Understanding the president’s family influence-peddling business.
Understanding the president’s family influence-peddling business.
I n one of American cinema’s most riveting scenes, Vito Corleone, the Godfather, rebukes a distraught undertaker whose once-beautiful daughter has been beaten to a pulp by two young men — one of them the son of a powerful politician. Though the case was a slam dunk, a corrupt judge had let the brutes off with no jail time. That the system is rigged against those who play by the rules suddenly dawns on the law-abiding undertaker, whom the film’s co-writer, novelist Mario Puzo, named Amerigo Bonasera — as in Goodnight, America, where threats lurk around every corner, and the rules turn out to be strings pulled by puppeteers.
Bonasera needs a godfather. So he goes to Corleone, sobbing about the good intentions that were behind his good citizenship, his reliance on police and the courts. The Don cuts him off, scoffing that while he’d opted for the faux protection of the law, true security — the godfather’s friendship — had been there all along if only Bonasera had asked. “And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, then they would become my enemies,” Corleone says, pausing and pointing at his supplicant, “and then, they would fear you.”
Nowadays, such Yale-educated professional glibsters as Devon Archer would call this Don Corleone’s “brand.” Such a nice word, brand. Not what we federal prosecutors in the Organized Crime Unit called it back in the Eighties. We were more inclined to say extortion. Or racketeering — say, running a protection racket, as in, “Nice business you have here, be a shame if anyone shut it down.”
Pols like Joe Biden and their hangers-on — like Archer, his son Hunter’s partner in slime — don’t like to think of their “brand” as extortion. They’re more in the mold of Don Corleone’s equally ruthless but more progressive son, Michael, who swore that any year now the family business would become “completely legitimate.” In such “completely legitimate” businesses, the muscle to do extortion is the family’s “brand.” The brand’s stock-in-trade is “influence,” an aura of intimidation to which beleaguered businesses — including foreign “partners” connected to corrupt and anti-American regimes — buy “access.” That’s what they expect will protect them from the metastasizing peril of, yes, “regulation.”
If you doubt that, you can skip the 140 pages of Archer’s recent House Oversight Committee testimony and just watch the twelve-minute clip of his extraordinary interview with Tucker Carlson. These two contemporaries, who spent their formative years inside the Beltway, agree without hesitation that “the business of Washington is selling access.”
But why do people need “access” to powerful politicians? Aren’t we, after all, a nation of laws? Pu-lease!
What sends Archer and Carlson into sniggering spasms is the local patois. “Understanding the regulatory environment,” Archer translated, “means selling access. . . . That’s how I interpreted it. That’s how most people on Wall Street interpret it, whether they admit it or not.”
That is the business he went into with the Bidens in 2009. The “Biden brand” was a boon for those willing to pay to “understand the regulatory environment.”
You know how this works. To show you how very much they care, politicians promise to save the planet, reduce emissions, clean the water, eliminate workplace hazards, stabilize the banking system, and basically achieve “progress” in every minute aspect of life by enacting regulations. The movers in this process are lobbyists — some working for entrenched businesses who ask to be regulated not out of their love of humanity but because they can withstand it while their upstart would-be competitors can’t; and some representing pragmatists who recognize that if you’re not at the table then you’re on the menu. The result is an ever-expanding, fee-laden regulatory maze that generates income for lawyers, accountants, and most of all “consultants,” those solons who possess that special “understanding of the regulatory environment” — or, more succinctly, who’ve “got a guy.”
If you’ve got a visa problem, they’ve got a guy at the State Department. If you need a permit, they’ve got a guy at every agency. If your nephew gets crosswise with the law, they’ve got a guy at the police department — and at the DA’s office, just in case. They’ve always got a guy someplace who can fix your problem, or at least get your problem to the top of the pile while the saps without a guy are dazed, confused, and harassed by the “regulatory environment.”
In power politics, the big kahuna is the guy who’s got the most guys. The guy who’s got so many guys that he can get away without calling them too often — who’s got so much power that the regulators think twice about harassing anyone known to be his pal.
The vice president of these United States of America is about as big as it gets in the kahuna business.
When Hunter Biden’s dad — a gaffe-prone Washington graybeard whose fading career we can thank Barack Obama for reviving — became vice president, the Biden family “brand” became a cash cow. There was a complication: Hunter, of course, had been a lobbyist when dad was a senator, but “lobbyist” is a dirty word because skimming off politics, while a crowded profession, is not perceived as a noble one, so presidential administrations pretend to distance themselves from it. So, as Archer explains, once the Obama administration came into power, Hunter had to “transition from lobbying to strategic advising.”
Advising . . . about the “regulatory environment”? Yes, Archer said, “regulatory issues” were Hunter’s specialty. Was he fit for that because of his training as a lawyer? Well, Archer explained, Hunter didn’t really do what you’d recognize as legal work. Well then, Carlson asked, did he have “a sophisticated understanding of regulation”? “Um,” Archer quipped (to Carlson’s uncontained amusement), “I think that he led a team that had a sophisticated understanding.”
Archer’s best description of Hunter’s skill set? “You gotta be an expert in knowing the guy, and he was the guy that was the expert in knowing the guy.”
Who would that guy be? Mainly, dear old dad, Archer explained, assisted by dad’s siblings, such as Jim Biden, a family-business fixture.
It’s been amusing this week watching newbie New York Democrat Dan Goldman and other Biden apologists squirm over the evolution of the president’s laugh-out-loud lies. The “I never discussed business with my son” line, not only notoriously untrue but implausible, was first downgraded to (as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre put it) “the president was never in business with his son.” That fib has now been shredded by Archer’s blunt acknowledgment of what was already obvious: The now-president was in numerous business meetings with his son and the Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian, and other partners who paid dearly for the Biden “brand” while, as vice president, Joe Biden steered the “regulatory environment” known as American foreign policy.
Thus are Democrats reduced to spinning that what was being sold — by Hunter, mind you, not Joe, of course — was the “illusion of access,” words that Goldman could not quite put into the slick Archer’s mouth. In light of the effusion of access that is apparent to anyone with eyes to see, we’ve finally reached the spin-about-spin portion of our program: Just what does access mean?
Democrats and their media allies say it means affirmative abuses of Joe Biden’s political power and influence to advance particular interests of “Hunter’s” foreign clients, and they stubbornly insist there is no evidence of such abuses. That’s laughable. To take just one example, there is already evidence that Mykola Zlochevsky’s corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, bribed Biden and his family to the tune of millions of dollars, and that during that payment stream — which included Hunter’s sinecure on the company board and, Zlochevsky told an FBI informant, $10 million in money transfers — the then–vice president pressured the U.S.-dependent Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor who was investigating the company.
Nevertheless, that construction of “access” sets the bar too high, as do the gaslighting protestations that the president “did not discuss business” with Hunter, or “was not in business with Hunter.”
Joe Biden was the business.
Without the now-president, there would have been no Biden brand. Influence-peddling only pays when there is influence to be peddled. Access can only be sold if it is access to someone. Joe Biden is what Hunter Biden was selling. It is risible to hand-wring over whether Joe and Hunter “discussed business” when Joe’s status and the access to power it provided to those willing to pay was the business.
And sure, the business does occasionally call for some hands-on services — Shokin was fired because of pressure brought to bear on the reluctant Ukrainian government, as sure as Don Corleone arranged for his henchmen to put a whuppin’ on the attackers of Bonasera’s daughter; and when Hunter extorted his Chinese partner, Henry Zhao, invoking the name of Joe who (Hunter said) was sitting right there with him waiting for Zhao to call, the WhatsApp message read as if it were written by Mario Puzo himself.
But mostly, the business is just access to an air of intimidation that requires no action. As Hunter put it in dressing down his associate, Tony Bobulinsky, the Chinese partners wanted to be in business “with the Bidens.” They wanted the association with America’s vice president — the problems it could stave off as well as the doors it could open. Zlochevsky was under investigation by the Ukrainians, and $23 million of his fortune had just been seized by the British government. He needed a godfather — an association with a powerful figure who would discourage his tormentors, such as a public tie to the vice president of the United States globally advertised by the installation of the vice president’s son on his company’s board.
Zlochevsky figured that his enemies, such as Shokin, would become Joe Biden’s enemies. But more to the point, he calculated that by buying the “Biden brand” and the access it signaled, he was buying a fear factor that would minimize the challenges of the “regulatory environment.”