Thoughts On The Potential Biden Implosion
Let me qualify this at the very outset, because I’m not convinced, and nor should you be, that the waterfall of revelations and confirmations we’ve been seeing out of these congressional oversight hearings and other events with respect to the Biden bribes scandal will ultimately result in a Watergate-style presidential denouement.
Were Joe Biden a Republican they certainly would go that way. Were this the 1950’s or 1960’s, or maybe even the 1980’s or 1990’s, when expectations of government and the people who run it were far higher, I would be much surer that this scandal would be absolutely fatal to a presidency.
It certainly should be. The basic gist of what we know, and let’s not pretend that we don’t surely know this, is that Joe Biden and his family peddled influence and took bribes from seedy actors in China and Ukraine and other places, and at least to some significant extent those bribes have paid for American policies which have damaged both our interests and our pocketbooks.
It’s a constitutional impeachment exacta. The Impeachment Clause, after all, specifies “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” as the grounds for impeachment. Typically we’ve got to parse whether a particular offense is a high crime or misdemeanor to be considered impeachable, but in Biden’s case we have much less ambiguity.
We’re literally talking about bribery, and to the extent that, say, Chinese interests have bought deleterious American policy vis-a-vis the interests of our people, we’re also talking about treason.
And this is before something I’d be willing to bet will eventually follow, namely that sooner or later it’s going to come out that one or more of Hunter or Jim Biden’s clients in their influence-peddling game turns out to be affiliated with the Mexican cartels who are pushing such a volume of drugs and people over our inexplicably-porous border.
A hundred thousand Americans a year killed with Chinese fentanyl that those cartels are smuggling across that border while the Biden administration not only shrugs its shoulders but actively combats state governments like Texas who are trying to shut the door, and you aren’t supposed to believe that corruption plays a role?
Sorry. It seems like it’s just a matter of time before it comes out. The other bribes certainly have.
I mentioned this during this week’s Spectacle podcast, but I keep coming back to that idiotic moment caught on camera from the Council on Foreign Relations…
It has come out that right before the incident Biden bragged about in that video, he and his son were paid a combined $10 million from the head of Burisma, the company being investigated by Victor Shokin, the prosecutor Biden’s talking about firing.
There is very little wiggle room on this. By any reasonable standard we’ve got workable proof that Biden took a bribe to leverage American policy in favor of a corrupt foreign oligarch in a country we’re now spending hundreds of billions of dollars to defend in a war over what is at heart a border dispute. You could argue that what Biden is doing with Ukraine is within our interests, though that’s clearly a debatable proposition and it’s certainly far past the point where reasonable people would have expected peace talks and, hopefully, a cease-fire to halt the carnage.
So perhaps the Ukraine theater of this scandal isn’t about treason. It’s certainly about bribery.
And the thing of this is that for all the shell companies and FBI/DOJ hush-jobs, none of this is really all that complicated. Anyone with eyes and a willingness to use them can see that the Bidens shook the Ukrainians down for millions of dollars when he was Vice President. What’s more, when Donald Trump attempted to shake loose the scandal and provide some accountability by calling Volodymyr Zalensky, Ukraine’s president, in 2019 and asking him to cooperate with a U.S. investigation, he was impeached.
Given what we know now, that first Trump impeachment rings out as one of the most blatantly corrupt actions in the history of the U.S. congress. Trump was impeached for attempting to facilitate the solving of a crime.
And frankly, anybody who was paying attention back in 2019 when all of this first fully came to light has known ever since what the score is here.
The arrogant sloppiness of all of this is what really resonates.
I have a theory, which is that Joe Biden thought his political career was over in Obama’s second term. At the time it was thought Hillary Clinton would get her two terms and then they’d move on to Kamala Harris, who was being groomed as the Obama machine’s next puppet.
So he figured he’d cash in, and within the little bailiwicks Obama gave him, which included China and Ukraine but there were others, he had his brother and his son shake down all the greasiest people.
Biden never expected he would be in an executive position to pay off those bribes with action. He figured once Hillary won he’d be able to make a call here or there and influence things, but that would be it.
But then Hillary lost, and Biden couldn’t even make those phone calls. That’s why he ended up running for president in 2020 – that and the fact that Team Obama realized Kamala couldn’t hack it as a candidate.
Biden and his brother and son figured that a little influence-peddling on the way out the door wouldn’t attract much attention because it was sort of garden-variety DC corruption. That’s why they were so sloppy. He gets elected president and he’s like a deer in the headlights. That’s why they don’t even have a weak cover story for how they got all this money.
I haven’t seen much to blow up my theory. It would explain why this is as wide open as it is.
It doesn’t explain why the Democrats continue to hang on to Biden when it’s clear how crooked and compromised he is. Unless you believe they’re all crooked and compromised as well, which is certainly possible.
Jonathan Turley thinks this house of cards is coming down, and he thinks Biden will ultimately take the easy way out…
That’s a plausible scenario, except it has problems.
Because if Joe Biden pardons Hunter for all the tax, FARA, bribery and other crimes he’s clearly guilty of, the public is most assuredly not going to like it. He’d certainly have to beg off of running for re-election, and that would mean Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom or Michelle Obama – the three most plausible alternatives – would have to explain away a massive scandal that had just taken down their party’s president.
And whether it’s Donald Trump or somebody else who runs as the Republican nominee, there will quite certainly be no quarter offered to Biden for his own role in the crimes Hunter would be pardoned for. So Turley’s option might get Hunter off the hook but not Joe.
Then again, a year from now Biden might be in such an extreme state of mental decline that trying him for bribery or treason or any of the other things for which he’s quite apparently guilty would be a waste of time.
You really shouldn’t expect a lot by way of accountability for the Biden bribery scandal. You should assume the culprits will at least mostly walk free. Your political expectations might be a little higher, though, as this scandal is only just beginning to truly percolate, and it will be difficult to explain or excuse it away.
