As with all topics of national import, we’ve written our fair share about Hunter Biden and the Biden Crime Family led by Joe Biden. Yet the indispensable Andy McCarthy always has something to add.

He begins by recounting the similarities to the protection racket depicted in the “Godfather,” before continuing:

Nowadays, such Yale-educated professional glibsters as Devon Archer would call this Don Corleone’s “brand.” Such a nice word, brand. Not what we federal prosecutors in the Organized Crime Unit called it back in the Eighties. We were more inclined to say extortion. Or racketeering — say, running a protection racket, as in, “Nice business you have here, be a shame if anyone shut it down.”

Pols like Joe Biden and their hangers-on — like Archer, his son Hunter’s partner in slime — don’t like to think of their “brand” as extortion. They’re more in the mold of Don Corleone’s equally ruthless but more progressive son, Michael, who swore that any year now the family business would become “completely legitimate.” In such “completely legitimate” businesses, the muscle to do extortion is the family’s “brand.” The brand’s stock-in-trade is “influence,” an aura of intimidation to which beleaguered businesses — including foreign “partners” connected to corrupt and anti-American regimes — buy “access.” That’s what they expect will protect them from the metastasizing peril of, yes, “regulation.” …

You know how this works. To show you how very much they care, politicians promise to save the planet, reduce emissions, clean the water, eliminate workplace hazards, stabilize the banking system, and basically achieve “progress” in every minute aspect of life by enacting regulations. The movers in this process are lobbyists — some working for entrenched businesses who ask to be regulated not out of their love of humanity but because they can withstand it while their upstart would-be competitors can’t; and some representing pragmatists who recognize that if you’re not at the table then you’re on the menu. The result is an ever-expanding, fee-laden regulatory maze that generates income for lawyers, accountants, and most of all “consultants,” those solons who possess that special “understanding of the regulatory environment” — or, more succinctly, who’ve “got a guy.” …

In power politics, the big kahuna is the guy who’s got the most guys. The guy who’s got so many guys that he can get away without calling them too often — who’s got so much power that the regulators think twice about harassing anyone known to be his pal.

The vice president of these United States of America is about as big as it gets in the kahuna business.

No wonder Joe Biden was known as the “big guy.” McCarthy proceeds through other parts of Archer’s testimony and interview with Tucker Carlson, the evolution of Joe Biden’s “never discussed” business with Hunter to was “never in business” with him, the whole “illusion of access” word games from Rep. Dan Goldman, and more.

Democrats and their media allies say it means affirmative abuses of Joe Biden’s political power and influence to advance particular interests of “Hunter’s” foreign clients, and they stubbornly insist there is no evidence of such abuses. That’s laughable. …

Nevertheless, that construction of “access” sets the bar too high, as do the gaslighting protestations that the president “did not discuss business” with Hunter, or “was not in business with Hunter.”

Joe Biden was the business.

Without the now-president, there would have been no Biden brand. Influence-peddling only pays when there is influence to be peddled. Access can only be sold if it is access to someone. Joe Biden is what Hunter Biden was selling. It is risible to hand-wring over whether Joe and Hunter “discussed business” when Joe’s status and the access to power it provided to those willing to pay was the business.

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.