Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is acting as if the recent revelations about his son’s overseas business dealings and the role Joe Biden may have played in them will just blow over.
His wife, Jill Biden, said as much during an interview with ABC’s The View on Wednesday. When asked about the emails Hunter Biden allegedly sent offering to arrange a meeting between his father, who was then vice president, and a top Ukrainian energy executive, Jill dismissed the story as a “distraction.”
“I don’t like to see my son attacked, and certainly, I don’t like to see my husband attacked, but for me, these are distractions,” she said on Wednesday. “The American people don’t want to hear these smears against my family; the American people are struggling right now.”
But recent polls prove that voters do care about this scandal and the lack of honesty it represents. Nearly half of registered voters told the Washington Examiner’s latest YouGov poll that they do not believe Joe Biden has been honest about his son’s business activities overseas. Plus, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, a majority of likely voters agreed that Biden’s oversight of Ukraine while vice president posed a conflict given Hunter’s business dealings in the region.
Maybe people aren’t interested in the specifics — in who Joe Biden allegedly met with and when, or in which companies Hunter had a stake, or in how much money Hunter made during his father’s tenure in the White House — but voters are smart enough to realize that something isn’t adding up. It has been nearly a week, and Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has been unable to disprove a single detail included in the New York Post’s report about Hunter’s alleged emails. Neither Biden nor his son have denied that the laptop in question belonged to Hunter. So, is the story true or not?
Joe Biden hasn’t given us a straight answer, and the media isn’t willing to find out. And as a result, many independent voters are growing wary of a candidate who already has a long history of fibbing, as my colleague Quin Hillyer pointed out. Perhaps Joe Biden’s campaign and Twitter’s political activists are right that this scandal won’t move the needle much. That’s the bet Biden is making — and it’s one he just might live to regret.
