Under normal circumstances, a politician repeatedly lying about something, forget abruptly changing policies on his own, would suggest – at a minimum – they have something to hide, but somehow, for some unstated reason, none of that is supposed to apply to President Biden.
President Joe Biden’s supporters have adopted a curiously obtuse perspective, one where logic and common sense have been replaced by an unusual blind faith in a politician whatever their party. Over the past several months, we have witnessed a deluge of new information concerning his son, Hunter’s business dealings and their relationship to the President himself when he was Vice President under Barack Obama. By any rational standard, each new piece of information to emerge has been damning on its own – the existence of some thirty shell companies, millions flowing in from foreign countries, whistleblower claims of a corrupt investigation, a confidential source claiming both men were bribed, eye witness accounts of meetings the Vice President had with Hunter’s associates, the Vice President described as the company’s “brand,” the appointment of a Special Counsel following the collapse of a plea deal, the State Department emails detailing how he personally changed policy in Ukraine to favor Burisma, and most recently the revelation that Biden used fake email addresses to communicate with his son, more on both in a moment. In the meantime, not a single piece of evidence over this same period has been remotely exculpatory. There has been no conflicting data points to suggest the Biden family was engaged in anything other than a classic influence peddling operation on a massive scale, profiting from his office. Indeed, there is no other explanation for any of this, and the mere existence of such an operation has been seen as unethical and corrupt – if not outright criminal – for more than a hundred years. Generally speaking, the appointment of a Special Counsel alone is perceived as indicative that some serious scandal has been committed and we are issued breathless reports about the walls closing in (for the record, President Biden now has two Special Counsels looking into him and his family), but not this time.
This time, none of it means anything and there are those who continue to deny the obvious. They do so even though much of the current controversy is of the President’s own making, the direct result of lies he has told in the past. In 2019 and 2020, at the height of the Presidential Primary and subsequent campaign, he denied any involvement or knowledge of his son’s business dealings, flatly and repeatedly. The House Oversight Committee investigating these matters has identified at least sixteen instances, most taking the form of this statement from August 28, 2019, “First of all, I have never discussed with my son, or my brother, or anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses, period,” leaving no wiggle in such a defiant statement, complete with a “period” to emphasize the point. Even at the time many suspected this was a false claim, but now we know for certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, much less a preponderance of the evidence or a reasonable one. The President has persisted in this lie, however, denying he ever lied at all, as recently as June. A reporter asked him, “Did you lie about never speaking to Hunter about his business dealings?” The President responded, “No.” This month, in fact, he insisted on something similar. “There’s this testimony now where one of your son’s former business associates is claiming that you were on speakerphone a lot with them talking business. Is that what?” “I never talked business with anybody, and I knew you’d have a lousy question,” he insisted despite the truth. Likewise, the President also claimed his family didn’t made any money at all from China. At the Presidential Debate with former President Donald Trump, he said, “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China.” Setting aside how it is possible for him to have no knowledge of Hunter’s business dealings and know that those dealings do not include China, this was yet another lie. Hunter has admitted, in court, to receiving at least $664,000 and Republicans believe it was much more.
More recently, State Department memos also strongly suggest the President has not been truthful about his role in the firing of Ukraine Prosecutor General, Victor Shokin. In 2018, President Biden bragged about a classic quid pro quo, stating clearly and succinctly that he informed the Ukrainian government they would not receive a promised billion dollar loan guarantee unless Mr. Shokin was fired. “I said, ‘Nah, I’m not going to – we’re not going to give you the billion dollars.’ They said, ‘You have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said –.’ I said, ‘Call him.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the $1 billion.’ I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here.’ I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.” Everyone important in the eyes of the media, the kind of card carrying experts Dr. Anthony Fauci favors, insisted that then-Vice President Biden was simply carrying out the agreed upon policy. As USA Today put it, the firing “wasn’t because Shokin was investigating a natural gas company tied to Biden’s son [as Republicans and a confidential source allege]; it was because Shokin wasn’t pursuing corruption among the country’s politicians, according to a Ukrainian official and four former American officials who specialized in Ukraine and Europe. Shokin’s inaction prompted international calls for his ouster and ultimately resulted in his removal by Ukraine’s parliament.” Except, we now know that the State Department recommended the billion dollar loan guarantee with no strings attached. Contrary to expressing concern, they declared they were “very impressed” with Mr. Shokin and planned to invite him to the White House until the Vice President intervened by issuing a memo of his own on November 22, 2015.
“There is wide agreement that anti-corruption must be at the top of this list,” the memo read, “and that reforms must include an overhaul of the Prosecutor General’s Office, including removal of Prosecutor General Shokin, who is widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem.” Despite this abrupt change of plans, it was believed the loan guarantee would be offered without the quid pro quo. A memo briefing Vice President Biden on the plans on the very same day reads, “Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk will be looking for tangible signs of U.S. support to assist the Ukrainian people during these difficult times, facilitate further reforms, and help with efforts to defend against Russian aggression. You will sign our third billion-dollar loan guarantee and publicly announce FY 15 U.S. assistance for the first time: $189,035,756 — which does not include security assistance (previously announced separately).” The Vice President, however, appears to have taken it upon himself to change the policy. The US Ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Geoffrey Pyatt acknowledged this in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, albeit rather vaguely in the language we have come to expect from those protecting the establishment, when the a card carrying experts circle the wagons and obscure the truth. “I can’t help you on that,” he said. “If you look on the clearance page you will see that I actually didn’t see these documents until you guys sent them to me.” He continued to equivocate, but certainly not to the benefit of Biden. “This is an imperfect art. And what it ultimately comes down to is the principal’s decision, and, you know, in this case how the Vice President based–and there would typically, before a big trip like this, a day or two before he got on the airplane there would have been a deputies’ or a principals’ level discussion.” In other words, this was the Vice President’s doing and he did while his son was on the board of a company that desperately wanted Mr. Shokin gone, even hiring a PR firm to that effect.
Under normal circumstances, a politician repeatedly lying about something, forget abruptly changing policies on his own, would suggest – at a minimum – they have something to hide. There’s an old adage about the cover up being worse than the crime, and here the President continues to insist on a blatant falsehood, lying to this day, straight to everyone’s faces. Moreover, this is no simple lie of omission or misstatement that has since been corrected. It’s an equally old adage that no politician is completely truthful and a little benefit of the doubt is due in many cases. At first, we might have assumed President Biden meant that he never talked in depth and only had a broad understanding of Hunter’s business, as many parents do their children, but by now, we have a clear, systematic series of lies about one thing, his son’s business dealings and his involvement in them. Why? Why would anyone repeat the same obvious lie over and over again when everyone knows they are lying? There are many, primarily in the Democrat Party, who insist that Hunter was running a legitimate business, or at most selling the “illusion” of access, but if that was the case, what is the point of lying about it in the first place? After all, we lie to conceal things, to hide the truth, or to misdirect when we would prefer the truth never be known. If the police learn a murder suspect is lying about his whereabouts on the night their wife disappeared, they would not hesitate to assume this lie served a nefarious purpose. If a wife learns her husband is lying about who he is meeting with after work, she would be justifiably inclined to be concerned he might not be faithful. These are the normal human reactions to lies and cover ups. As we know from Shakespeare’s Othello, we cannot see inside another’s head to discern the absolute truth. We can only access the outside show, and when that show is a proven lie, we are rightfully suspicious, but somehow, for some unstated reason, none of that is supposed to apply here. Instead, we’re supposed to believe that President Biden lied repeatedly because…Well, there is no because. No one has posited any rational reason as to why he would lie so boldly about something that wasn’t nefarious. If all of these business dealings are ethical and above the board, why lie about them at all? We don’t know and his supporters aren’t saying.
The same reaction greeted the revelation that President Biden frequently communicated with his son using a fake email address, some 5,400 times according to the National Archives. Think about that for a moment: A sitting Vice President sent 5,400 emails to his son using fake names including robinware456@gmail.com, JRBWare@gmail.com and Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov. Consider that the Vice President was only in office for 2,920 days in total, meaning he emailed Hunter about twice per day including weekends, holidays, and vacations, and he did so under addresses specifically chosen to hide these communications. Why would anyone do that if all they were discussing was family and the weather? How many people that are supposedly as busy as the Vice President have this much time to email their adult children? To revisit the analogy from earlier, what would your wife say if she found out you had secret email addresses containing thousands of messages? So far, the National Archives has refused to release the emails, claiming it will take some unspecified amount of time to process records they’ve had for over five years. “We have performed a search of our collection for Vice Presidential records related to your [June 9, 2022] request and have identified approximately 5,138 email messages, 25 electronic files and 200 pages of potentially responsive records that must be processed in order to respond to your request,” Stephannie Oriabure, the director of NARA’s archival operations division, wrote to the Southeastern Legal Foundation on June 24, 2022.
They will come out at some point, but in the meantime, what they say doesn’t really matter. The question is why the Vice President would hide anodyne, harmless conversations, thousands of them. Once again, no one has supplied any reason or rationale, pretending the pattern of lies and deceptions means absolutely nothing at all. This, of course, is rarely ever the case. Unless President Biden lies when the truth would serve him just as well and hides what doesn’t need to be hidden – which is its own set of problems, by the way – we can only assume that he has done so to cover up unethical, corrupt, and possibly illegal behavior. What other innocent explanation is there? Where there’s smoke there’s fire they say, and what walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and acts like a duck, is a duck, except in this case.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 