In Brief: How the Bidens Got Rich
The DOJ has ignored the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation for too long.
The Biden Crime Family is certainly the subject of Republican scrutiny, though the Leftmedia has circled the wagons to prevent anyone from finding out “too much.” Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, however, is on the case, though he argues it’s less about criminal activity that national security and political culpability.
As the evidence mounts, ever more risible are the president’s claims of noninvolvement in the Biden family’s leveraging of his political influence for eye-popping paydays courtesy of corrupt, anti-American regimes. Yet the Biden Justice Department remains indifferent, as if the issue were merely the personal peccadillos of the president’s ne'er-do-well son, Hunter.
Even on those — Hunter’s evasion of millions of dollars in personal taxes and a false statement concealing his drug abuse on a federal firearms form — prosecutors have refrained from filing charges, although the apparent crimes are long-standing and uncomplicated. And the evidence is strong: Liens had been placed on various Hunter properties for years, and he recently paid his back taxes with a loan from a Hollywood lawyer friend (a move that does not vitiate the tax evasion but could enable the Biden Justice Department to rationalize not indicting). As for the handgun, Hunter is depicted waving it around on a video from his infamous laptop while he cavorts with a prostitute during a drug binge. A few days later, he lost the weapon when his then-paramour — Hallie Biden, the widow of his brother, Beau — disposed of it in a garbage bin across from a school (it was later found; the only real intrigue involves whether Secret Service agents tried to make documentary evidence of the gun’s purchase and loss disappear).
Jaw-dropping, sure, but Hunter’s personal criminal jeopardy is a sideshow. What matters is that millions of dollars have poured into the Biden-family coffers from agents of foreign regimes, including China, which just happens to be the Biden family’s most lucrative cash cow. There is no gainsaying the payments. House Oversight Committee Republicans, under the leadership of chairman James Comer (R., Ky.), have just released an “interim report” detailing over $10 million flowing from foreign sources to accounts of business associates and family members.
This is likely the tip of the iceberg. NBC News reported last year, for example, that Hunter alone raked in around $11 million in just the five years from 2013 to 2018 — i.e., beginning soon after a drug test resulted in his quiet discharge from the armed forces (after the then–vice president’s son, at age 42 and with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, was somehow selected to become a commissioned officer in the Navy’s public-affairs department). From that debacle, Hunter cruised to an exorbitantly compensated sinecure on the board of Burisma, a corrupt Ukrainian energy company. Did I mention that his father happened to be Obama’s point man on American policy in Kyiv?
The key suspicion centers on this truth: “In legitimate business transactions, it is generally easy to detect the consideration — services, goods, real estate, etc. — swapped for large sums of money. By contrast, the only apparent commodity in many hefty payments to Biden-family members is access to Joe Biden and his political influence.”
He adds:
The telltale signs of illegitimate business are reticulated payment arrangements featuring shell companies, complex banking channels, and money transfers to people with no clear — and sometimes no plausible — connection to the provision of goods and services. Such practices are strongly suggestive of money-laundering: the intention to obscure the ultimate source of the money and to parse large payments, which would otherwise raise suspicion, into less conspicuous smaller payments.
That pretty much describes everything nine members of the Biden family did with 20 shell companies. McCarthy goes on at length before concluding:
In a healthy political culture, Biden’s scandals would not be survivable. In the political culture we inhabit, the media and political establishment snooze while Attorney General Merrick Garland refuses to appoint a special counsel despite the Biden Justice Department’s neon-flashing conflict of interest and resulting paralysis. A disgrace.