Hunter Biden, the ne’er-do-well, ethically-challenged son of former Vice President Joe Biden, appeared in a video on the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and told America his father would be an “honest” president.
You have to admire the sheer chutzpah it took to say that.
Hunter Biden is Exhibit A in Biden’s dishonesty, how the former vice president used his office to enrich members of his family. And, like a true con man, Hunter Biden lied with a straight face.
Let us review the facts.
Hunter Biden joined the U.S. Navy at age 43 through the direct commissioning program, a process typically reserved for people with special skills. It is not clear what special skills he offered, but right away he received special treatment: one waiver for his age, and another waiver for a drug incident “when he was a young man,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
It ended quickly, and badly: he tested positive for cocaine after showing up for duty, and was discharged.
From there, Hunter Biden found his way to an appointment on the board of Burisma, the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas company, in 2014.
He had no experience in the energy industry, but he had one important qualification: his father was vice president, and had been placed in charge of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. He earned $83,000 per month and he never even went to Ukraine, though he attended board meetings outside the country.
When reporters asked the Obama administration about the odd arrangement, the “scandal-free” Obama White House referred questions to the vice president’s office. The State Department said that Hunter Biden was a “private citizen” and that there were no concerns about the arrangement — not even about the “perception” of Russian or Ukrainian oligarchs using Hunter Biden to gain influence with the administration.
The mainstream media, satisfied with those responses, dropped the issue.
But career civil servants were concerned.
During the impeachment inquiry last year, it emerged that State Department official George Kent had raised the issue internally because Hunter Biden’s role “could create the perception of a conflict of interest.” He was brushed aside: “The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president’s son Beau Biden was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth to deal with family related issues at that time,” he testified to the inquiry.
Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, a key witness for Democrats, admitted in response to questions from the Republican side that she had been briefed about Hunter Biden’s conflict of interest when the Obama administration prepared her for confirmation hearings in 2016. She was told to refer questions to the vice president’s office. Once at her post, the supposedly corruption-busting diplomat took no interest in Burisma or in what Hunter Biden was doing on its board.
In a now-infamous video from 2018, former Vice President Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations that he had demanded the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor, on pain of losing $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. What he did not tell his audience was that the prosecutor had jurisdiction over investigations into Burisma.
Even if those inquiries were dormant, it was a glaring conflict of interest. Biden admitted earlier this year that Hunter’s deal “looked bad.” But it was not the only one.
Hunter Biden traveled to China with his father on Air Force Two in 2013 and returned from the trip with an unheard-of $1 billion deal — later expanded to $1.5 billion — for his investment firm.
Later, as Joe Biden’s presidential campaign heated up, Hunter resigned from the board of Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), the company involved in the deal. But he has reportedly kept his 10% stake in the company, which could be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Again, his only qualification was his father.
Recently, Hunter Biden lost a paternity suit in Arkansas, where a judge ruled that he was the “biological and legal father” of a woman there after he took a DNA test.
He told the court that he was financially destitute, yet earlier this year when he was hit with a $453,890 tax lien by the District of Columbia, he paid within days.
In sum, Hunter Biden is the least qualified person on the planet to testify about his father’s honesty. Joe Biden has let his son use his connections, repeatedly, to enrich himself.
Biden is not honest. He lies, repeatedly, about provably false things like the Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax.
He is a “moderate” front for a party whose agenda has been taken over by radical socialists — hence the near-total silence about the party’s policies during the DNC.
The Hunter Biden moment was the “tell,” the clue that revealed the entire DNC was a fraud. And yet praise poured in from journalists for the portrayal of Biden as a family man.
Every con requires a willing victim. Our media are hooked.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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