The media circus that stars Donald Trump as principal clown, trapeze artist and pile of elephant droppings was in full pomp this week. The former president spent a day testifying in one of the myriad trials in which he is a defendant, this one in a New York courtroom where he faces a civil suit that claims he unlawfully inflated the value of his real estate assets to borrow oodles of money.
Every word, every grimace, every lunatic subsequent social media post from the carnival barker-in-chief was pored over and denounced by the band of reporters and commentators that can’t get enough of the Orange Bozo even as they emote for the cameras about the existential threat he poses to American democracy
The Trump Show performs many useful functions for the partisan media crowd, but none more important than distracting from the rising stench of corruption emanating from the vicinity of Joe Biden.
Yes. You read that right. Even as every dubious dollar, crooked word or wicked deed that ever emerged from Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower is subjected to intense prosecutorial and journalistic scrutiny, evidence grows by the day that the sitting president of the US has been at the centre of a get-rich-quick scheme by which his family advanced the interests of America’s main global adversary in exchange for millions of dollars – and then covered it up to avoid legal and public accountability.
In the last week, new revelations from an investigation into the business dealings of the president and his son have offered the clearest picture yet that dear old Uncle Joe, the everyman from Scranton, Pennsylvania, the genial old guy whose worst flaw may be only a declining mind that fogs up after teatime, has in fact been on the receiving end of a lucrative deal and influence-peddling arrangement on behalf of communist China.
For years most news outlets have studiously ignored – in fact suppressed – what used to be called the “Hunter Biden Problem”. When they did mention it, giving it that moniker served a purpose: if anyone did anything wrong it was the president’s wayward son, a troubled man who used his father’s name to get millions from foreign companies to feed his crack addiction and taste for fast cars and faster women. When they grudgingly reported on the criminal prosecution of Biden Junior, they were careful to paint the father as an object of pity. What parent wouldn’t turn a blind eye to the misdeeds of his mentally disturbed offspring?
And yet the more we learn, the more likely it seems that, far from overlooking his son’s grift, the president partook of it. As Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and (it should be noted, Trump-loathing) commentator for the conservative National Review put it this week: “As it turns out, the incumbent president actually is what the media-Democrat complex falsely claimed the prior president was: a clandestine agent of a foreign power.”
The latest evidence comes from a Republican-led congressional committee investigating the Bidens. According to the committee, in 2015, when Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president, James Gilliar, a Biden family associate, set up a deal between what he described in an email as “one of the most prominent families from (the) US” and a Chinese energy company, CEFC. Like any strategically important Chinese company, CEFC was guided by and accountable to the Communist Party leadership.
When Biden left office in 2017, Hunter went to work to suction millions of dollars from CEFC. When the company initially stalled on stumping up the vast sums he was demanding, Hunter used his father as leverage. In a threatening WhatsApp message that became public earlier this year, he warned his Chinese associates that he was “sitting here with my father” and said: “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every single person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.” Soon afterwards, the Chinese company began wiring millions of dollars to a US entity in which Hunter was the principal participant.
In a memo originally unearthed by the New York Post and authenticated by the committee, the arrangement was for the creation of a holding company that would be owned 50 per cent by the Chinese and 50 per cent by Hunter, James Biden (Joe’s brother) and others. The memo stated that 10 per cent of the stock would be held for “the big guy”. This “big guy” was never named but it was alleged later by one of the associates to be Joe himself.
Biden and his associates have denied any direct involvement in the scheme, but now the committee has uncovered what looks like a smoking gun: a cheque made out to Joe Biden from his brother for dollars 40,000. The purpose, according to a line written on the cheque, was the repayment of a loan from Joe to his brother. Exactly why James Biden, a wealthy businessman, would have borrowed money from his lifelong-public-office-holding brother is unclear. But what is clear is that the dollars 40,000 is exactly equivalent to 10 per cent of dollars 400,000 that Hunter drew from a dollars 5 million transfer wired by CEFC to the US entity in August 2017.
The committee continues to delve into the financial records of “the big guy” and how much in all 10 per cent was worth. But it is important to grasp the geopolitical context. CEFC’s primary role was the promotion of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a strategic push by Communist China to increase its influence around the world.
If the allegations from the committee are true and it can be shown that Joe Biden did indeed receive large sums from the company, it means the current US president was a well-remunerated participant in a plan to advance the interests of America’s principal adversary.
But, hey, let’s get back to talking about Donald Trump.
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