Responsible People

We currently have supposedly responsible people who are enthusiastically promoting a presidential candidate who exhibits every indicia that is commonly associated with early stage 1 senile dementia, and at the same time is being accused of political influence peddling which illegally enriched his son and possibly, himself. All because they hate, hate, hate Donald Trump. That's not responsible behavior, no matter how much you dislike Trump.

Obviously, Biden supporters disagree, and to bolster what is actually an indefensible position, they have decided to establish a dual fantasy:

1. Joe Biden stutters ... he's always gaffed his way through politics ... he doesn't have any cognitive impairment, and besides, he'll have the support of Kamala and Bernie and The Squad and Nancy and Chuck and his staff of young leftists when hard decisions must be made. 
2. The growing volume of evidence, including Biden's own statements and emails written by his son which indicate that Biden was well-aware of his son's influence peddling business and participated so that money could be made, are nothing more that Russian disinformation. (the Russians, yet again appear in the fevered imagination of the Dems ... Is there anything they can't do?)  And besides, leaks and whistle blowers are a bad thing (all of a sudden) particularly when they expose Democrat corruption.

The editors of Issues and Insights comment on the second point:

... The news is getting out [despite the attempts to censor it]. And it isn’t good for either Joe Biden or his freeloading son. The evidence clearly suggests that both Bidens profited from the vice president’s office during the Obama administration, in essence selling access for cash.

What’s galling is that Biden had heretofore denied any contact at all with Hunter’s many global partners, saying he had “never spoken” to his son “about his overseas business dealings.”

But the newly discovered trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop says otherwise ...

The emails are damning, the [New York] Post report shows:

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

 

‘Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together. It’s realty (sic) an honor and pleasure,’ the email reads.

An email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

That shows Biden’s denial was an out-and-out lie.

But that’s not the worst of it.

During a December 2013 official trip to China to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Joe Biden met with Chinese venture capitalist Jonathan Li in a hotel lobby. Nothing wrong with that, except Li was one of Hunter Biden’s partners in an investment firm called BHR Partners, formed just six months earlier.

Still later, he would make room in the White House for another family member,

But the most alarming revelation of all is an email, released by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, that suggests Joe Biden took a half-cut of everything his son earned from his shady foreign deals.

The democrats trained hamsters in the media refuse to ask any questions about any of this and outright refuse to investigate on their own, but what else is new?

Joe Biden is now cognitively impaired. He can't help that, and it is sad. But he wasn't impaired when he participated in the Washington favorite game—influence peddling to enrich himself nd his family. And that indicates that he's nothing more than another swamp creature and probably has been for 47 years. 

Pushback is coming from people who may not be members of the woke elite, but are nonetheless, far more responsible than the woke elite could ever be.

UPDATE:

It's odd that only the foreign media seems to be covering the Joe Biden corruption and influence peddling scandal. Gosh, you'd think the media in this country was covering for their chosen candidate. You'd be right.

In any event, here's still more news (out of a very detailed report) about Biden and his son from the U.K.'s Daily Mail:

... in 2014, when Joe, as Vice President, was helping to implement U.S. policy in Ukraine, Hunter took a highly-paid job with a Ukranian energy company called Burisma (of which more later).

Around the same time, he built murky and contentious connections with Russia, helping his investment advisory firm Rosemont Seneca receive some $3.5m from the billionaire widow of former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhov ... 

Then there was a somewhat dubious episode in China, where Hunter arranged for an entrepreneur called Jonathan Li, with whom he was setting up an investment fund, to hold a meeting (and enjoy a very public handshake) with Joe in a Beijing hotel lobby during an official visit.

Such ventures, in regions of the world hardly known for their probity, have always smelled distinctly whiffy. So what, then, ought we to make of the revelation that, when his father was Vice President, Biden Jr was doing business in a fourth cash-soaked but highly corrupt country?

Namely: Kazakhstan.

The Mail can reveal that between 2012 and 2014, Hunter worked as a sort of go-between for Kenes Rakishev, a self-styled 'international businessman, investor and entrepreneur' with close family connections to the kleptocratic regime of his homeland's despotic former president Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Emails passed to this newspaper via anti-corruption campaigners from the Central Asian country reveal that Biden Jr held extensive meetings with Rakishev, who was looking to invest a portion of his personal fortune in New York and Washington DC. He also travelled to the Kazakh capital of Astana to hold business discussions ...

It may even be that Joe Biden himself was dragged into the oligarch's orbit. An unverified photograph, published on the website of an anti-corruption group called the Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery, appears to show Hunter introducing his Dad to both Rakishev and one Karim Massimov, the former Kazakh Prime Minister.

So who exactly is Rakishev?

[In] 2012 ... Rakishev had just joined Forbes magazine's top-15 list of Kazakhstan's 'most influential' tycoons, with estimated assets of some $332 million. Like many an oligarch in possession of a huge fortune, Rakishev was now looking for a safe place to park it, so had come to America in search of new places to invest his hard-earned roubles.

Sadly, things hadn't gone entirely smoothly. For in the highly-regulated world of Western capitalism, Rakishev discovered that blue-chip investment partners were often reluctant to take his cash.

To blame? The fact that no one was entirely sure where his wealth actually came from ...

The United States Department of Justice then took an interest in Rakishev. It soon dragged him into an investigation of potential breaches the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act related to 'an investment in the oil and gas industry in Kazakhstan'.

... in late October 2013, Biden's partner Archer arranged a conference call between Rakishev and the aforementioned Alex Forbes Kerry [daughter of John Kerry], who was by then attempting to raise cash to launch a film production firm.

Immediately after the call that December, Rakishev emailed with happy news: 'Thank you my brother from another mother! Thanks you very much my brother! We decided to invest 1 mln [million]! Give them my email!'

Ms Forbes Kerry, who has never publicly acknowledged her debt to Rakishev, finalised the deal in January 2014. The following month, she and Biden met Rakishev for dinner in Washington DC.

'It was a pleasure to meet you with Devon and Hunter the other day,' she told him by email afterwards. 'I want to thank you for the beautiful watch! I am sorry I didn't open it at the table. I misunderstood and thought it was a baby present so I only opened it when I was at home. It is absolutely beautiful and you are so generous . . . Please come to New York soon and bring your family. We will host you and your team.'

Rakishev responded that he intended to take up that offer in September. 'Let's be in touch!' he wrote ...

In 2017 ... Hunter was of course the subject of a spectacular political controversy. This stemmed from his decision in 2014 to accept a $50,000-a-month job on the board of Burisma, a Ukranian gas and oil company.

The role, for which Hunter had no obvious qualifications (in an industry he'd never worked in), came at a time when his father Joe was touring the region as Barack Obama's Vice President, seeking to shore up support for Ukraine's government following Russia's annexation of the Crimea.

Via Joe, the White House was not only lobbying Ukraine to become more energy independent by exporting oil and gas to the West, but also calling for its government to do more to root out corruption.

In particular, the U.S. and its allies were calling for the dismissal of the country's top prosecutor who was, at the time, carrying out an investigation into alleged malfeasance at Burisma.

All of which meant that the Vice President of America appeared to be using his position to endorse policies that would generate huge profits for a company that had suddenly decided to hire his own son as a director.

As The Guardian newspaper at the time put it: 'Putin's propaganda people can take a long weekend. Their work is being done for them!'

This week's emails leaked to the New York Post suggest that in return for his fat salary, Hunter in 2015 may have attempted to arrange for a senior Burisma executive called Vadym Pozharskyi 'spend some time together' with Joe in Washington DC.

It remains unclear whether any such meeting occurred. Indeed, Biden's campaign, while not disputing the authenticity of the emails, this week issued a carefully-worded statement insisting that 'no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place'.

Be that as it may, Donald Trump long ago developed something of an obsession with this affair.

... But as we can today reveal, Hunter Biden's real relationship with the hugely rich oligarch actually runs far deeper than anyone — even Donald Trump — has previously dreamed. 

Before you protest that much of this is circumstantial, recognize that the Democrats initiated a two year special counsel investigation on evidence that was much, much  flimsier than the information presented by The Daily Mail and in the NY Post exposé.

Did Biden benefit monetarily? Did he lie when he said publicly that he had no direct knowledge of his son's shady business dealings? Did he knowingly allow his son to peddle his name to raise money? Does he even remember any of this?

The media won't discuss the matter and even worse, social media censors anyone who tries. Welcome to a preview of the new world of leftist governance, aided and abetted by a media that enables it. Frightening.