The surest sign that the Biden family enrichment scandal is getting serious is the growing desperation and gaslighting that increasingly characterizes the spin being deployed on behalf of the president from elected Democrats and unelected Democrats in the 'news' media. We laid out Monday's developments in this post, which I'd encourage you to read if you're catching up on this story. We included some of the new talking points from the White House and Democrats, some of which were immediately and dutifully ingested and regurgitated by certain journalists. I'd like to focus on a handful of components of the new and evolving conventional wisdom, the guardians of which can no longer simply declare this all a non-story. They're flailing, which is, in turn, revealing:
(1) Let's recall that Joe Biden said this in August 2019: “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period." This was one of multiple times Biden denied any knowledge of, conversations about, or connections to his family's lucrative money-making endeavors involving foreign 'business partners' and benefactors. At least nine members of the family have received payments from overseas, many routed through a complex series of shell corporations, totaling in the millions of dollars. In many cases, the goods and services supposedly rendered in exchange for these cash infusions is shrouded in mystery. Now that multiple accounts and witnesses with personal knowledge have confirmed that Joe Biden was on numerous phone calls with Hunter Biden's international business associates, as well as attending in-person meetings and meals, Biden's categorical claims from the campaign are null and void. Even the sycophants aren't trying to maintain that deception anymore.
I'll also note that other major assertions made by Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign, including on the presidential debate stage -- that Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation, and that Hunter didn't make any money from China -- have since been exposed as completely false. As we pointed out last week, the White House has seamlessly pivoted from Biden's 'no conversations, ever' line to a dramatically different denial, stating that the two Biden men were never "in business" together. This could very well also be a lie, but it would be a lie that's tougher to disprove than Biden's broad-based and now-shattered lie. Other Democrats and journalist allies have already skipped to the next step, which is to say that of course Biden had lots of contact with his son's overseas business partners, something that has been known for a long time. The goalposts aren't being dragged a few inches here. They're being uprooted and planted at the other end of the field:
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Rep. @danielsgoldman: "Preposterous premise" to say Joe Biden shouldn't be talking w/ Hunter's business associates pic.twitter.com/QtL4XZflBt
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 31, 2023
Folks, just look at this sentence from the NYT: pic.twitter.com/5INh22nmGB
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 1, 2023
It would be "preposterous" to think that what Joe Biden said was the truth, it seems -- and the lie that he got away with telling, over and over again as a candidate for president, has "long been known" to be false. It's remarkable to watch in real time, and incredible that they think they're fooling anyone.
(2) Another talking point that seems to have rapidly congealed is that Joe Biden should be given some slack for perhaps cutting a few ethical or judgment corners, or forgetting about a few dozen meetings, because back during that general time frame, his other son was dying. Don't blame a grieving father for his grief. These hacks are simultaneously arguing that this family enrichment scheme and bribery allegations are truly a story of paternal love (for Hunter) and grief (for Beau), and it's unseemly to talk too much about any of it. The invocation of Beau Biden's memory bubbled up rather suddenly, from Democrats and media figures alike:
Rep. @danielsgoldman: "Let's put this in context: Beau Biden got very sick in 2015. He died in 2015. It was right in the middle when Devon Archer had his business dealings with Hunter Biden. At that point Joe Biden and Hunter Biden began to speak every day because they were… pic.twitter.com/hul2OjQiDs
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 1, 2023
This is vile, ghoulish emotional blackmail. The whole purpose of tying Beau's death into this is to preemptively demonize the people asking questions about extremely questionable conduct and the verifiable lies Joe Biden has told. They're trying to erect another barrier to talk about the scandal in an open and honest way, much like we saw attempted here. They're using a deceased Biden as a human shield. It's disgusting -- even setting aside the fact that Joe Biden has weirdly lied on multiple occasions about the location of Beau's death, just as he also lied about the circumstances of his first wife and daughter's tragic deaths. It's not gross to point that out; it's gross that he does it. What stage of grief, exactly, entails a mourning father grappling with the loss of his son by using US foreign policy power and taxpayer money to coerce a foreign government into firing a prosecutor investigating an overseas company for corruption? A company, incidentally, that happens to be paying the father's other son $1 million a year for no substantive reason beyond access to power and influence, and whose top executives were placing enormous pressure on said surviving son to secure US intervention in helping to solve their prosecutor problem. Again, Joe Biden boasted in public about achieving the 'quo' in a quid pro quo that has been directly alleged by an FBI informant, the basics of which were just affirmed by one of the Bidens' closest business associates.
In one of the above clips, Eugene Robinson asks why a man who loves family more than anything else would hang up on his own son, especially in the 'context' of his other son passing away. This is a pathetic attempt to explain away dozens of contacts that Joe Biden had totally denied during the campaign. It's also rich to see them back at the 'devotion to family' storyline well so soon after the president was finally dragooned into acknowledging a granddaughter he'd been ignoring for four years, amid the family treating the child horribly. Once the political optics got too ugly, Biden at long last whispered to some reporters that ok fine, he has a 7th grandchild, in a mid-summer Friday night news dump. Ah yes, family surely is everything to this man. Somewhat relatedly, what stage of grief entails sleeping with one's brother's widow, then trying to blame illegal immigrants when she throws one's illegally-obtained gun into a dumpster near a school, and people start to ask questions? This is the "decency is on the ballot" family.
(3) We've seen apologists framing what Hunter was up to as selling the "illusion of access" to his father, not actual access:
Ah yes, the “illusion” of access created by
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) July 31, 2023
*squints*
meetings with 14 business associates, and at least 20 phone calls pic.twitter.com/uAVsDKVdSQ
Exactly. When Dad answered those calls repeatedly, showing off how easily Hunter could get 'my guy' or 'the big guy' on the line, that's not an illusion. That's access. The telegraphed message is, pay me lots of money and this access can be leveraged for your benefit. Joe Biden didn't need to get into specific details about business matters with these people on initial calls. Just his voice and/or presence told the story. And again, in the case of Burisma, that access-purchasing appears to have paid enormous dividends in the form of the US government forcing the firing of a thorn-in-their-side prosecutor, explicitly engineered by Hunter's father. The alleged phone call that led to that outcome surely wasn't just small talk about the weather.
(4) Finally, to reiterate what seems to be an essential point in this unfolding saga: Devon Archer's recollection of the fateful "call to DC" placed by Hunter Biden and Burisma executives -- allegedly getting the ball rolling to the ousting of that Ukrainian prosecutor -- appears to confirm a big piece of the explosive bribery allegation leveled at Joe and Hunter Biden by a confidential FBI informant, as memorialized in the much-discussed FD-1023 memo. According to reports and sources, some FBI investigators had already corroborated some details from this informant's accusation. Devon Archer confirming the occurrence and context of that same phone call would absolutely bolster the credibility of the informant, and makes additional questions about the bribery claim even more serious.
The response to this from the Left, apparently, is to proclaim that Archer has essentially exonerated Biden (never mind the recent whistleblower testimony from IRS investigators who attested under oath that the DOJ "handcuffed" them from pursuing any evidentiary leads that might lead to Joe Biden), and that it's unsavory to focus on a few cloudy statements regarding a period of time in which the Vice President was mourning the loss of his other son. Shameless. And desperate. They can smell the smoke, too, and might therefore be realizing the likelihood of a fire is quite real.
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