Joe Biden has “shattered the moral pretensions of his presidency, his party, and arguably his entire class”

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK/ANDREW LAYDEN

T

he recent election was a devastating blow to what voting guru Nate Silver refers to as the Indigo Blob — “the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia, and public health on the one hand and expressly partisan and political instruments of the Democratic Party and progressive advocacy groups on the other hand.”

Indeed, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was a far greater blow than even that of 2016, following as it did on January 6; two impeachments; and a slew of legal actions, both civil and criminal, state and federal. In short, voters in 2024 could not say they did not know what they were getting in Donald Trump. His victory therefore demonstrates the degree to which voters have come to doubt the basic competence of the expert class.

School closures pushed by teachers’ unions during a pandemic, calls to defund the police during a crime wave, and a racial “reckoning” amid a pandemic are a few of the disasters Silver mentions. He emphasizes that voters were not swayed by “misinformation,” but by a correct perception of institutional decline and policy failures of the expert class: overstimulating the economy leading to inflation, opening the border to nearly ten million illegal immigrants, and trying to run a doddering Biden again. Perhaps the biggest recent failure of the technocratic elite cited by Silver was the handling of the Covid epidemic, which managed to combine economically ruinous lockdowns, disastrous school closures, and seven million deaths worldwide.

The one thing left to the elites after Trump’s victory was their unshakeable faith in their own moral superiority. And one of their favorite proofs was President Biden’s oft-repeated promise that he would abide by the jury determinations in his son Hunter’s trials and not pardon him. Brendan O’Neill writing in Spiked describes how the establishment media fawned over the president as a moral icon, whose acceptance of the jury verdict in Hunter’s trial for lying on a federal gun permit form contrasted so sharply to Donald Trump’s rants about a “rigged” justice system.

“Over and over and over” the media and Democratic politicians celebrated their own high-mindedness and morally spotless characters. Veteran D.C. journalist John Harwood, for instance, posted, “People who insist Biden will pardon Hunter after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves; they can’t imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word.”

With last week’s announcement of a pardon of his son Hunter — not just on the federal gun charges on which he was convicted and the failure to pay federal taxes to which he has pleaded guilty, but of any and all crimes that he may have committed from 2014 on — Joe Biden has, in O’Neill’s words, “shattered the moral pretensions of his presidency, his party, and arguably his entire class.” Former DOJ pardon attorney Margaret Love could think of only one pardon so sweeping — Presidents Ford’s pardon of his predecessor Richard Nixon.

ALMOST AS EMBARRASSING as the president’s pardon itself was the justification he offered for his belated change of mind: His son, he argued, had been subjected to a prejudicial prosecution simply because he was the president’s son. On its face, the claim that the Department of Justice, headed by Biden’s appointed attorney general, Merrick Garland, had singled out Hunter Biden was laughable. That would be the same Merrick Garland who never appointed a special prosecutor to look into the multiple serious crimes of which Hunter Biden was suspected — money laundering, income tax evasion, and failure to register as a foreign agent — even though the very purpose of special prosecutors is to handle cases where the Department of Justice may have a conflict of interest.

United States District Court Judge Mark Scarsi, before whom Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to nonpayment of taxes, responded sharply to the president’s claim that drug-addled defendants, like Hunter Biden, who eventually make back payments are seldom criminally prosecuted. Scarsi pointed out that the charges to which Hunter pleaded guilty included nonpayment of taxes in years subsequent to his crack addiction, and that he had admitted to having the necessary funds to pay his taxes in those years but preferred to spend the money on his sybaritic lifestyle instead.

He might have added that Biden’s crimes were not simple nonpayment of taxes, but sophisticated and deliberate frauds, involving large sums of money. Those included deducting his debaucheries as business expenses and taking payments from foreign entities to his consulting firm in the form of nontaxable loans from the firm to him. Moreover, the more than 100 money transfers to Biden family members, through a dizzying array of shell corporations, which were flagged by six different banks as “suspicious,” strongly suggest an effort to hide payments from foreign sources by breaking it into small payments.

Scarsi concluded archly that the president has the power to pardon; he does not have the power to rewrite history.

Far from having been singled out for harsh treatment by the IRS or the Justice Department, Hunter was given the most solicitous treatment possible. IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler testified that at every juncture, their investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances was stymied by supervisors. They were denied access to his laptop, which was in the possession of the FBI, and which contained extensive correspondence about his business dealings.

Nor were they ever informed of the fact that an FBI informant had testified to being told by the founder of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat for a monthly fee of $83,000, that he had paid both Hunter Biden and his father $5 million each to get Ukrainian investigators off his back and to run interference for the company with US authorities. Then-vice president Joe Biden held the Ukrainian portfolio in the Obama administration, at that time.

Shapley and Ziegler’s request for a search warrant of Hunter’s residence and a beach house belonging to his father where he frequently stayed was denied by Assistant US Attorney for Delaware Lesley Wolf, despite the latter’s admission that there was probable cause for such a warrant. And on another occasion, when they were going to search a storage locker belonging to Hunter, Wolf tipped off his defense team in advance. Further, Shapley and Ziegler were told to ask no questions about the “big guy,” or Hunter’s “dad.”

US Attorney for Delaware David Weiss slow-walked the investigation into Hunter’s taxes to such an extent that the statute of limitations ran out on the most serious of those investigations dating back to 2014.

Finally, there is the matter of the plea bargain and diversion agreement that the DOJ attempted to sneak past US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley described the plea agreement as looking like it had been drafted by Hunter’s attorneys at Latham and Watkins. It was not accompanied by an indictment detailing Hunter’s crimes, as would normally be the case.

Second, tucked away in the “diversion agreement” for his failure to note his drug addiction on his form to purchase a firearm was a provision immunizing Hunter Biden from prosecution for any other offenses (just like his father’s recent pardon). That provision should have properly been in the plea agreement itself. Fortunately, Noreika caught its presence in the diversion agreement and refused to ratify the plea agreement, which itself constituted a severe and rare rebuke to the federal prosecutors.

THOSE PROFESSING to be disappointed to learn that Joe Biden is not the paragon of virtue and honesty they had imagined must have been wearing pretty thick blinders. He was caught plagiarizing in law school, and rather than graduating in the top half of his class, as he has claimed, he finished in the bottom quintile. His 1988 presidential campaign came to an abrupt halt when he was found to have substituted the life story of British Labour politician Neil Kinnock for his own. In the 2020 primaries, he told a whopper about having been arrested trying to meet imprisoned South African black leader Nelson Mandela.

More significantly, he repeatedly claimed to not know anything of his son Hunter’s business affairs with foreign entities, including those with entities closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party. That claim was rendered untenable when two of Hunter’s closest associates, Devon Archer and Rob Walker, testified that Joe Biden was repeatedly available to demonstrate his closeness to Hunter by speaking to him during business meetings either by phone or in person. Archer listed at least 20 such occasions.

Joe Biden’s vice-presidential visitor logs show that Archer met at length with him just prior to being appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and three weeks before Hunter was appointed to same board, at a monthly salary of over $83,000, despite having no experience in the energy sector.

Doing nothing about Hunter’s lucrative links to a Ukrainian company, while he was in charge of the Ukrainian portfolio in the Obama administration, was by itself an ethical violation by the senior Biden. But Joe was also so incautious as to boast in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations that he had had the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma fired by threatening to withhold a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the Ukrainian government.

The impropriety is clear even if Joe Biden never received a penny by allowing his brother James and son Hunter to profit heavily over decades by trading on the “Biden brand,” as Devon Archer called it. But it would require a good deal of credulity to believe that was the case. The House Oversight Committee has uncovered at least $24 million in payments from foreign entities associated with Hunter through over 100 shell companies to at least nine Biden family members.

Tony Bobulinski, a onetime business associate of Hunter’s, has testified that the “big guy” — referred to in a document concerning the division of profits between Hunter-affiliated entities and Chinese Energy Company (CEFC) — was the president.

Bobulinski further testified that Joe Biden was present at a 2017 business meeting with representatives of Chinese Energy Company at a posh Los Angeles restaurant, and was well-versed in the relationship between his son and the Chinese company, with close ties to the ruling CCP. In a 2017 encrypted email sent by Hunter to CEFC’s Henry Chao, who is also a CCP official, the former threatened that between himself and the “man sitting next to me [i.e., Hunter’s father],” there would be severe consequences if certain promised payments were not forthcoming. Chao had no trouble believing the Hunter’s father was indeed next to him, and the payments were made forthwith.

Had President Biden been a little better law student, he would have realized that by pardoning Hunter, he might have tightened the noose around his own neck. Should the Trump DOJ decide to follow up on the investigations into the Biden family business by the House Oversight Committee, it can begin by hauling Hunter before a grand jury for questioning. He cannot plead the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, as he has already been immunized to prosecution, and would have no choice but to answer questions on threat of perjury.

What an ironic ending that would be to the Hunter Biden pardon.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1040. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)