Just when I thought I was beating a dead horse on Hunter Biden’s laptops and their Watergate, Teapot Dome-magnitude scandals, along comes Fox News host Sean Hannity and his pale imitators to rouse me from my complacency with their pronouncements that for Donald Trump and his democracy-shunning followers the dead horse still has a beating heart.
When Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Republicans’ “October Surprise” was hand-delivered a week before the election by former FBI Director James Comey who announced he’d found even more “incriminating” emails before getting back to us a few days later with a too little, too late “never mind.”
In 2020, Republicans were again given a hand-delivered “October Surprise” involving “incriminating” emails. This time the emails belonged to Hunter Biden, the president’s son. With Rudy Giuliani’s help, the emails found their way to the front page of the Trump-friendly New York Post two weeks before the election, which broke the news that “secret emails” revealed Hunter’s former Ukrainian employer once thanked him for the chance to meet his father, the former vice-president.
Looking ahead to the 2022 and 2024 elections, Trump Republicans give every indication of trying to squeeze at least one more “incriminating emails” October Surprise into the election cycle to disclose Democratic Party dishonesty.
Hunter Biden’s email saga was a spent force after the 2020 election until the New York Times last March gave the story new life with a 1,700-word, none-too-flattering account of the ongoing Justice Department probe into son Biden’s far-flung business dealings.
But Trump’s legions weren’t interested in DOJ”s formal investigation. The government’s aim was justice while theirs was political power. Their complaint against the New York Times was that it waited until word number 1,006 of the paper’s 1,700-word recounting of Hunter’s legal exposure to make any mention that DOJ prosecutors had taken Hunter’s laptops and emails into account and determined they were authentic -- meaning they belonged to Hunter.
That was evidence enough for the right-wing media to declare the NY Post’s pre-election accusations of Biden family corruption were true, and shame on the fake news media for covering up for Hunter and his dad.
If you thought Fox News, Newsmax, conservative talk radio and the Donald Trump Republican Party might commend the New York Times for putting Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” back in the news, you’d be wrong.
The far right knows its case against Hunter is weak, which is why almost without exception right-wing accounts on Hunter ignore entirely the content of Biden’s emails.
By doing so, the Trump GOP hopes to convince us, as it has convinced itself, that the Times did not render a public service when it aggregated in one place all of the charges against Hunter Biden that the DOJ is investigating. Instead, Trump’s party wants us to believe the Times “buried” news of Biden’s emails when it piled 1,000 words on top of them. Maybe it’s just me, but there must be better ways to bury a story than to devote 1,700 words to it in the nation’s “newspaper of record.”
But in doing so, say Trump’s followers, the Times actually exposed itself as being in cahoots with a sprawling anti-Trump conspiracy by the media, academics, liberals, Democrats, snobbish elites and even some ex-Republicans to shield Hunter Biden from the consequences of his misdeeds – and put his dad in the White House.
There’s a reason you won’t find references to “smoking gun” emails in the GOP’s latest October Surprise narrative. Instead of providing evidence of Biden family corruption, the emails stolen from Hunter’s private laptops do the reverse.
As I read the emails, they reveal a young man genuinely trying to negotiate the dangerous terrain awaiting anyone doing business while a parent runs a country and is therefore held to account for conflicts of interest -- presuming the country is a rule and law-bound democracy, of course.
And so, those like Hunter must walk the fine legal and ethical line that separates the legal leveraging of familial connections and family names, from the illegal and unethical misuse of close family ties to make corrupt bargains where profits are gained with promises the American public must ultimately keep.
Pulling strings to get a president’s C-plus son into Harvard is okay. Blackmailing an employer by withholding public grants until it gives that son a job when he graduates is not. That’s the missing link in nearly every accusation Fox News and others level against the Bidens.
Post hoc, ergo hoc. That’s the fancy Latin phrase for the logical fallacy conservatives flagrantly commit whenever they link Biden junior’s job in Ukraine with Biden senior’s threat to Ukraine’s president that he could kiss a billion dollars in foreign aid goodbye unless he got rid of a certain corrupt prosecutor.
Sean Hannity flat out lies when he asserts Vice President Biden targeted the prosecutor because he was “investigating zero experienced Hunter and the company he was in business with, Burisma, for corruption.” He wasn’t.
Another fancy Latin phrase identifies the only principle germane to this case – quid pro quo. We know Hunter got $50,000 a month from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. But what else, if anything, did the Bidens get in the deal? What else, if anything, did Vice President Biden give up to get it? What from the Executive Branch did Vice President Biden have to trade to get his son that insanely lucrative job? The answer to all three is: Nothing.
By comparison, Donald Trump’s quid pro quo with Ukraine was a doozy -- $400 million in US military aid to fight off invading Russians contingent on Ukraine digging up dirt on Trump’s rival, Joe Biden. Now that’s grandmaster-caliber corruption. It’s also corruption the right rarely if ever talks about.
Of course Burisma put Hunter on its payroll because his last name was Biden. It would have been idiotic not to. The $50,000 a month retainer was chump change considering the boy’s father could be the next President of the United States.
Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to earn a few chits with a future POTUS? Putting a president in one’s debt is still a smart move even if never repaid. Or repaid with verbal thanks only. Or repaid with favors that do not involve impeachable offenses. But the idea that a future president would blackmail a sovereign nation to protect a son’s job is ludicrous. It just goes to show that Hunter’s emails are the only “scandal” the right has to work with.
The picture that emerges from Hunter Biden’s hacked laptop is of a young man with a troubled past trying to make money in an arena where the perception of corruption and ethical conflicts are often as lethal to careers and reputations as the real thing.
In one email to his employers, Hunter states the obvious when he says his dad’s upcoming visit to Ukraine will enhance their reputations as insiders with pull. But then he is quick to add that what Vice-President Biden “will say and do is out of our hands.”
In another email, Hunter says he needs to “temper expectations” among his employers about what a vice-president’s son can -- and cannot – deliver. Burisma executives, writes Hunter, “need to know in no uncertain terms that we will not and cannot intervene directly with domestic policymakers, and that we need to abide by FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act), and any other US laws in the strictest sense across the board.”
To guide the Ukrainian executives through the unfamiliar minefield of American politics and law, Biden suggested his law firm instruct Burisma officials on the rules they must follow whenever “in direct discussions” with representatives of the US government.
It's easy enough for those who remain unpersuaded to dismiss these defenses of Hunter’s integrity as misguided and naïve. That is neither here nor there. Even if the alibis are set aside, Biden’s accusers would still own the burden of proof for any specific acts of corruption connected with Hunter and his sweetheart deal in Ukraine.
Trump’s team had that chance and failed because there was never any there, there. Given the time and resources to sift through Hunter’s emails, the only corruption the New York Post could find for its front-page exposé was the thread-bare insinuation that: “Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
This so-called “meeting” was a meet-and-greet at a Democratic fund-raising event in a big DC hotel. That is a very different thing from the clandestine confab during the 2016 election at Trump Tower when the campaign’s governing triumvirate met with Russian operatives in possession of Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails. That makes the Post’s headline even more comical:
“BIDEN SECRET E-MAILS REVEALED: UKRANIAN EXEC THANKED HUNTER BIDEN FOR ‘OPPORTUNITY TO MEET’ VEEP DAD.”
Donald Trump and his army of acolytes and sycophants were asking a lot of their MAGA red cap followers to conclude, without evidence, that Hunter’s new job was linked in some tortured, circuitous, nefarious way with his father’s ultimatum a year later that Ukraine would lose funds and NATO membership unless its leaders cracked down on corruption in their government.
Unable to produce concrete evidence, Hannity and others resorted to innuendo and the maligning, slandering and libeling that goes on when all you’ve got is smoke without fire.
“For years, zero experienced Hunter and shady business associates garnered lucrative payouts from foreign nationals all over the world,” said Hannity last week.
Hannity then denominated the foreign investments that have fallen Hunter’s way: $3.5 million from the former first lady of Moscow; $5 million from a state-backed Chinese company; $1.5 billion from the Bank of China; $100,000 from a Kazakhstan oligarch; and $1.5 million for sitting on the board of Burisma.
What Hannity did not do was cite any payouts that were illegal. Nor did he identify any paybacks that were corrupt. Nor did he present evidence that proved a connection existed between Hunter’s job and some benefit from the US government not available to other companies like Biden’s.
What Hannity did instead was more insidious. He recited the raw numbers without comment as if they spoke for themselves. He then asked a series of loaded questions: What if Hunter’s name was Trump? Why can’t you, and me, and everyone get a deal like that? And finally, “why were these wealthy foreigners sending a prostitute-loving crackhead so much money?”
Was it because Hunter’s dad was a prominent senator, vice president and future presidential aspirant?
Of course, it was. “They were paying for access to the highest levels of our government,” said Hannity as if paying for access was unique to politics, or even unethical.
When you get right down to it, what’s the difference between a corporation giving a candidate $600,000 in this Citizens United era of unlimited corporate donations, and that same corporation hiring the incompetent son of that candidate for a job that pays $50,000 a month?
The inducement, or bribe, is the same. In both cases, the corporation expects to get something for its money even if the tradeoff is unspoken. In both cases, concerns are voiced about the disproportionate influence money now exerts in politics. In both cases, it’s assumed contributors are buying, at a minimum, access. And in both cases, the transactions are legal just so long as a wrongful quid pro quo isn’t thrown into the bargain.
That said, I remain largely in agreement with Matt Yglesias when he wrote in Vox: “The whole Hunter Biden situation, from top to bottom, reeks of the kind of cozy cronyism that makes a lot of people detest establishment politics and explains the appeal of the idea of a rich businessman who can’t be bought swooping in to drain the swamp.”
But before we start throwing people under the bus for the “perception” of corruption where none exist in law, we’d do well to remind ourselves of this single fact: When corporations buy access with their campaign contributions, the donations are sanctioned by a corporate-friendly Supreme Court that opened the floodgates of money in politics with their ruling in Citizens United. But when those same corporations put the friends and relatives of politicians on their payroll, even where no corrupt quid pro quo is cited or exists, it’s still possible grounds for impeachment-- provided the Congress is Republican and the targeted president is Democratic.