Watch a Biden Surrogate Call for a Special-Counsel Probe of Hunter’s Influence Peddling

A contentious interview with a Biden campaign surrogate on the Hunter Biden laptop story made the rounds last week. Most of the commentary seems to have missed a key point: She endorsed a special counsel to investigate the controversy.

To recap: Joe Biden’s surviving son Hunter is your textbook ne’er-do-well political relative (complete with an unsavory trail of drugs and sexual liaisons) who has made virtually his entire career out of cashing in on his father’s influential position. This is not a new story in politics; it was not a new story in politics when Donald Trump got into politics, or when the Clinton Foundation was raking in shady foreign donations. It is a story that is as old as politics itself. But it is still one that we rightly regard as a scandal every single time we see it, whether or not it breaks any laws. As Michael Brendan Dougherty has summarized, there was already plenty to find scandalous in Hunter Biden’s career before the laptop story broke, and plenty of evidence that Joe Biden’s camp knew full well, years ago, that Hunter was raking in money from people with interests in currying favor with his father.

Sure, anyone can understand Joe Biden trying to use a little of his juice as a powerful man to find steady work for a troubled son, and most of us would give him some latitude on that. But getting tens of thousands of dollars a month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, with no qualifications for the job besides his proximity to the man running point on Ukraine policy? Accepting gifts of diamonds from Chinese energy tycoons? These are not the opportunities that are available to a state assemblyman trying to get his kid a makework job at the parks department when he gets out of rehab. If anything, Hunter’s high-rolling foreign ventures seem to have enabled his dissolute lifestyle. And his partnership with Joe’s brother Jim in a Chinese venture illustrates how the cashing-in game went beyond just getting steady work for one screwup family member.

Joe Biden has tried to bluster his way around Hunter’s business ventures by claiming, implausibly, total and complete ignorance. That’s why communications showing more direct and concealed knowledge, involvement, and possibly profit by Joe would be a big deal. Enter the laptop that is claimed to belong to Hunter Biden, and the statements and text messages revealed by Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter and Jim. The firsthand account by Bobulinski already gives this story more on-the-record, named-source support than a great many of the Trump stories of the past several years.

There are reasons to remain skeptical of the messages from the laptop. How do we know this is really Hunter Biden’s laptop? How do we know that emails printed in PDF format are really from the laptop? How do we know that all of them were actual communications from Hunter Biden? The story is a strange one, and the list of domestic and foreign actors with a motive to make mischief against the Bidens is not short. Then again, there are indicia of credibility, such as emails that have been disclosed and treated as legitimate by their participants, and photographic evidence supporting the claim that this was Hunter Biden’s private property. The laptop is now, reportedly, in the possession of the FBI, for reasons that have not been adequately explained.

A responsible press corps would dig in to get to the bottom of all this and demand on-the-record yes-or-no answers from Joe and Hunter. “Is this your laptop?” is a fair question. So is “is this your email?” Instead, much of the media have circled the wagon to prevent the story from even circulating, accepted totally unsubstantiated hand-waves of “Russian disinformation,” and let pushback from the Biden camp stand without close questioning. The New York Post, which broke the story, has faced hostile investigations from rival newspapers and a blockade and suspension on social-media platforms.

Against that backdrop, Biden surrogate Jenna Arnold had a contentious interview with Leland Vittert of Fox News last week. You can watch the whole thing here, including her unwillingness to deny the authenticity of the laptop.

Let’s focus on the tail end of the interview:

LELAND VITTERT: What’s interesting is I feel like you still haven’t answered the fundamental question, which is, can anyone say that these emails are inauthentic? And so far, I haven’t heard anybody say that.

JENNA ARNOLD: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I don’t think anybody is saying they are inauthentic or not. . . .

VITTERT: Let me ask you. Let me, let me, let me do this. Hold on. Let me ask it like this. One of the biggest issues that Democrats have had and the former vice president have had with the Trump family was the emails that connected Donald Trump Jr. to Russians. OK, there was an entire special counsel investigating that. OK, there are now emails connecting Hunter Biden with both cutouts for the Ukrainian government and Russian intelligence and with the Chinese Communist Party . . .

ARNOLD: There’s an entire counsel — but there’s an entire counsel investigating that —

VITTERT: So let me just ask the question. Should there be the same treatment? Should there be a special counsel? Because when there was an email from Don Jr., the left went crazy.

ARNOLD: I think your point about having a special counsel is probably particularly responsible. I think it’s a shame that we’re spending so much time and taxpayer dollars on this . . .

VITTERT: Hold on, hold on. It’s a shame trying to figure out if the man who’s going to be running for president of the United States, or wants to be president, it’s a shame to figure out whether or not there was 10 percent of a Chinese company put aside for him. That’s a waste of time? . . .

ARNOLD: I’m happy . . . I’m happy to respond to you if you let me finish my sentence, which is . . . I have no problem with asking incredibly diligent, hard questions about any sort of news that comes out from any political party, whether it’s my candidate or any other candidate that’s raising their hands to lead this country . . . so I have no problem with [inaudible] . . . so we can have that counsel . . .

VITTERT: The problem isn’t the questions, Jenna. The problem isn’t the questions, it’s the answers. We gave you equal time . . . . We appreciate it. Thank you.

The part I’ve marked here as “inaudible,” I believe she is saying something along the lines of “no problem with a counsel,” but Vittert was talking over her and cut the segment short, so it is not as clear as the rest of this part of the interview. Broadly speaking, while Vittert did a fine job of confronting Arnold in ways few other outlets have done, he could have let her elaborate more. But she was, in a national television appearance on behalf of the Biden campaign, rather clearly endorsing a special-counsel investigation. That seems rather newsworthy, no?

Should there be an investigation? The FBI is already involved, and it is not difficult to picture what legal or national-security questions that may be involved in the laptop’s provenance and contents. Certainly, if you think that the various Trump investigations have been amply justified, you could easily see why a lot of the same arguments apply here. Hunter’s is a different story from the Trump children, although many of the same issues should arise for anyone who has raised alarms about Trump family influence-peddling. Donald Trump’s children had positions in their father’s business enterprises before he went into politics. They had those jobs because they were his children, but there’s nothing scandalous about nepotism in a family-owned business. Where the Trump family business became problematic is because Trump did not unwind his business empire, which by its nature is impossible to put in a truly blind trust — everybody on the planet still knows who owns all the buildings with Trump’s name on them in huge gold letters. So, continued pursuit of business interests in Russia, Turkey, and the Philippines, or business done by Trump hotels and resorts with foreign governments, has led to entirely fair concerns about influence-peddling. Moreover, much of the justification for national-security investigations of Trump and his family has rested on the “Kompromat” theory: Anything unethical, shady, or embarrassing that could be known by hostile foreign actors and used to blackmail the president or his family should be the subject of a federal investigation.

I remain deeply uneasy with the implications of pushing these theories to their logical limits. Trump underwent years of investigation that turned up a certain amount of ethically questionable things and led to process crimes by some of the targets, but on the whole, much of the work of the Mueller investigation was enough of a dud that we should hesitate to hold it up as a model going forward. Some of these things would be best investigated by Congress as a matter of oversight, but if Democrats take over the Senate, there will be no oversight of a Biden administration (go look up how little oversight the Democrats did in 2009-10 or 1993-94 if you doubt this). The entire process of using open-ended national-security tools to investigate prominent national political figures should be rethought before it spins even further out of control than it has the past four years.

Still, if we are going to have even the pretense of evenhanded administration of justice, maybe the Biden campaign should be taken up on its surrogate’s word. Many Democratic politicians and pundits spent the last four years saying that only the guilty would ever object to an investigation. If any of them actually mean it, they should welcome a special counsel tasked with getting to the bottom of Hunter Biden’s foreign business, its relationship to his powerful father, and whether that laptop and its contents are for real or are “Russian disinformation.”