The real ‘Biden Brand’ is a lot more sordid than the media ever revealed.
The real ‘Biden Brand’ is a lot more sordid than the media ever revealed.
K ate Hyde, a blogger on X, has the best summary of the Hunter Biden pardon: “Biden’s Presidency started with him denying the existence of Hunter’s laptop and is ending with Biden pardoning Hunter for all the things found on his laptop.”
The concluding act of Biden’s presidency also must be viewed as the end of one of the most successful career cover-ups in American history. From his first election as a senator at age 29 in 1972, Joe Biden has publicly crafted an image as a straight-talking populist loyal to working stiffs. But privately, he has long been known as a man of explosive temper, filled with petty grievances, grandiose opinions of his own abilities, and often easily swayed by the last person to talk with him. In other words, his character in many ways resembles the caricature of his nemesis Donald Trump.
Much has been made of the grasping and conniving nature of Trump’s business activities. But because Joe Biden has served in public office for 48 of the past 52 years, he has had to obscure a corrupt history that enriched both him and his family.
Indeed, Biden’s pardon of his son is remarkable in many ways. “I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” says Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department office that Biden apparently did not consult in making his decision.
The Biden pardon’s starting date of January 1, 2014, was surely not chosen randomly: In May 2014, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, after which he shamelessly profited by invoking his father’s name and peddling influence.
The simplest explanation is almost certainly true: Biden acted not just to protect Hunter from jail but to protect the Biden influence-peddling machine from further scrutiny.
Last year, the House Committee on Oversight released subpoenaed bank records revealing that one of Hunter Biden’s business entities, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden. The committee identified more than 20 shell companies that showed Biden family members raking in over $24 million between 2015 and 2019 by selling Joe Biden as “the brand.” In her new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, the New York Post’s Miranda Devine, reports that Joe Biden dined with his family’s foreign associates, spoke to them by speakerphone, had coffee, attended meetings, and ultimately received payments that stemmed from his family’s business dealings.
The media have covered for Biden in countless ways over the years, at first out of sympathy for a man who, at the age of 30, tragically lost his first wife and infant daughter in a car accident. It’s true that when he ran for president in 1988, an opposition research file compiled by another Democratic candidate did surface. It revealed that Biden had shamelessly plagiarized the life story and words of British Labour Party politician Neil Kinnock. Biden withdrew from the race in shame and thus avoided more media scrutiny of his serial acts of plagiarism of, among others, Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey.
Indeed, Biden’s first documented plagiarism involved a 1965 Syracuse University Law School faculty report that found he had “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution” and he deserved a failing grade. Biden’s pleaded ignorance of research standards and even said, “If I had intended to cheat, would I have been so stupid?”
While the pardon of Hunter is one bookend to Joe Biden’s career, the way it started out back in 1972 deserves mention and reveals a clear interest in cheating and connivance.
In 2019, filmmaker Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro brought out The Irishman, an adaptation of a true-crime best seller by former prosecutor Charles Brandt. It was based on extensive interviews that Brandt conducted with Frank Sheeran, a Teamsters official from Wilmington, Del., who recounted his life associating with mobsters.
Most independent reviewers are skeptical of Sheeran’s claim that he was the hitman behind the murder of ex-Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. But the book’s depiction of Sheeran’s role as a side player in that killing is considered accurate.
Despite a running time of nearly four hours, Scorsese’s film completely skips over a political bombshell in Brandt’s book. Sheeran told Brandt that at the very end of Biden’s 1972 campaign for U.S. Senate in Delaware, he orchestrated a newspaper strike that shuttered the Wilmington News Journal, Delaware’s only statewide newspaper, for more than a week. That prevented Biden’s Republican opponent, Senator Caleb Boggs, from distributing inserts denouncing Biden’s record and inexperience. Sheeran says the picket lines were lifted just after the election.
Sheeran told Brandt:
There have been things written about this incident and I am always mentioned in them. They say that this maneuver is what got Senator Joe Biden elected. Especially the Republicans say that if those newspaper inserts from the Boggs side got delivered inside the newspapers, it would have made Joe Biden look very bad. The Boggs ads coming as they almost did that last week there would have been no time for Biden to repair the damage. I have no way of knowing if Joe Biden knew if that picket line thing was done on purpose on his behalf.
Sources in Delaware with whom I spoke were divided on what actually happened back in 1972. But a 2019 book on the Biden family by Ben Shreckinger, a national political reporter for Politico, reveals that Bill Stevenson, who was married to Jill Jacobs from 1970 to 1975 (after her divorce, she married Joe Biden in 1977), said he scrounged together $3,000 to pay Sheeran for what the Teamsters official said was a “plan that will probably win us the election” At the time, Stevenson was close with the Biden family and a key supporter of his Senate campaign.
After the election, Stevenson recalled to Shreckinger, one of the Bidens, he could not remember which one, told him that his money had paid for the strike. Stevenson also said that his friend Joe “Boom” Beck, an official with the Carpenters Union, told him that Sheeran was “the guy who took care of the tab for the News Journal strike.”’
The White House declined to respond to Stevenson’s claims. Shreckinger concludes, “Whether or not the Bidens played any role in ginning up the strike as Stevenson claims, their 1972 campaign sealed an alliance with organized labor that would last for decades.”
The 1972 Delaware newspaper strike joins a long list of events in Joe Biden’s life that escaped much scrutiny, from his egregious foreign-policy judgement (Obama Secretary of Defense Robert Gates commented in 2014 that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national-security issue over the past four decades”) to the successful coverup of his cognitive decline until his disastrous debate performance this past June.
Only now are the scales falling from the eyes of Democrats and Biden apologists in the media. They’re also falling away from the eyes of Never Trumpers such as Nick Catoggio at the Dispatch, who admits that Biden’s pardon of Hunter describes the maxim “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law” to a T. “There’s no way to digest it without concluding that most of the president’s chatter about ‘norms’ was an opportunistic exercise in anti-Trump political branding, not a matter of heartfelt belief,” he writes. “It’s an egregious betrayal. However much contempt you are feeling for him today, it isn’t enough.”
Indeed, the “Biden Brand” in the end was a façade. Only now at age 82, with his son Hunter and other family members imperiled, has Joe Biden — who never has to face voters again — decided to rip off the mask and reveal what’s underneath.