By Debra J. Saunders / Creators.com
“My son has done nothing wrong.” It’s the mantra President Biden repeats regularly about his son Hunter as the president tries to cloak the Biden family’s greed behind the its grief.
Hunter Biden, 53, has dealt with horrific loss in life. When he was 2, his mother and baby sister were killed in a car accident. Then, in 2015, his brother Beau died at age 46 from an insidious form of brain cancer.
Those awful losses, however, do not excuse Hunter Biden’s reckless behavior or shameless cashing-in on the family name, as the House Oversight Committee reported Wednesday.
Committee chairman James Comer released information about a web of more than 20 shell companies used to conceal money paid by foreign entities, including Chinese and Romanian nationals, to the Biden family. Not just Hunter.
The Committee noted on Twitter, “We can now confidently trace at least $10 million in total from foreign nationals’ and their related companies going to the Biden family, their business associates, and their companies.” Most of the transfers occurred when Biden was vice president.
According to the report, nine Bidens received payments, including Hunter, the president’s brother James, and Beau’s widow Hallie.
In a statement to CNN, White House spokesman Ian Sams responded, “Comer has a history of playing fast and loose with the facts and spreading baseless innuendo.”
Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell dismissed a Comer memo as “repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens” with “no evidence of wronging.”
The Politico headline on the Oversight report: “Comer releases Biden family probe update without showing link to president.”
No link to Joe Biden? As in: the family would have cashed in if Biden hadn’t been vice president?
Who believes that?
By his own account, Hunter Biden habitually sped down highways under the influence and consumed mountains of crack cocaine without spending a night in jail; very convenient given his father’s role in writing federal drug laws that put first-time nonviolent drug offenders behind bars for decades.
In 2020, the New York Post reported Ukrainian energy concern Burisma had paid Hunter Biden upwards of $50,000 per month, months after the Yale Law School graduate was discharged from the Naval Reserve because he tested positive for cocaine.
At the time, fighting corruption in Kyiv was part of Biden’s portfolio.
Biden’s reaction to the story: “My son did nothing wrong with Burisma.”
When I speak of the Bidens’ greed, I think of Hunter Biden’s refusal to live on the honest six-figure compensation to which his prestigious education guaranteed him a slot. I think of his post-intoxication stint as an artist, with an art dealer who planned to ask as much as $500,000 for the newly minted artiste’s work. Hunter should have produced a masterpiece named “influence peddling.”
In October, The Washington Post reported the feds believed they had enough evidence to charge Hunter Biden with tax evasion and lying to purchase a gun in 2018.
I don’t want the president’s son to go to jail, even though I believe a young Black man would have served hard time for the sort of drug-fueled antics Biden wrote about in his memoir.
I’d just like to see my profession report on the first family’s money-grubbing ways, instead of downplaying the story again, just as the news giants ignored the laptop.
Because China already knows.
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org. Copyright 2023, Creators.com.
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