OPINION:
With all that’s going on at home and around the world, we should have expected the chatter concerning Hunter Biden to die down. That’s not the worst thing in the world. Some things, like the war in Ukraine, the aftershocks of record inflation, and the out-of-control rate at which the federal government is spending our money, are deserving of more attention than his exploits, real and rumored.
Still, the people have the right to know whether the president’s son is a crook and, by extension, if his father is. Saying so doesn’t make it so, no matter what evidence people think is already out there. We are pleased that Congress is not spending all its time on that question, as we feared might be the case once it was clear the Republicans had won a majority in the House of Representatives, but it does matter if you believe access to high government officials should not be for sale.
Writing last October, columnist Miranda Devine referred to a 634-page report made by an independent conservative group that “listed six alleged crimes committed by Joe Biden — including tax evasion and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act — alongside 459 crimes it alleges were committed by Hunter, including illegal foreign lobbying and money laundering.”
These are serious allegations, as serious as anything former President Donald Trump and his associates are alleged to have done. Do people really expect the American people to ignore them?
Further, compared with the various investigations of Mr. Trump, his family, and his business and political associations, the examination of Hunter Biden’s finances and business dealings are being handled with the utmost discretion. That’s a breath of fresh air after all the stink the Democrats on Capitol Hill raised during the last administration.
On Monday, Kentucky Republican James Comer, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, who is overseeing part of the Hunter Biden inquiry, paid a visit to the U.S. Treasury to view what his office called “financial records related to the Biden family and their associates’ business transactions.”
His observations affirm the need to investigate further.
“The Biden family enterprise is centered on Joe Biden’s political career and connections, and it has generated an exorbitant amount of money for the Biden family. We’ve identified six additional members of Joe Biden’s family who may have benefited from the Biden family’s businesses that we are investigating, bringing the total number of those involved or benefiting to nine,” Mr. Comer said in a statement issued after viewing the records.
None of that means anyone is guilty of anything more than errors in judgment. But it shouldn’t make anyone breathe easier. Based on what we know, or believe we know because it was on the younger Biden’s laptop, it does look a lot like people were trading on their access to officials at the highest levels of the American government during the Obama-Biden administration.
Those who don’t think that’s a big deal should talk to the people prosecuted by the Justice Department for doing the same thing during the Trump administration. The rationale behind such charges is not all that deep and depended, in some cases, on finding new meaning in antiquated laws.
If that’s unfair, well, goose and gander. The people who try to dismiss such concerns as “whataboutism” are trying to avoid having to defend what are obviously double standards. If every jot and tittle of Mr. Trump’s income tax returns is deserving of public and congressional scrutiny, so are the Bidens’.
We are confident that the Comer-led inquiry into the Bidens’ “tangled web of financial transactions,” as the committee said in a release, will be conducted fairly and fully cognizant of the need to show guilt rather than surmise it or, as Rep. Adam Schiff, California Democrat, did repeatedly during the Trump investigations by making it up.
Something appears to have gone rotten in the state of Delaware. The stench, which has been drifting toward D.C. since before the last presidential election, is getting worse every day.
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