Is Joe Biden’s love for an errant son greater than the love for his nation?

Disclosure: I am not a fan of Trump. I think he is a megalomaniac, but even megalomaniacs deserve justice in a democracy.

So, here is another story that should be huge both in the US and for anyone interested in its politics. But Western media is again trying hard to ignore it. Last month, the Republican-led House of Representatives Oversight Committee released an “interim report” on possible corrupt practices of president Joe Biden’s family. The inquiry is in its early stages, but the details already available are fascinating. This is potentially as big as Bofors was in India in the 1980s.

Bank records reveal that nine members of the Biden family, including two minor grandchildren of the president, received at least $10 million from shady foreign firms through a complex web of shell companies, beginning in the years when Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president. The entities paying the Bidens include a Romanian businessman now in jail for corruption; CEFC, a now-wound-up Chinese energy corporation which was definitely a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) front; and Burisma, a scandal-ridden Ukrainian natural gas company.

The stories have been around for some time, with strong circumstantial evidence, but till now they concerned only the president’s feckless son Hunter and his brother Jim, a known Washington DC wheeler-dealer. As vice-president, Biden took Hunter along on an official visit to Ukraine in 2014. Soon after, Hunter joined the Burisma board with a fat pay cheque, though he had no experience in the energy sector. In fact, a self-confessed drug addict, he has never been able to hold on to any job in his life. But the Chinese company CEFC paid Hunter and Jim $4.8 million between 2017 and 2018.

In an honest world, business payments are made for the exchange of goods and services. What services could two American kids — Biden’s grandchildren — provide to the CCP? In an honest business transaction, the payment is not broken up into small tranches and routed through shell companies. Here, much of the money was transferred through 20 companies, 15 of which were set up by Hunter while his father was vice-president.

The most obvious explanation for all this is money laundering and influence peddling. The only service the Bidens could offer their clients was the connections they had by being related to a vice-president. In fact, in an email in August 2017, Hunter said that he was receiving a $10-million annual fee from a Chinese billionaire for “introductions alone”.
For nearly two years, the Biden administration stonewalled Republican demands for a probe into the family’s affairs. It blocked access to over 150 “suspicious activity reports” that banks are required to file under US law. These were about transactions related to the Biden family. But after the mid-term elections in November last year, the Republicans got control of the House of Representatives and the government had to comply, though with much reluctance.

The evasion continues. The House committee is asking for an internal Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report by a whistleblower agent which claimed that Biden himself had taken bribes. The FBI refused, saying that the whistleblower is not credible and the contents of the report cannot be verified. Last week, it presented a new reason — that sharing the document will put the whistleblower’s life in danger.

This is extraordinary — an agency whose stated mission is “to protect the American people” is unsure of its ability to protect one of its own agents. Also, does not this admission imply that the FBI should investigate the allegations this person made, if what he or she said poses a threat to their life?

Was Biden involved in the suspicious financial dealings? He has said that he knew nothing about Hunter’s businesses and then even asserted that his son “has done nothing wrong”. Yet, official records show that he met his son’s Ukrainian and Chinese partners several times. There is also a March 2017 email exchange between Hunter and his business associates on a planned joint venture with CEFC, where one of them writes: “10 held by H for the Big Guy?” suggesting that this person would get 10 per cent of the money, which would be officially in Hunter’s name. In fact, Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski, who structured the deal, has identified “the Big Guy” as Joe Biden. Of course, none of this proves anything conclusively.

Hunter seems to be a son out of every parent’s worst nightmare. He forgot to collect a laptop that he wanted repaired and it was found by the newspaper New York Post (NYP) a few weeks before the 2020 presidential election. NYP published a damning report. But US social media companies made sure, under instructions from the FBI, to black out all mention of it. Mark Zuckerberg admitted this a few months ago in an interview. Twitter went to the extent of suspending the NYP account. NYP is one of the largest-selling newspapers in the US.

The contents of that laptop are startling, even apart from the financial corruption angles. Among other things, the photos and videos lovingly stored by Hunter show him in orgies with underage girls — something that would have sent anyone who is not the president’s son immediately to prison. But he is the president’s son.

While he was making money out of shadowy Chinese and Ukrainian businesses, Hunter also evaded millions of dollars in income tax — he has now paid up — and bought a revolver with a false statement about his drug abuse. There is a video of him, obviously stoned out, waving the gun around with several sex workers watching. US laws are very strict on these matters, but Hunter has not been indicted. In his 2021 autobiography Beautiful Things, he confesses that his life has been one of “depravity”, though he claims to be cured now.

President Biden has had to deal with several tragic losses in his life. His first wife and a little daughter were killed in a car crash in 1972. His son Beau died of cancer when he was only 46. Hunter is his only surviving son. One can easily understand why he may feel protective about him. But if his son has indeed used his father’s position to enrich himself, he should not act like a typical Indian politician and prove that US politics is no better than India’s.