via althouse
It is a truism of American politics that money swills around the top candidates to an alarming degree. And it is also true, and inevitable, that many candidates trust their family members above anyone else to deal with money and other perks that can come their way. Yet even by these standards, the Biden emails showed a family involved in far from normal influence-trading.
For example, Hunter Biden had sat for years on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma. Why Hunter Biden sat on that board and was so well remunerated for it — around $50,000 a month — was hardly a secret. Hunter has no expertise in the energy sector, nor in anything much else. But proximity to the former vice-president — at the time possibly the next president — brought irresistible cash advantages. (As it did for Joe’s brother, James. He and Hunter signed a deal in 2017 with a Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC, which paid $4.8 million over 14 months to entities controlled by the two Bidens.)
Hunter’s laptop included messages from Burisma executives going back to 2014, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message”. Other emails described how a “provisional agreement” between Hunter and CEFC would include 10 per cent of equity held back by Hunter for “the big guy”. Who was “the big guy”? It was possible to guess. Elsewhere in the laptop, in January 2019, Hunter could be found sending an angry text to his daughter Naomi, scolding her for having no idea what demeaning things he said he had had to do to support his family. But, he told her: “Don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.” People had imagined that Hunter was using Joe. But no, it appeared that Joe was using his son to make money. If ever there were questions to be asked of a candidate here were some….
But such questions would not be asked by Democratic operatives with bylines, and would be squelched by the alliance of tech companies and intelligence/law enforcement agencies that aspires to rule us. We’re lucky that the British press, at least, is raising them.
h/t Glenn