Hunter Biden, whose name of late “triggers the vapors among cable TV hosts and their guests,”according to law professor Jonathan Turley, emerged from the shadows over the weekend to make an announcement. Bloomberg has the skinny:
Hunter Biden is stepping down from the board of a Chinese-backed private equity company and promising to forgo all foreign work if his father, former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, is elected president in 2020.
After months of keeping a relatively low-profile as President Donald Trump leveled a barrage of unsubstantiated accusations of corruption at him, the younger Biden is publicly vowing to avoid any conflict of interest.
Fox News Senior Political Analyst Brit Hume responded to the news by quipping, “He didn’t do anything wrong and he won’t do it anymore.”
It’s entertaining, if in a perverse way, to see the Bidens attempt to extricate themselves from the very mess that was supposed to enable the Democrats once and for all to take down Donald Trump. It seemed clear to me at the outset of the latest round of impeachment follies that if the president’s phone call to his Ukrainian counterpart was to be the last nail in Trump’s coffin, it would also bury the Dems’ frontrunner’s chances. And while the Dems have struggled mightily, with a little help from their friends in the media, to keep Hunter Biden’s past out of the news pages, they have forgotten that the internet has a long memory.
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Among the evidence that they have overlooked is a video from 2008 in which Joe Biden was grilled by Tom Brokaw about yet another shady arrangement that enriched both father and son. The “reference” Brokaw speaks of at the beginning of the video is to a Wall Street Journal story from Aug, 25, 2008 that noted that “Biden’s candidacy … is bringing new scrutiny to his family’s business dealings, especially those of his son Hunter, 38 years old.”
https://twitter.com/ibrahimpols/status/1180531106191413255
That’s a reference to your son being hired right out of law school by a big company here in Delaware that’s in the credit card business, MBNA. He got about $100,000 a year, as I recall. You received $214,000 in campaign contributions from the company and from its employees.
At the same time, you were fighting for bankruptcy bill that MBNA really wanted to get passed through the Senate making it much tougher for everyone to file bankruptcy. Senator Obama was opposed to the bill. Among other things, you couldn’t in fact claim that you had a problem because of big medical bills. You voted against an amendment that would call for a warning on predatory lending. You also … opposed efforts to strengthen the protection of people in bankruptcy.
This is an issue that you’ve heard about before. Your son was working for the company at the same time. In retrospect, wasn’t it inappropriate for someone like you in the middle of all this to have your son collecting money from the big credit card company while you were on the floor protecting its interests?
Biden responded to this lengthy accusatory query with a simple “no,” which is precisely what he has done lately when the subject of Hunter comes up. All that may be about to change.
