Count on Hunter Biden to remind us, no matter what else is in the news, what ethical obliviousness looks like.
Biden and his latest wife, Melissa, had a baby boy Saturday. In the course of discussing it, he insisted, yet again (when the questioning digressed), that he had not done “anything improper … in any way whatsoever” in his dealings with the Burisma energy company that was at the center of President Trump’s impeachment drama.
His only error, Biden said, was in showing the “poor judgment” of not realizing his board position with a dicey foreign corporation might give “a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father. That’s where I made the mistake.”
Of course. His perfectly ethical behavior gave other people an excuse to act unethically.
We can limn the younger Biden’s ethics even without delving into him ditching his wife for the widow of his late brother, cheating on the widow to father a child with a random woman in Arkansas, falsely denying paternity of the Arkansas child, and then ditching both his ex-sister-in-law and the Arkansas woman in order to marry his current wife six days after they first met. We’ll also ignore his discharge from the U.S. Navy due to cocaine use.
Let’s focus instead merely on his Burisma dealings.
First, to act unethically does not necessarily entail acting illegally. The two standards are different. Trump has not identified a single crime that Hunter Biden is suspected of committing — largely because there isn’t necessarily anything criminal in trading on a family name to take a cushy job.
Still, the huge ethical problem with taking Burisma’s highly paid board position was that it unambiguously put a cloud over important U.S. diplomacy. When Biden joined Burisma’s board on April 18, 2014, his father was already well-ensconced as the Obama administration’s point man on policy toward Ukraine, one of the world’s leading diplomatic hot spots. Worse, Biden the son had no obviously relevant experience for the position.
Whenever an immediate family member of a major public official takes a lucrative position, the official naturally will be in somewhat compromised circumstances if he or she must oversee policy clearly affecting the outfit the family member has joined. There is no way to avoid questions about whether the official’s decisions have been affected by the family member’s interests.
If one’s father is the vice president, and one’s new job obviously could be materially affected by your father’s diplomacy, it is no longer a matter of mere private ethics or private profit. The chance of even subconscious altering of the nation’s diplomacy has ramifications far beyond one’s own family. The United States, indeed the world, might have its best interests subject to shadings of judgment that might not have existed if one’s own financial spigot hadn’t been opened.
When the diplomacy involves one of the world’s most important of hot spots, these shadings of judgment could have monumental effects.
Meanwhile, the very appearance of a conflict may make the sincerity of the diplomacy more difficult for others to trust. Even if the judgment of the diplomat, or, in this case, the vice president, has not been materially altered, the mere fact that foreign entities suspect an ulterior motive can make it more difficult for the administration to achieve its aims in service of U.S. interests.
So, yes, it was absolutely “improper” for Hunter Biden to put his father, his father’s administration, and U.S. foreign policy as a whole in such an awkward position. His union with Burisma, like several of his other unions, was obviously ill-advised.
