If all of this is such a wild conspiracy theory, then Biden should be eager to dispel it.
First, Joe Biden’s Praetorian Guard argued that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden scoop was “Russian disinformation.” The DOJ, FBI, and DNI each publicly disagreed. No one in the Biden camp has denied the veracity of a single email thus far. Yet, as of this writing, the Post’s Twitter account is still frozen, and most major news outlets won’t report the story.
The next deflection was to play on your emotions: “How dare you mock a father struggling with the addiction of his son?!’” This isn’t about Hunter’s addictions, predilections, or life choices, but about his favor-trading, and whether a presidential candidate benefited from them during his tenure as vice president of the United States. We shouldn’t mock those with addiction, but a person isn’t inoculated from scrutiny merely because he’s an addict, either.
Today, a Wisconsin reporter finally asked Biden what he thought about Senator Ron Johnson accusing his family of profiting from Hunter’s shady arrangements.
It should be said that reporters have adopted a pusillanimous positioning in which they refuse to ask Biden straightforward questions, but rather frame queries as baseless accusations from “the Right.” This, of course, allows the candidate to skip answering the question all together and simply attack.
In this case, Biden teed off on Johnson, who he claimed “should be ashamed of himself” for suggesting that the Bidens “profited off” the family name — an indisputable fact, and one that Hunter himself has admitted. Biden went to claim that “vast majority of the intelligence people have come out and said there’s no basis at all” — a complete fabrication. What he didn’t do was answer any specific questions.
If all of this is really so wild and crazy conspiracy theory — “spaghetti being thrown at the wall,” as I heard one CNN host claim — then Biden would be champing at the bit to dispel it. In fact, he very well might have some good answers to the questions that journalists ought to be asking him. For instance:
- In 2018, you bragged that as vice president you had threatened Ukrainian president Poroshenko with the withdrawal of United States aid if he didn’t fire state prosecutor, Victor Shokin. You called Poroshenko on February 11, 12, 18, and 19 and demanded he fire the prosecutor — only days after the prosecutor had seized Burisma owner’s property. Did you know at the time that Shokin was investigating Burisma, the oil company that was paying your son Hunter more than $50,000 a month? Did you ever talk to your son about Shokin?
- Last year in an interview with Axios, you claimed that you had no idea what Hunter was doing at Burisma. Yet, in 2015, two Obama administration officials had raised concerns to the White House about Hunter’s relationship with the oil company, worried that the relationship undermined the administration’s anti-corruption message. Did you hear about these complaints at the time? Were you troubled that Hunter’s leveraging of the Biden name might look like influence-peddling? Why did you think he was making so much money?
- Similarly, though you have claimed that you had no idea what Hunter was doing at Burisma, an email found on Hunter’s laptop — now verified by Fox News — shows an executive from the oil company thanking your son for facilitating a meeting between you and he while you were still vice president. Did you take that meeting? If so, did you talk about Hunter’s work? If not, what did you talk about with the executive?
- Did you ever financially benefit from Hunter’s relationship with Bursima — or any other company he dealt with?
- Again, you claimed in the past to have no idea about Hunter’s business, but yet he accompanied you on Air Force Two flight to China in 2013. Two years earlier, you reportedly met with Chinese Communist Party members and favored billionaires in Beijing as vice president, in a meeting facilitated by Hunter’s associates. What did you discuss at this meeting?
- Hunter’s emails also claim that you would be getting a ten percent share in a deal he struck with a Chinese energy firm — that he secured trading in on the Biden name. Did you ever benefit financially from this deal, or any other deals made by Hunter?
There may well be excellent answers to all these questions. Journalists, of course, won’t even investigate these incidents now, much less put the presidential candidate on the spot.