THE INFLUENCE PEDDLERS: The Real Story of the Biden Family Business --- And The DOJ Cover-up

By Charles Lipson

The Biden administration has repeatedly told the public that Hunter’s lucrative consulting business doesn’t matter unless it is directly connected to his father. That’s true. Moreover, they add, that connection is not just unproven, it cannot be proved because it didn’t exist. That’s false, although the mainstream media has repeated it faithfully. But even the most feckless are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain this awkward lip-syncing with the White House press office. Actually, the Biden grifting operation extends well beyond Hunter to include multiple family members. It always centered on Joe’s public position and the political access it ensured, first as the sitting vice president and then as a prospective Democratic nominee after Hillary Clinton’s defeat.  The Purpose of the Biden Family Enterprise The clearest indication of the enterprise’s corrupt purpose is its construction of an opaque web of nearly thirty LLCs to hide the distribution of profits from the operation. There is no legitimate business purpose for this tangled web of pass-through entities. The only purpose is to hide the sources and distribution of this outside money. That should be obvious even to the Washington Post, though it doesn’t seem to be. They might want to pay attention to another painful fact: all this money was paid for services that have never been disclosed to the public. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know the purpose. My dear Watson, all the clues point to political access. * * * That access hinged on Joe Biden’s political position. His family (and especially Hunter) went to great lengths to hide any direct, criminal connection and, it appears, to pay taxes on all the proceeds.  Proving a criminal connection to Joe Biden is a difficult, complex task — and it has not yet been done. The IRS and DoJ Obstructed an Honest Investigation The main reason is hasn’t been proved, we now know, is that official investigations were deliberately blocked by higher-level officials at the IRS and, most likely, the Department of Justice. In private meetings at the Internal Revenue Service, those officials acknowledged that there were sufficient legal grounds to pursue those connections to Joe Biden, which emerged from the IRS investigation of Hunter. Then, for reasons that have not been explained, the same higher-level officials reversed themselves and prevented any investigation that would touch on Joe Biden himself. We need to know the names of people who blocked that inquiry. We need to know if anyone higher up the chain of command ordered this cover-up or if they simply did it themselves to curry favor. We need all that testimony under oath. And we need to know who disclosed to Hunter and his lawyer that some of Hunter’s documents were about to be searched and some of his associates interviewed. Miraculously, those documents disappeared before the search and the associates were nowhere to be found. Another avenue of inquiry had been successfully blocked. How do we know all this? Not from any investigation by the somnolent mainstream media. They only pull their Woodward and Bernstein act for presidents they hate. They run a protection racket for the others. Not from any testimony by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Not from the US Attorney for Delaware, who told a meeting of IRS agents one thing and then Congress another. We know it only from testimony, given under oath, by two experienced, politically-neutral IRS agents. They spent years investigating Hunter Biden and reported multiple cases of political interference by higher-level officials whenever the investigation touched on his father. Such interference was unprecedented, they said, and would not have happened in any normal IRS investigation. We need to know who interfered and why. And we need that testimony under oath, not that the Biden DoJ will pursue the threads. While Joe Stays Mum, His Press Office Changes Its Story Amid inconsistent and contradictory excuses from the White House press office and DoJ, the president himself has been silent. He and his press spokesman have tried to stand on Joe’s old, firm denial of any connection to Hunter Biden’s business operations. Those old denials went further. He repeatedly said he had no knowledge of Hunter’s business activities (or those of his brother and other family members) and never benefited from them. White House press spokesman, Karine Jean-Pierre, repeated those assertions… until this week. Then KJP changed her story slightly while pretending she had not changed nothing. Her latest defense of the president is that he did not participate in any of Hunter’s business operations. That’s obviously different from have “no knowledge” of them. When she was pressed to clarify, she refused. Talk with the DoJ, she said, or with Hunter’s lawyers. The last time we saw this kind of obfuscation and revision of previous statements from the White House press spokesman, was from Ron Ziegler, who did it for Richard Nixon. At least Ziegler acknowledged that his previous, false statements were “inoperative.” The current White House spokesperson won’t even say that. Why did the Biden White House change its story? Probably because they know of forthcoming testimony from one of Hunter’s business associates, who says Hunter put Joe on the speakerphone during multiple conversations about these business/political-influence operations. That’s just the sort of direct connection senior officials at the IRS and DoJ blocked, according to the IRS whistleblowers. The response of Democrats on the House committee that heard that public testimony is worth noting. They never attempted to refute it. They brought up lots of unrelated topics and then said, “unproven.” That response is best characterized as, “Hey, look, there’s a squirrel over there.” The House Needs to Continue Its Investigations; the DoJ Won't Meanwhile, the Republican-led House continues these investigations, aided by Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson in the Senate. We can expect more dominoes to fall, and we can expect continued obstruction by the White House and the senior bureaucrats who answer to the president. The stakes are high: Joe Biden’s presidency and his prospects for reelection (or staying in the race). The Scandal's Implications Beyond Joe and Hunter Besides the impact on Joe Biden and his family, there are other implications worth considering. ① One is the politicized role of high-level officials in the gargantuan, federal bureaucracy. They want to protect their own political positions, which means protecting their patrons, and they often want to advance their own partisan views. We need those officials to testify under oath — not in the circus hearings Congress conducts, but in private sessions before the committee’s legal counsel. All that testimony should be made public. ② Another implication is that America’s central government is now so large, its budgets so enormous, its regulations so extensive that political insiders have huge financial incentives to intervene for anyone who wants to buy political influence. The folks who want to purchase that political influence are not confined to American citizens, or American corporations. We know that from Hunter Biden‘s operations, which centered on the countries where his father, the vice president, was charged with leading the Obama administration‘s foreign policy. Why wasn’t Hunter Biden charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as Trump aides such as Paul Manafort were? Oh, what a mystery. (Hint: the answer is political bias and favoritism at the DoJ.) This influence-peddling — sometimes legal, sometimes not — is truly bipartisan, even if prosecution for it is not. We see it when politicians leave office and remain in Washington as high-priced lobbyists. Not too long ago, they retired to their home districts. The lucre from lobbying today is too rich to do that anymore. Examples? After the Trump administration ended, the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reaped huge rewards from the Middle East countries where he had been involved in diplomatic negotiations. The Clinton family wins the gold prize. Using non-profit foundations, which were going full-steam ahead when Hillary was secretary of state, they organized this grifting and influence-peddling on an industrial scale. If the donations to those foundations were simply for good works, they would have continued well after Hillary left the State Department and lost her run for president. In fact, those donations fell off a cliff. Any guesses why? ③ As the Biden scandals unfold, the public is rightly concerned about two standards of justice, one for political insiders, another for ordinary citizens. The public is right. That problem goes beyond anyone administration. The bigger the central government, the more regulations it imposes, the more resources it controls, then the more it pays to buy influence in the White House and the bureaucracies. That influence-purchasing has become a permanent fact of life in Washington. The Biden Family Came Within a few House Seats of a Complete Coverup It could be argued that Hunter Biden was simply less adept at hiding any potential illegality. Perhaps. But it is also worth noting that that he and his father were less than a dozen House seats short of a successful cover up. There is zero chance House Democrats would have investigated the corruption. We know that from their behavior in recent hearings. There is zero chance Biden’s Department of Justice or senior officials at the IRS would have pursued a corruption investigation, despite the mountain of evidence. Their goal was to block it. We know that from the whistleblowers’ testimony and the unprecedented sweetheart deal they tried to strike with Hunter. The Bidens came so close. But now all the levees built by the Washington establishment cannot stop the flood of evidence about the Biden family business. That business had only one product: selling political influence. The waters keep rising, and the flood is approaching the front door of the White House.

Read more at The Spectator