The scheme to monetize Joe Biden’s political influence could not have succeeded without his willful participation.
I’ve been arguing for a couple of years, most recently in a post earlier this afternoon, that the Republican approach to the Biden family’s influence-peddling scheme is all wrong. The issue is not, and never has been, whether Joe Biden personally profited by having money go directly into his own hot little hands.
The point is that the scheme, which involves exorbitant sums of money ($24 million just between 2014 and 2019), could not conceivably have gone on unless Joe Biden knowingly and willfully participated in it. He is the business. The business is selling access to him. Even the appearance of access to one of the most powerful, politically connected men in the United States enabled those who paid for it to intimidate agencies and rivals that might have otherwise considered investigating or harassing them. It opened doors to lucrative opportunities that would not otherwise have been available. That’s why the agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes were willing to pay.
How much Joe Biden personally received — especially under circumstances in which gargantuan payments for his political influence, made to his ne’er-do-well son and operator brother, were payments for his benefit, even if they didn’t end up in his pocket — is beside the point.
Nevertheless, Democrats have gulled Republicans into accepting their premise that “there’s no there there” unless House investigators can show significant payments going directly to Joe Biden. We are to believe that an enterprise that could not have gone on for any meaningful length of time without Joe Biden’s knowing participation is of no consequence unless a goodly chunk of the millions paid to Biden family members and associates by, for example, the Chinese Communist Party, showed up in Joe Biden’s personal bank account.
Our Brittany Bernstein’s report sheds light on this farcical way of looking at things. Given that tens of millions of dollars had by 2018 poured in from overseas, what made Republicans think it would meaningfully advance their case to show a series of three puny payments, each of $1,380, going from Hunter to Joe?
The payments resemble a common car-loan transaction. And . . . well, whaddya know, they appear in fact to be related to a car loan involving a 2018 Ford Raptor that Hunter obtained but needed his father’s credit to close. Presumably, some reimbursement payments were made until, about 18 months later, the strung-out Hunter no longer wanted the Raptor (which he apparently damaged), at which point dear old dad talked the dealer into buying it back.
The suggestion — advanced by Hunter, his lawyers, Democrats, and the Biden Justice Department prosecutor who is pretending to investigate the case — that the Chinese regime, Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs, and other big-pocketed aliens were paying millions of dollars for the benefit of Hunter’s brilliance as a lawyer and businessman should have us laughing so hard our ribs crack. (Sorry to mention crack.) Hunter couldn’t even handle a car loan, but we’re to believe President Xi’s protégé, the billionaire wife of a Putin crony, and a corrupt Ukrainian energy company shelled out big bucks to consult with him on major financial deals?
But instead we’re talking about whether three payments, amounting to a hair over $4,000 and connected to an easily provable car loan, are the smoking gun implicating Joe Biden in a $24 million corruption scheme. Of course, there would be no $24 million to talk about if it weren’t for Joe Biden, but if you’re going to play the game on the Democrats’ terms, that point gets lost.
As I said in the earlier post, the real hole in the investigation into influence-peddling is the nexus between payments to the Bidens and Joe Biden’s actions. We’ve seen some hints of this. For example, the Burisma millions are clearly connected to then–vice president Biden’s pressure on Ukraine to fire a prosecutor. Joe Biden was personally involved in the CEFC scheme, in which Xi protégé Ye Jianming offered to pay the Bidens $10 million per year just to make introductions. Then–vice president Biden gave Hunter a lift on Air Force 2 to Beijing, where Hunter closed a lucrative deal with Jonathan Li on an investment vehicle that helped China acquire vibration technology with military uses and a coveted African cobalt mine. (Hunter introduced Li to Joe Biden, who later wrote a letter to try to help one of Li’s children get into an Ivy League school.)
There seems to have been little effort to build on this — to focus on the most critical part of the scheme: What were China and the others getting for their millions? As I said in the earlier post, we recently had much public discussion — occasioned by Xi’s trip to meet Biden in San Francisco — of Biden’s accommodationist policy toward China. From what I could detect, there was almost no discussion of the likelihood that Biden’s posture is explained, at least in part, by the undeniable fact that agents of Xi have paid his family millions of dollars for no apparent reason other than to buy Biden’s political influence.
As long as we’re talking about $1,380 transfers instead of that, the investigation is proceeding on the Democrats’ terms.