This weekend, NBC’s Chuck Todd and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson had a tense exchange over the importance of the Hunter Biden story. After whatabouting the issue for a bit, an agitated Todd asked: “Senator, do you have a crime that you think Hunter Biden committed? Because I’ve yet to see anybody explain. It is not a crime to make money off of your last name.”
There can’t be an investigation until we know for certain that something criminal occurred, but we can’t know if anything criminal occurred until there’s an investigation. Convenient. This, of course, is not the standard journalists have ever embraced for scrutinizing presidential wrongdoing in the past. Todd regularly entertained notions about Donald Trump’s alleged seditious conspiracy in 2016 — which would have been the most diabolical political crime in American history — without any tangible evidence of criminality.
Also, not inconsequentially, Hunter is already under criminal investigation for tax and gun charges by federal prosecutors in Delaware. So, surely, the case has hit the threshold of a criminal investigation. Does Todd not know about this?
That said, a president doesn’t necessarily have to break a specific criminal code to be corrupt. And this scandal isn’t about Biden’s son or his brother, but about Joe. At worst, Biden benefitted and participated in the family influence peddling, or, at best, he spent years lying to the American public about his knowledge of that business. Even if we found pictures of Trump and Putin taking shots of Imperia vodka together to celebrate the defeat of American democracy, it still wouldn’t change the fact Biden has much to answer for.
Recall that in an interview with Axios, Biden claimed he knew absolutely nothing about what Hunter was doing with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that was paying the younger Biden $50,000 monthly. Joe said he trusted Hunter, who had accepted a no-show job while his father was overseeing the Obama administration’s policy in Ukraine. That firm was led by an oligarch who at the time was under investigation for corruption.
Joe Biden claims that as vice president, he threatened Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko with the withdrawal of United States aid if he didn’t fire state prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time. That, at the very least, was a serious conflict of interest. In 2015, some Obama administration officials — not exactly right-wing conspiracy theorists — raised concerns about the Bidens and Ukraine.
Because of the New York Post’s investigation into Hunter’s laptop — a story ignored by the Chuck Todds of the world for transparently partisan reasons — we also learned that an executive from Burisma thanked Hunter for facilitating a meeting between him and Joe while the latter was still vice president. This week, The New York Times gingerly confirmed that Biden had, indeed, met with Burisma reps. We also know that Hunter’s business partner made at least 19 visits to the Obama White House. We know that former Hunter associate Tony Bobulinski has sworn that Joe Biden discussed the family business. Emails suggest that Biden was the recipient of 10 percent in all those deals. I suspect if this was about Donald Trump, Chuck Todd would care more?
None of this even gets into the fact that Hunter’s associates allegedly facilitated a meeting between then-Vice President Biden and Chinese Communist Party members and billionaires in Beijing. Or that Hunter’s emails claim that You-Know-Who got a 10 percent share in a deal Hunter struck with a Chinese energy firm.
Todd, incidentally, decried the “political” nature of the Hunter investigation in an interview with incoming House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer last week. Of course there’s a political motivation here. Every investigation into Trump had a political motivation, as well. Virtually every congressional investigation in history, to some extent, is politically motivated. This is how the American government works. One side keeps the other honest. That alone doesn’t make the underlying claims untrue. Remember, Hillary Clinton’s illegal server and influence peddling were ferreted out in the Benghazi investigation — which, unsurprisingly, Todd also claimed was propelled by “conspiracy theory.”
It’s not the partisan incentive that made the Russia collusion narrative a hoax, it was the complete lack of merit and evidence. Republicans would be wise not to obsess over Hunter Biden, but they already have far more genuine evidence to justify a House investigation.
Now, I’m not certain if taking a cut from the family racket is technically a criminal offense, but it’s most definitely a worthwhile story. Maybe Joe Biden, noted civil rights activist and college football star, merely lied to distance himself from his son, or maybe not. How will we ever know? Republicans can’t rely on the political media to do its job. Todd, Jake Tapper, Joe Scarborough, and many others don’t merely dismiss inconvenient stories as unworthy of their attention, they act like members of the Biden Praetorian Guard.
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