The story of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his shady dealings with a Ukrainian energy company, is convoluted enough already. But the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s report on all of it makes at least one thing clear: Biden has been humiliated by his son’s conduct.
Even as the former vice president has admitted he was, at minimum, wary of his son’s involvement with energy company Burisma, he has still maintained that he knew nothing of what Hunter was doing and that it had no impact whatsoever in Obama administration diplomacy in Ukraine.
The Senate report proves in detail that that cannot possibly be true. On the contrary, it cites former Obama administration officials who raised concerns directly with Biden and his office that Hunter’s inexplicable employment on Burisma’s board was impeding their efforts to confront widespread corruption in Ukrainian’s fragile government.
“More than a year after [senior State Department official George] Kent reported his concerns to the vice president’s staff, he wrote to his superiors that Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board was ‘very awkward’ to those on the front lines pushing anticorruption efforts in Ukraine on a daily basis,” the report says. “Kent testified that he felt the need to ‘prepar[e] everybody for ‘what about-ism,’ because we’re pushing what’s right… and we have to be prepared for people who are critics, are opponents, to say, ‘Well, what about? What about Hunter Biden?’”
In short, Joe Biden as vice president was tasked with rooting out corruption in Ukraine — remember, that’s supposed to be the West’s first firewall against our number one foe Russia! — and his son deliberately took advantage of his father’s role, using it as an opportunity to make, according to the Senate report, several million dollars.
Hunter is and was a grown man. He’s responsible for his own actions. It’s not illegal to be a slimy opportunist willing to use your father’s very serious work in a high-level government role for personal financial gain. But how could Joe Biden not be embarrassed that his son put him in that position?
He’d have to be. And he has since been compelled to defend his son’s slimy conduct because, well, that’s what family is for, I guess.
The Senate report concedes that there “remains much work to be done” in further piecing together what exactly Hunter Biden was doing abroad while his dad was vice president, with investigators facing a series of roadblocks from Democrats on the committee, lawyers, and other legal matters. But there is no denying that, if nothing else, Joe Biden should be mortified.
