by Victor Davis Hanson
Joe Biden has about 17 months left as an elected politician — if he is lucky. That projection guides most of the inexplicable and shameless behavior of the Department of Justice and Biden himself. View Biden as in a race against the truth. Will he be physically and mentally able to complete his term and head to retirement before his decades-long crimes of corruption catch up to him?
Joe Biden’s serial yarn that he never knew anything about his son Hunter’s quid pro quo grifting with rich foreign grandees has been finally exposed as the old lie it always was.
Biden’s fallback untruth — that he never got involved in Hunter’s business — proved instantly laughable, given prior damning testimonies from Hunter’s business associates, from IRS whistleblowers, from the assertions of foreign beneficiaries, from Hunter’s own laptop, and from Joe’s own earlier loudmouth braggadocio about using threats of canceling U.S. foreign aid to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into corruption of the sort in which his own son was knee deep. (Did not then president Barack Obama know the nature of Biden corruption when he appointed him as point man on Ukraine)?
To his partners in corruption, Hunter referred to his father variously as the “big guy” as well as the recipient of “ten percent” of the leveraged income. And apparently as a rather greedy pop, Hunter whined that Joe himself demanded half of all Hunter’s own shake-down income from abroad — despite Hunter’s payment of many of Joe’s monthly bills incurred on his palatial lakeshore mansion.
At some point, even the corrupt leftwing media and DNC cannot continue to laugh off eyewitness testimonies, whistleblowers’ revelations, bank records, Hunter Biden’s own computer messaging, Joe Biden’s phone calls and personal appearances, and the evidence from foreign beneficiaries.
And then there is simply the power of reason and logic.
Over the last five years of this hushed-up tawdry saga, Americans knew immediately that Joe Biden was lying in all his denials of any involvement whatsoever in the procurement of a large part of his income from abroad simply because no one in the entire Biden family had any business, investment, or energy expertise. In other words, as grifters without Joe, the Bidens had zero market value.
As energy consultants, financial investors, or international analysts, they had no qualifications — a fact known and remarked upon by their corrupt foreign partners. If any doubt about that, try to guess how much the prior cash recipients Jim or Hunter or Sarah or Hallie or Kathleen Biden will be getting from foreign concerns for services rendered after Joe leaves office.
The Biden familial mediocrities had nothing to offer shady wealthy foreign interests other than they were not only related to the Vice President of the United States, but also could guarantee that Joe Biden had no scruples whatsoever, and so even while in office he would call or meet his son’s associates to substantiate Hunter’s promises of favorable diplomatic or business treatment from the Obama — or a future Biden — administration. Note Biden seemed to have no worries whether his family’s lobbying of Ukraine, Russia, or China was in conflict with the interests of his own country.
And so deals were cut, millions were rerouted to Biden accounts to avoid scrutiny, and the Biden clan got rich off Joe’s offices and his son’s rank criminality. Joe’s adjusted gross income on his 2016 return of $396,456 soared on his 2017 return to more than $11 million. No one knows whether these or any of Biden’s returns showed reported income commensurate with what either he actually received or with his lavish lifestyle, bank accounts, and his multiple expensive homes.
Rarely has any prosecutor enjoyed a more riveting confessional than Hunter Biden’s own laptop that established his credentials as a drug addict who burned up millions of dollars on his various drug and sex addictions, while confirming that his own father was central to the family consortium’s shake-downs. Without an obsequious media, a Democratic Senate, and a weaponized Department of Justice, all the Biden recipients of foreign cash would by now have been prosecuted, and likely found guilty of an array of felonies.
But like everything Joe and Hunter do to excess, they were not just shameless in their raking in money by using Joe’s senatorial and then vice presidential offices and likely presidential candidacy, but in covering up their crimes.
Nothing is more emblematic of that brazenness than Biden aide and future Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s phone call to a former CIA interim director to round up 50 intelligence “authorities” to lie on the eve of the 2020 debate and election that the laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.” To go to such extremes to leverage proverbially retired “wise men” to so blatantly misinform, disinform and warp a presidential election reflects the paranoia of the Biden family over Hunter’s laptop confessional.
Enter Merrick Garland. Like Blinken, his job description entailed hiding the truth about Hunter Biden’s incriminating evidence. First, Garland had assured the nation that no special counsel was needed to investigate the Bidens’ influence peddling. And on spec his lieutenant Delaware prosecutor David Weiss slow walked for years all investigations of Biden family wrongdoing.
The Biden Department of Justice since January 2021 assumed that with a Democratic House and an obsequious media, it could simply run out the clock on any of the many Biden crimes that were not sufficiently covered up. Any problematic data or testimony that eventually entered the public domain, would do so only after the statute of limitations had expired. This cover-up continued to work well for the first two years of the Biden administration.
But then the unexpected happened. First, the Republicans took the House in 2022 and suddenly had the ability to subpoena witnesses and documents over the objections of the media and Democratic congressional toadies.
Second, the Ukraine war broke out and had refocused popular interest in the past Biden-Ukrainian profiteering.
Third, when Donald Trump announced his reelection candidacy, he was soon met with a cohort of weaponized leftwing prosecutors. Immediately he and his supporters legitimately pointed out that while he was being politically neutered by the left, his possible 2024 opponent Joe Biden was given de facto exemptions.
Finally, the congressional testimonies and whistleblowers grew so embarrassing, and the stark contrast between the government coverup of Biden crimes and the weaponized effort to destroy Trump so glaring, that even Biden’s handlers and Merrick Garland were forced to act — at least sort of.
So last week the DOJ flipped. It abruptly announced that after years of a deliberately stalled David Weiss investigation and the collapse of Weiss’s own phony plea deal before an honest judge, Garland would now appoint a special counsel, after all — again, sort of.
Garland then did something so outrageous that it eclipsed even his prior blatant politicalization of his department. First, he violated the special counsel statute by hiring an inside government attorney — another apparent confirmation that Garland and Biden were paranoid that any legitimate outside counsel might well tap into a gold mine of Biden family felonies.
Second, he selected as independent counsel none other than David Weiss, the very prosecutor who had tried but failed to fool a judge into accepting a laughable Hunter Biden plea deal. Weiss’s only other alluring recommendation was that he had previously spearheaded and slow walked the DOJ non-investigation of Hunter.
Third, by elevating the title — but not the mission — of Weiss in a manner that previously he promised he would not, Garland cleverly ensured that Weiss would likely not show up to testify before the House about prior and ongoing whistleblower allegations that prosecutor Weiss had blocked investigations concerning Hunter that otherwise might well have led to multiple felony indictments. Now as special counsel, Weiss will even likely refuse congressional subpoenas concerning incriminating Biden information on grounds they would prejudice or interfere with his own special counsel inquiries.
How could Garland believe he could fool the American people with the veneer of a special counsel appointee and then violate the very spirit and text of the law about such appointments by naming Weiss?
Reason is not what guides the petulant Garland, who has never recovered from the trauma of being humiliated when his Barack Obama lame-duck supreme court appointment was recessed by a Republican Senate. Instead, Biden rescued Garland from bitter obscurity with the implied rationale, as Joe himself has mused openly to friends, that Garland should go after Trump, Biden’s past nemesis, and now his leading opponent in the 2024 presidential race.
What then is the long-term Democrat strategy that requires such short-term malodorous skullduggery?
Biden must be healthy and crime-free enough to finish his remaining term, but at all costs not run for reelection. A full one-term Biden prevents a 2023 or 2024 presidency of an utterly incompetent Kamala Harris and thus in addition her route to the 2024 Democratic nomination — and in theory perhaps even a longer presidential tenure.
Democrats will have enough trouble keeping Biden semi-coherent and upright over the 17 months without a string of indictments involving high crimes and misdemeanors from bribery to treason, if indeed Biden did alter U.S. policy at the bequest of his paymasters in China, Russia, Ukraine or Romania.
In other words, Weiss was selected for his past loyal suppression of the Hunter investigation and his future further quashing indictments as special counsel. That fact almost ensures that Biden can finish his first term without an impeachment trial in the Senate or a forced Nixon-style resignation, given the enormity of his own illegality.
Ensuring the viability of Biden’s next year-and-half will mean Kamala Harris does not inherit the presidency from either a physically or mentally incompetent Biden — or a president so reduced by bribery and racketeering counts that he is forced to resign.
Biden then will likely not run for reelection, pleading age rather than his own and family’s blatant corruption. That will be another subtext for Weiss’s slothful investigation to be ground down into oblivion. Harris will not be president, and be reduced to just another wannabe 2024 primary candidate. She will likely, as in 2016, not win a single delegate.
By 2024, Democrats will be seeking a young Gavin Newson-like candidate. Harris will not be the nominee, much less President by default. And Joe will likely be so bewildered that Weiss in a few months “for the sake of the country” will not hound either an enfeebled ex-president or his dutiful son.
DOJ lawfare then works in two ways: by commission in neutering the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump after trying to ensure that he will win the Republican primary and nomination; by omission, in de facto suppressing momentum for Biden indictments and thus allowing the Biden family to be prison-free through 2024 and onto retirement — and thus sparing the nation a Harris presidency.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
Photo “President Joe Biden” by The White House.
Excellent analysis. As usual, Victor Davis Hanson has accurately boiled it down to the essentials in a clear, concise manner.