In a hard-hitting interview with lefty “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert, and with a non-medicinal doctor sitting confidently by his side, Joe Biden said that the investigation into his pure-as-the-driven-snow son Hunter is being “used to get me” and is “foul play.”

We’re sorry if we don’t seem sympathetic. Even if what Biden says about “foul play” is true — and it ain’t — it wouldn’t be the first time a politician’s family had been used against him. Why, we seem to recall a sitting president who’s had a similar experience.

As we learned just last week, the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware is investigating Hunter’s “tax affairs” — not his tax evasion, mind you; just his affairs. And it’s believed that there might be something more to it than just a little tax hiccup — something about, oh, influence peddling with China, and something about his dad being compromised by it. As our Mark Alexander recently wrote, “Despite three years of fake allegations that Trump was in the Kremlin’s pocket, the October revelations about the ChiCom links to Joe Biden, via Hunter Biden, are direct, and the allegations are verifiable. The evidence affirms that the ‘Big Guy’ was picking Beijing’s pocket — but with its full knowledge and complicity, and an understanding that he would thus end up in China’s pocket.”

Squeaky Clean Joe isn’t worried, though. “It is what it is,” he confidently told Colbert. And then, in a remark that no doubt deeply offended his former boss, Biden said of his son, “He is the smartest man I know, I mean, in pure intellectual capacity. As long as he’s good, we’re good.”

Sometimes, though, even really smart crooks get caught.

“There have been growing calls among Republicans,” writes Naomi Lim in the Washington Examiner, “for a special counsel investigation into Hunter’s foreign business dealings and taxes, an idea which President Trump reportedly favors, to provide the inquiries added protection against Joe Biden moving to squash them. Trump tweeted on Thursday he has ‘NOTHING’ to do with the potential prosecution of Hunter Biden. The elder Biden has stood by his son, releasing a statement through aides that reiterated how he was ‘deeply proud’ of him for fighting ‘through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger.’”

Yeah, those vicious personal attacks are the worst, especially when they’re directed at one’s son.

Whether President Trump’s next attorney general will appoint a special counsel here is yet to be seen, but Hunter’s dad wants us to know that his whole family is turning over a new leaf. “My son, my family will not be involved in any business, any enterprise that is in conflict with or appears to be in conflict,” he proclaimed earlier this week with a straight face.

That announcement, though, might not satisfy folks like Senator Tom Cotton, who’s calling on Biden to hold a press conference and start leveling with the American people — many of whom voted for him without knowing a thing about his family’s secretive business dealings with our nation’s number one geopolitical foe.

“I’d like Joe Biden to come clean entirely about what was going on with, not just his son, but his brother and his sister,” said Cotton. “His entire family has trading on his name and his public life for 50 years.”