Editors at National Review Online explore the president’s questionable family affairs.
On May 21, 2014, then–Vice President Joe Biden, in his role as Obama administration point-man for American policy with respect to several countries, including Romania, delivered a speech in Bucharest, admonishing the prime minister and other Romanian officials that “corruption is a cancer.” He warned that allowing public corruption to fester “can represent a clear and present danger not only to a nation’s economy, but to its very national security.”
Investigations currently being pressed by House Republicans raise worrisome indications that Biden may have failed to heed his own advice.
That is the upshot of a 36-page interim report issued by the House Oversight Committee led by Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.). Thanks to Biden administration stonewalling, the committee’s probe is still at an early stage. In the president’s first two years, for example, Treasury Department practices were altered to deny the GOP minority access to over 150 Suspicious Activity Reports filed by banks in connection with Biden family transactions. Until Republicans took control of the House and its subpoena power in January, House GOP efforts stalled, with investigators left to rely on the yeoman’s work of Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), relying on information derived from Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop and whistleblowers.
Still, as the interim report details, after a perusal of just a fraction of the relevant data, his family members and their associates have hauled in over $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies since Biden’s days as Obama administration vice president. These include Gabriel Popoviciu, a businessman convicted of bribery in Romania and relatedly investigated by British authorities. He poured over $1 million into Biden family accounts even as the then–vice president lectured Bucharest about corruption.
