Calling it all ‘old news’ works up to a point. But the news doesn’t stay old if more of the story emerges.
If there’s one thing Hunter Biden and the Biden family have going for them, it is that the allegations brought this week by House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) are complicated. Complexity favors the accused in the court of public opinion, which is the venue in which Comer’s claims are presently being litigated.
The single-sentence version of the allegations against the president’s relations is this: Joe Biden may have used his political influence to help his family members obtain audiences with influential foreign business leaders, and the Bidens profited from those relationships. That version of events elides many details spelled out by Comer and others, a concision that frustrates those who want to craft a tidy narrative of malfeasance on the Bidens’ part that also adheres to the facts as they are known.
The Oversight Committee alleges that the Biden family and its associates presided over a network of companies many of which were formed when Joe Biden served as vice president, thus allowing the family to profit from his political connections.
The allegations include the claim that Hunter Biden and Hallie Biden, the widow of Beau Biden, earned significant sums from deals with a Romanian businessman just five weeks after Joe Biden met with the Romanian president. A Serbian national who was making a bid for secretary general of the United Nations tried to use his preexisting business relationship with Hunter Biden to secure a meeting with one of then–vice president Joe Biden’s aides, according to the committee’s claims. Two Chinese nationals compensated Hunter Biden directly through a Beijing-backed energy company, which, the Oversight Committee claims, is part of a conglomerate that has been used to “bribe and corruptly influence foreign officials.”
It all stinks, but neither Comer nor his committee’s Republicans have alleged any illegality. The committee has not yet elaborated on how Joe Biden might have benefited from these transactions, nor has it claimed that his financial interests might have affected the president’s policy preferences. Comer himself insisted that he believes Biden has made decisions as commander in chief that “put China first and America last.” But when it comes to specifics, the chairman deferred the matter. They “will get into that later,” he said.
The committee’s failure to implicate the president directly in these suspect deals compelled the New York Times to breathlessly insist that the committee found “no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden.” That assessment may prove premature, particularly given the FBI’s refusal to cooperate with some of Oversight’s document requests citing the sensitivity of documents that might “violate privacy or reputational interests, create misimpressions,” or “harm investigations” and “prejudice prosecutions or judicial proceedings.”
There’s just too much we don’t know, and that’s just how the Biden family’s attorneys like it. But rather than rest their defense of Hunter Biden’s conduct, the Biden family scion’s legal representatives are relying on the suspiciously Clintonian strategy of calling all this new information old news.
“Today’s so-called ‘revelations’ are retread, repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens,” said Hunter Biden attorney Abbe Lowell in a statement following Comer’s press conference this week. Insofar as this effort to malign Republican efforts is true, it’s only because Senate Republicans first unearthed the revelation that Hunter Biden and James Biden, brother of Joe, received wire transfers from Chinese firms in 2020. It’s not true of the details Oversight uncovered pertaining to the Biden family’s interactions with their Serbian and Romanian counterparts.
To take objectively scandalous and previously unknown revelations about damning personal conduct and deem them the jejune preoccupation of those who just aren’t in the know served Bill Clinton’s defenders well. The 42nd president’s supporters could point to a banal statement about the security of his marriage in 1991 to claim that he had performed a “masterful” disarming of allegations involving impropriety that wouldn’t surface until years later. The “womanizing is old news” — that’s what Democratic voters were primed to believe. The sheer volume of allegations against the president’s personal conduct lent journalistic outlets just enough room to claim that, whatever the latest claims were, “the scandal is old news.” And by the time the allegations are investigated and the cover-up revealed, “it’s old news” has a ring of veracity to it.
Hunter Biden may benefit from similar circumstances. The complexity and variety of the alleged schemes that have Hunter at their center invite the well-worn strategy of calling it all “old news.” But as the Clintons eventually learned, old news doesn’t stay old if the story hasn’t been fully told.