Hunter Biden — the man who took $83,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company while his father ran Ukraine policy for the Obama administration, who collected millions from Chinese Communist Party-linked firms, who flew to Beijing on Air Force Two to meet his new business partners, who sold paintings of questionable artistic merit for six-figure sums to anonymous buyers while his father sat in the Oval Office, who was convicted on federal gun charges, who received the most sweeping presidential pardon since Richard Nixon — logged onto X on the Fourth of July to deliver a lecture about political corruption.
Let that sink in for just a moment.
In a sprawling, self-righteous post dripping with the unique
Confidence of a man who has never once been held fully accountable for anything, Hunter compared the Trump family to King George III and declared — with a straight face — that Trump has made the colonial monarch “look like an amateur.” He listed a series of Trump family business dealings, strung them together with the word “corruption,” and apparently expected the American public to nod along in solemn agreement.
The American public did not nod along in solemn agreement.
They showed up in force to remind Hunter Biden of a few things
He appears to have forgotten. Things like Burisma. Things like CEFC China Energy. Things like “10% for the big guy.” Things like the laptop — the one that Hunter spent years insisting didn’t exist, then insisting wasn’t his, then insisting contained nothing damaging, and which turned out to contain thousands of emails, documents, and financial records detailing one of the most brazen influence-peddling operations in modern American political history.
“They found nothing,” Hunter wrote about six years of federal
Investigation into his business activities. “I made about $200k a year selling paintings when my Dad was President.”
Yeah, well, when your father is president and his Justice
Department ‘can’t find anything,’ that seems like a stretch to say there was no fire with that smoke. But even then, there were federal prosecutors who ‘found’ Hunter had broken the law by lying on a federal firearms form to buy a handgun and that he had underpaid his taxes.
Hence daddy’s pardon – the only one daddy actually signed himself. Oh, and daddy’s pardons for the rest of his family. Hmmm.
Besides, Hunter Biden did not make $200,000 a year selling
Paintings. Hunter Biden made millions of dollars across a
Decade-long career of leveraging his father’s name, his father’s offices, and his father’s political relationships to extract payments from foreign governments and oligarchs who wanted access to the man one step below the President of the United States. The paintings were a footnote — and a suspicious one at that, given the anonymous buyers and the complete absence of any mechanism to prevent the purchasers from being exactly the kind of people trying to buy influence with the Biden White House.
But let’s engage seriously with Hunter’s central argument for just a moment, because it deserves the contempt of a thorough rebuttal rather than mere mockery. He lists a series of Trump family business activities and calls them corruption. Pentagon contracts. Investment funds. Board positions. What he carefully omits from this accounting is the rather crucial distinction between business activities conducted by private citizens who happen to be related to a president — activities the Trump family was engaged in long before anyone named Trump held federal office — and the specific, documented, timestamped pattern of foreign payments flowing to Hunter Biden and James Biden while Joe Biden was Vice President, actively shaping the foreign policy of countries whose oligarchs were simultaneously cutting checks to his family.
That’s not a subtle distinction. That’s the entire ballgame. One is a business family whose patriarch entered politics. The other is a sitting government official whose family members were monetizing his government position in real time.
