Editors at National Review Online ponder new revelations about President Biden’s dubious dealings.
In Chicago, Democrats took the curtain-opening night of their national convention in Chicago to inflate the Biden presidency into the stuff of Mount Rushmore. We doubt that this is the inflation Biden will be remembered for, even by Democrats, whose leaders have arranged to have the nation’s disappearing president flown to a beach a couple of thousand miles away while they spend these next three days pretending the Biden presidency never happened — or, at least, that their new champion, Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, had nothing to do with it.
A more realistic portrayal of Biden has been composed by the House impeachment investigation into Biden family influence peddling. That inquiry, jointly conducted by the Republican-led Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means committees, has produced a 291-page report extensively documenting the monetization of the “Biden Brand.”
That’s the euphemism that Joe Biden’s collaborators — his son Hunter, his brother Jim, and their associates in the family business — used as they sold access to Biden and his political influence to agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes. Most alarmingly, that includes communist China, which accounts for much of the staggering $27 million that the self-dealing enterprise generated between the years 2014 and 2019 alone.
The report’s details are not new, but there is jaw-dropping effect in reading them marshaled together.
There is Hunter scooping up a tidy $3.5 million from the Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, with the then-vice president hopping on one of Hunter’s “business” calls and telling Baturina to “be good to my boy.”
There is Hunter prying $1 million from crooked Romanian real-estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu to intervene on his behalf with the government in Bucharest, even as his father lectured that government to step up its anti-corruption efforts. It’s a play the Biden Brand practically perfected — running it again in Ukraine.
