Here’s something the national media are very willing to overlook as they effortlessly dismiss even the possibility that Joe Biden and his son Hunter did anything fishy with regard to Ukraine: Both Bidens have publicly indicated that something was probably wrong.
In an interview with a local radio show in New Hampshire, the former vice president said just this week that he “never” discusses the business endeavors of his family members because he wouldn’t want to make political or policy decisions that appear nepotistic. Oh, but wait — then he recalled that one time…
“At one point that it came out that [Hunter] was on the board [of Ukranian gas company Burisma],” Biden recalled, “I said, ‘I sure hope to hell you know what you’re doing.’ Period. I said that.”
Asked by the interviewer Jack Heath what exactly it was that concerned Joe Biden about his son and Burisma, the 2020 candidate said, “What his job was.”
Um, does anyone in the media have thoughts on what that chilling answer entails?
Hunter was quoted in a New Yorker piece relaying the exact same anecdote in July: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’”
What does it say about Hunter that, as a middle-aged man, his father felt the need to say something to him like, “I hope you know what you are doing,” or, as Joe Biden recalled it, “I hope to hell you know what you’re doing”?
The last time my own father expressed such confidence in me, it wasn’t because I had just told him about my ambitions to cure cancer. The elder Biden clearly knew about the $50,000 per month arrangement and believed it was shady.
It’s not in dispute that Hunter has a history of drug addiction and unnaturally lucrative business dealings that make no sense to anyone who has bothered looking into them. But there he was, aboard Air Force Two with dad, flying to China for investment negotiations. And he just happened to see his financial interests protected by his father who, while vice president, pressured Ukraine’s government to get rid of a prosecutor who had been investigating Burisma.
Biden’s defense, with great assist from the media, is that a lot of other people also wanted that same prosecutor gone. The liberal website Vox last week triumphantly declared that it had seen proof that “GOP attacks on Biden over Ukraine are nonsense.” The proof was a 2016 letter signed by a handful of Republican senators who wanted a complete overhaul of Ukraine’s political system. At the very bottom of the letter, they say that call for “urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.”
Wow, doesn’t that sound exactly like what Trump supposedly did — tell Ukraine that if it didn’t get rid of the prosecutor, it wouldn’t receive $1 billion in foreign aid? But never mind that, even if it did, the letter doesn’t prove that the questions about Joe Biden, Hunter, and Ukraine are “nonsense.” It only proves that there was overlap between what Biden and some Republican senators wanted. Democrats say they would like a productive relationship with Russia. Trump says the same thing. So where’s the Vox article about how the Democrat “attacks on Trump over Russia are nonsense?”
Joe Biden has said very little about Hunter and Burisma, outside of sharing that one telling quote. Maybe we could start there if anyone was interested in finding out more.
