They’re Bluffing

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

Democrats have settled on a new line in their effort to defuse the underlying claims against Joe Biden, which are increasingly substantiated by the details emerging from congressional Republicans’ investigations into Hunter Biden’s conduct.

The president’s son, you see, is just a con man.

That is reportedly what Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee. The younger Biden was merely dangling before his marks the “illusion” that, through him, they could have influence over Joe Biden and, therefore, shape American policy in ways financially advantageous to them. Knowingly or otherwise, President Biden tacitly served as the inside man to his son’s roper by joining phone in conversations and appearing at social events with Hunter’s prospective clients.

Democrats have not disputed this characterization. Rather, they’ve latched onto it as proof that the president remained at a legally safe remove from his son’s shady dealings. In the attempt to render this facially ridiculous spin believable, Democrats have ornamented their arguments with a lot of theatrical bluster.

“It appears that the House Republicans’ own much-hyped witness today testified that he never heard of President Biden discussing business with his son or his son’s associates,” said White House spokesman for investigations, Ian Sams, in a statement. Not only did Archer fail to indict Biden for engaging in any specific misdeed, he couldn’t even accuse the president of “doing anything wrong.”

The subjectivity of “doing anything wrong” aside, the New York Times already set the goalposts at which Republicans are aiming back in January. “Republicans have yet to demonstrate that the senior Mr. Biden was involved in his son’s business deals or took any action to benefit him or his foreign partners,” the outlet averred. Well, Republicans have yet to demonstrate that the president benefited financially from his assistance to Hunter, but they have proven definitively that Joe Biden was, in fact, “involved in his son’s business deals.” Indeed, as Jim Geraghty observed, the distinctions between the illusion of access and actual access are debatable. But if participating in a scheme to defraud Hunter Biden’s clients isn’t “wrong,” what is?

Democratic congressman Daniel Goldman has similarly tried to bolster these hollow defenses of Biden’s conduct with displays of garment-rending indignation. “This is the taxpayer-funded defense and political arm of Donald Trump,” he told CNN host Anderson Cooper of the House GOP’s investigations into Hunter Biden.

Goldman maintains that Joe Biden was himself a victim of his son’s incredibly charismatic influence. When his son dragged him to meetings with foreign clients, it “sounds like most of the time, now-president Biden didn’t even know who he was at dinner [with],” Goldman said yesterday. In a subsequent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the ubiquitous frontman for Biden’s exculpation suggested even that Hunter Biden took advantage of his father’s grief following his son Beau Biden’s death. “He died in the spring of 2015, which was right in the middle when Devon Archer had his business dealings with Hunter Biden,” Goldman theorized.

Much as Hunter Biden’s now-defunct plea agreement maintained that he was a preternaturally competent business negotiator and too drug-addled to remember to pay his taxes, Democrats are making contradictory arguments about the president. Joe Biden could not have known about his son’s misconduct because he was beset by grief. At most, Goldman allowed, the president is “guilty of turning a blind eye to some of his son’s behavior.” Joe Biden wanted nothing more than to be as close as possible to his son. And yet, the elder Biden could not have possibly known or be expected to have known that his son was trading on his father’s connections and leveraging the power of the United States to enrich himself. “It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name,” Hunter Biden admitted to Archer in an email when asked why a connected Chinese national had hitched himself to the Biden family’s wagon.

Democrats are bluffing. Their defenses of the president’s behavior are contradictory, fluid, and always very loud because they are improvising. To judge from their public statements, Democrats appear to think that we are as easily manipulated as Hunter Biden’s clients.