Joe Biden deserves better than his delinquent son…
Before becoming Barak Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden was a senator from Delaware. Delaware is a small state of 961,000, where everyone knows everyone else and everyone knows all the major office holders. Here, all politics are local and Joe Biden comes off as an amiable good guy, kind of like a family’s goofy uncle. Joe Biden is also a sympathetic figure. Soon after his first election in 1972, his wife and daughter were killed in a car wreck. Which helps explains why Biden was elected to seven senate terms.
Politics became the Biden family business. Joe Biden’s oldest son, Beau, was himself a lawyer and served in Obama’s justice department. He was elected Delaware Attorney General (AG) in 2006 and 2010. In 2003, he joined the Delaware Army National Guard, serving in the Judge Advocate General Corps and was deployed to Iraq when still the state AG. Though certainly benefiting from his father, Beau Biden was a self-made man. Sadly, Beau Biden died from brain cancer in 2015.
Younger son Hunter Biden has been trading off his father’s name his entire adult life. Hunter Biden went to work for Delaware banking giant MBNA in the 90’s. He later went to work in the Department of Commerce and, after that, served on the board of Amtrak, America’s publicly owned passenger railroad service. In 2013, Hunter Biden founded BHR Holdings with a Chinese businessman named Jonathan Li, and actually arranged a photo op with his father for Li. That same year, Hunter Biden parlayed his father’s name into an officer’s commission in the United States Navy Reserve. In 2014, he took his $50,000 a month no show job with Burisma Holdings, the now notorious Ukrainian natural gas company. When Ukrainian prosecutor Victor Shokin opened an investigation into Bursima in 2015, Vice President Biden told the Ukrainian government to drop the investigation or lose a billion dollars in American foreign aid. Ukraine fired Shokin. This was the real quid pro quo and Joe Biden bragged openly about it.
Last summer, President Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyre Zelensky to look into the Burisma matter and to investigate Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 presidential election on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. For this, Democrats are trying to impeach the president. But Democrats have been threatening to impeach Trump since winning the House in last year’s midterm elections and introduced three failed impeachment resolutions in the previous session. Throughout 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi cautioned against impeaching the president. But when House Judiciary Chair Adam Schiff (D-California) said he had a leaker within the State Department who claimed Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden, she acquiesced and launched the so-called impeachment inquiry.
Early polls showed Americans were concerned by the allegations and interested in the impeachment hearings. But, since then, nothing has gone right for the Democrats. Trump released a transcript of his call with President Zelensky which showed nothing but banal conversation between two leaders. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) turned the investigation over to Adam Schiff, chair of the House Judiciary committee. Schiff held the committee’s first hearings in secret, a public relations blunder allowing the Republicans to claim the process was unfair and un-American. Later, public hearings were a disaster for the Democrats. Over the course of two weeks, Americans saw a succession of mid-level State Department ambassadors and staff talk about overheard phone calls and third hand conversations. Soon it was clear these utterly forgettable bureaucrats had no direct knowledge of the phone call and simply disagreed with the president on Ukraine. This was a policy difference, not a crime. The Democrats case would undoubtedly be helped if they could tell America exactly what crime they think Trump committed during his phone call with President Zelensky. At first, they claimed a quid-pro-quo, Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine in exchange for political dirt on Joe Biden. Later, the democrats claimed bribery and then extortion. Worst of all for the Democrats, the effort is being led by deeply unlikable people. Speaker Pelosi comes off as a word slurring old rich lady with a lot of bad plastic surgery. Adam Schiff’s eyes bug out of their sockets when he talks. Congressman Jerold Nadler (D-New York), chair of the Judiciary Committee scheduled to hold hearings this week, is cartoonishly short and squat.
Congressman Nadler will hold hearings in the House Judiciary Committee. Should the Democrats impeach, the trial will be held in the Republican controlled senate. Here, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be free to summon whatever witnesses he chooses. Hunter Biden is sure to be called. Unfortunately for Hunter, his personal life is a mess. Not long after being commissioned in the USNR, he was discharged after testing positive for cocaine. And was recently proven to be the father of a Washington DC stripper’s child. Most bizarrely, Hunter Biden had an affair with his dead brother’s wife. Hunter Biden can only further embarrass his father.
William Stroock, author of military fiction
