Paging Jim Clapper, Mike Hayden, John Brennan and all you 51 former intelligence community officials: hate to break it to you, but it’s that time again – time to fire up the laptop and get writing on another open letter asserting that any threat to Joe Biden is once again Russian disinformation.
Following last week’s bombshell release of an FBI document where a trusted informant discloses that the CEO and founder of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma claims he was “forced or coerced to pay” $10 million to Joe and Hunter Biden, among other things, to “deal with” the firing of a prosecutor investigating the business – you spooks need to beat feet down to the White House and pen another missive covering for the Big Guy.
While you’re at it, go ahead and debunk the sworn testimony of two career IRS agents last week that showed they were impeded by Justice Department officials from seeing that document or asking anything about Joe Biden’s involvement as part of their investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances.
Ditto for the WhatsApp messages where Hunter shakes down Chinese bank official Gongwen Dong for $5 million while “sitting next to” his father, noting that “The Biden's [sic] are the best at doing exactly what [the bank] Chairman wants from this partnership,” and threatening that failure to “fulfill” the “commitment” will result in Hunter’s “mak[ing] certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.” And, believe it or not, days later the bank wired Hunter – you guessed it -- $5 million.
Or, that “in at least a dozen instances, Hunter put his father, then VP, on speakerphone with his overseas business partners,” including Burisma, after Joe denied for years discussing any business deals with Hunter.”
No doubt about it – you gumshoes need to put away the invisible ink and start scribbling for real.
In many ways, Joe and Hunter are victims of bad timing. Joe joined the Senate when selling influence through family members was the oldest game in Washington, and it continues to this day.
The rules are simple: you get elected, your spouse, son, or brother hangs out a shingle as a lobbyist or “consultant,” and anyone who wants you to vote their way hires them. Fig-leaf rules exist to give a sheen of acceptability to the practice, most notably that family members cannot lobby their relative Senator directly, but the wink can be seen a time-zone away.
That game is the best way someone like Scranton Joe can join the Senate at age 29 as “one of the poorest members” of Congress, and emerge a multimillionaire after close to fifty years in government. Biden’s son and brother played the game, and when he became Vice President, they went from journeymen to star influence-peddlers overnight.
Whenever Biden took on a specific portfolio as vice president, Hunter and his uncle were often in tow, sometimes literally. Shortly after Obama made Biden his point person on China in 2012, Biden swooped into Beijing on Air Force Two, accompanied by Hunter, who met with Chinese executives and emerged with millions in contracts, despite holding no tangible skill or expertise in the banking industry, or otherwise.
The same goes for Ukraine, where Burisma put Hunter on its board for $80,000 a month, with zero experience in the energy sector, a mere six months after Obama gave Joe the Ukraine portfolio in November 2013.
When Joe decided against running for President in the fall of 2015, he and everyone else assumed Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election and serve two terms, spelling the death knell for Biden’s political career. With only a year-and-a-half remaining in office, Joe clearly had Hunter and his brother Jim rev their influence peddling into overdrive before they had no more influence to peddle.
A couple of months later, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. funding from Ukraine unless the prosecutor investigating Burisma was fired, which, as Biden later bragged, occurred hours later.
And somehow China donated over $30 million to the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, right after it established the Penn-Biden Center in Washington, which has been called “a dark-money, revolving-door nightmare where foreign competitors like China donated millions of dollars to the university so that they could have access to future high-ranking officials.” No wonder many call it the Penn-China Center.
When Hillary lost, and Biden emerged from the political dead to run for president, his family’s mammoth pay-for-play push in his final years as VP became an ethical millstone around Joe’s neck as president.
And now, with Republicans holding the gavel in multiple investigating committees in the House, that millstone is dragging Biden down more than any sandbag or stairs to Air Force One ever could.
So there’s no choice in the matter – it’s time for Clapper, Hayden, Brennan and all 51 spies to take a break from their paid speaking engagements and commentator gigs on MSNBC and CNN and get to work once again shilling for Biden with yet another CYA, dog-ate-my-homework open letter propping him up.
Mr. Ullyot is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former spokesman for the National Security Council.