My latest New York Post column:
The president of the United States denies that he ever had anything to do with his son’s efforts to sell access to him. The denials crumble, one after one, bringing the story ever closer to home. Multiple members of the president’s family receive millions from shady foreign interests through shell entities. Multiple figures in the story have been convicted of crimes — including official bribery conducted through family businesses of foreign leaders. The influence-peddling saga covers America’s number one enemy (China) and the country the president is now backing with tens of billions of taxpayer dollars (Ukraine) — the very place where his predecessor got impeached for digging into what he’d been doing there.
The son’s sweetheart plea deal with prosecutors who ultimately answer to his father collapses in open court. The prosecutors admit that there’s no precedent for the deal they cut, and it only falls apart after the judge catches wind of parts of the deal they tried to hide from her view. Law enforcement whistleblowers testify that they were thwarted by Washington from following the investigation of the son as far as it would lead. Sounds like quite a story, don’t you think? And that’s without mentioning the sex, the drugs, the missing gun, the tax evasion, the diamond ring, the spy chiefs, and the official plot to stop the presses before an election.
Once upon a time, a generation of political reporters raised on Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein would have had no higher aspiration than to sink their teeth into a story like this.