The ongoing federal probe of the president-elect’s son is not a ‘family matter’; it’s a matter of genuine national importance.
The ongoing federal probe of the president-elect's son is not a 'family matter'; it's a matter of genuine national importance.
I n an interview with Stephen Colbert, who was inspired as an imaginary commentator but is insipid as a real one, President-elect Joe Biden blew off the investigation of his son, Hunter: “great confidence,” “not concerned,” nothing but “foul play,” etc.
Colbert asked:
People who want to make hay in Washington are going to try to use your adult son as a cudgel against you. In terms of your job as president, can you reach across the aisle to people who’ll be using this as an attack on you when it is such a personal attack, because it’s about family?
Colbert is wrong on almost every point: The investigation of Hunter Biden is not simply about political haymaking, though hay will be made; it is not simply being used as a cudgel against Joe Biden; and — most important — it is not about “family.” How much and exactly what kind of a weasel Hunter Biden is constitutes the minor question, but the major question is: How much and exactly what kind of a weasel is the incoming president?
In simple terms, the underlying issue is this: (1) Hunter Biden’s business dealings are shady; (2) Hunter Biden on his own is a nobody who doesn’t bring anything to the table of shadiness; (3) the most likely and obvious reason to recruit Hunter Biden into a shady business deal is as a proxy for his father. There isn’t an apprenticeship for shadiness, and nobody bribes an unconnected person for practice. Ultimately, what we want to know is not whether Hunter Biden had corrupt dealings with Beijing moneymen and Ukrainian oligarchs but whether Joe Biden did, with Hunter Biden acting as an intermediary and purse. These questions are neither outrageous nor unfounded, and they merit serious investigation.
Joe Biden’s defense will be, and has been, that this is nothing more than his political enemies using his troubled son against him. Hunter Biden is a troubled man, and one sympathizes with him and his father. But Hunter Biden also is a man who has been paid tremendous sums of money in exchange for what appears to be very little more than an eager smile and one of the names on his birth certificate.
Unquestionably corrupt? No. Questionable? Yes, and then some. So, ask the questions. That’s what investigations are for.
Joe Biden’s credibility or lack of credibility will be indicated by, among other things, whether one of his first acts in office is firing U.S. Attorney for Delaware David C. Weiss. Presidents fire U.S. attorneys all the time — these prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the president. When George W. Bush fired a pack of them all at once, it was a “national scandal,” as NPR put it, a “political purge” in the words of Adam Cohen in the New York Times. (Never mind, for now, that Bill Clinton had done the same thing before Bush, or that Barack Obama did much the same thing after him.) Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) is among those who have intelligently suggested that keeping Weiss on would be preferable to appointing a special prosecutor. “If he wants to show that this is going to be an upright, upstanding Biden administration,” Paul told Fox News, “he needs to leave that U.S. attorney in place.”
Joe Biden has the power to fire Weiss, but that does not make it the right course of action.
Beyond that power, the president-elect also has motive: Weiss is investigating Hunter Biden, but he also put away Delaware businessman Christopher Tigani for making illegal campaign contributions to Joe Biden’s 2007 presidential campaign and related tax violations, part of a scheme to buy favor with the elder Biden, who was then a senator from Delaware. Biden said he didn’t know Tigani was a crook. Tigani said it was the “Delaware Way,” and bragged that his dirty money would “play a role in [Biden’s] new campaign as well as his son’s role as a future senator.” Tigani ultimately was the only one charged, but the FBI also scrutinized Joe Biden’s finance director, one of Biden’s business allies, and a former Biden aide who had become a lobbyist. Speaking of Joe Biden and one of his sons (it is not clear which), Tigani wrote: “They are very good and close friends, and I know we can take advantage of that role as needed.” He received grateful notes from Joe Biden: “Thanks for all the help, I wont [sic] forget it.”
There isn’t anything criminal about sending a crooked campaign donor a personal note. There isn’t necessarily anything criminal about being buddy-buddy with a campaign contributor who is engaged in a criminal influence-buying scheme. And it isn’t invariably criminal if members of your family prosper, sometimes wildly beyond their endowments, while your political star is rising. All of that might be perfectly legal.
But it also might not. The point of an investigation is not to punish wrongdoing but to establish whether wrongdoing occurred.
Yes, some Republicans will cheer if the new administration is partly hamstrung by an ongoing corruption probe encompassing Joe Biden’s family and their globe-spanning business dealings, but, contra Colbert, that is not a “family” matter.
It is a national matter, one of genuine importance.