself neither profited from those dealings nor deliberately changed U.S. policy because of them. Due to the very nature of those business arrangements, Joe’s tacit enabling of them necessarily compromised U.S. interests. In terms of moral capital, the damage continues still.
