And so another presidency is about to begin amid scandal. This one, involving Joe Biden’s son Hunter, seems to be an improvement on the last in that it looks more plausible than the Russian baloney the deep state served up after President Trump won the 2016 election. That fiction, concocted by Hillary Clinton, included an invented encounter with peeing prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room and lies of commission and omission by rogue elements in the intelligence services apparently bent on inculpating and perhaps toppling an elected president. One hopes special counsel John Durham will eventually report precisely who did what to whom, and how, so the public will see how much in need of cleaning the Augean bureaucracy has become.

The new scandal, in which the president-elect’s son is being investigated for alleged tax crimes and, previously, for laundering money from his no-qualifications employment in foreign countries, does not suffer from such obvious flaws, such as even its own advocates admitting they lack direct knowledge of its details. And on this occasion, it is not the investigators but their target and his father who are most likely to be tainted, even disgraced. (It has already disgraced the Democrats’ poodle media, as Byron York noted in his newsletter on Dec. 10. House-trained news organizations repeated for more than a year that there was “absolutely no evidence” against Hunter Biden, even as prosecutors investigated actual evidence.) Hunter’s nefarious money interests were central to Trump’s impeachment. It was his pressure on Ukraine’s president for an investigation that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff seized on for lack of a smoking gun.