Ever since The Post broke the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October of 2020, it’s been obvious that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s influence peddling schemes.
The president’s serial denials were as credible as Bill Clinton’s claim that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Biden’s most ridiculous lie was that he never even discussed Hunter’s foreign business with him.
Laptop messages and photos showing Joe meeting with some of Hunter’s skeezy clients proved otherwise.
Revelations that the son got millions from Ukraine energy company Burisma, despite knowing nothing about energy or Ukraine, destroyed the fiction that this was a merit-based business.
So did crucial public statements by Tony Bobulinski, a former Hunter Biden partner who bravely authenticated many of the emails and identified Joe as the “big guy” slated for a 10% cut in a Chinese deal.
Central to this picture of a sprawling scam was the 2013 China trip where Hunter flew with his vice-president father on Air Force Two and returned with a huge investment from a Chinese bank.
Apparently we were supposed to believe the father never asked the son, “Hey, what are you doing on my plane and why are you going to China?”
In the event that any dead-enders believed Biden’s absurd denials, the nearby photos from that trip settle the argument.
Withheld by Archives
Yet the release of the pictures does more than just prove the president a liar.
The decision by the storied National Archives to withhold the evidence until after the election despite a lawsuit from America First Legal opens the door to a larger scandal.
It means the president corrupted others in the administration to cover up his lie.
Think of it as a whole-of-government deception designed to help Biden win a second term.
Did Attorney General Merrick Garland know what the National Archives was hiding?
Did Vice President Kamala Harris?
How could they not know?
Gossip alone would have carried the scandalous information from one administration to another, not to mention the need to document everything a vice president says and does on an official visit with a foreign head of state.
The Secret Service would know the role of everyone in his traveling party and who they met with.
And is there anybody who doubts that the CIA, the FBI and others in the deep state knew Biden was lying with his ridiculous denials?
That’s blackmail-level knowledge, certainly enough to keep him in line.
J. Edgar Hoover terrified presidents and top members of Congress with far less dirt.
The gist is that many people in the Obama White House knew Biden was introducing his son, an on-and-off drug addict, to the communist nation’s top leaders and their bankers.
What did Blinken know?
Antony Blinken, now Biden’s secretary of state, who helped organize the dishonest 2020 letter from the 51 former intelligence officials who said the laptop smelled of Russian disinformation, also had to know the truth about the Biden family business.
He was deputy national security adviser in 2013.
Similarly, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, also had to know his boss has been lying to the public.
Sullivan was on the China trip and later admitted that Hunter’s business connections then “wasn’t something that was on any of our radar screens.”
Despite the fact that Biden is leaving office next month, this history cannot be dismissed as water under the bridge.
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There are too many loose ends.
Consider that Bobulinski once said he had changed his mind about the Biden relationship with China.
Where once he thought it was primarily about businesses currying favor with the vice president, he came to believe Chinese intelligence had showered the Biden family with money in a plot to compromise Joe.
The more we know, the more sense that makes.
Which is why these photos cannot be the end of the story.
GOP’s probe options
Here are two paths forward.
First, Republicans should use their congressional majorities to form a joint investigative committee and work with the incoming Trump administration to open up all government files on the Biden family ties.
Although Rep. James Comer and other GOP House members did yeoman’s work on the issue in the last term, they will now have the advantage of a GOP Senate majority and, most of all, Trump in the White House.
The second option is for Trump to discuss with Pam Bondi, his all-but-certain attorney general, about appointing a special counsel to probe whether Joe Biden was compromised by the family’s entanglements and who in the administration helped conceal the information from Comer and the public.
Bondi’s prime assignment should be to find whether the millions of dollars the Bidens got corrupted America’s policies toward China, Ukraine and other countries where the family did business.
In response to those moves, Democrats and their media lackeys will wail that Trump is using the government to go after his political enemies.
Let ’em wail.
Biden crossed that bridge first when he let Garland know he wanted Trump prosecuted and Garland obeyed by getting Trump indicted on two separate federal cases.
No other former president had ever been charged with a crime.
Thankfully, both cases are now dead, but had Trump lost the election, he would be getting ready for trial and face prison time.
As for Biden, there’s no question he did something seriously unethical by helping his family make millions on the basis of his powerful positions.
It is not revenge to determine whether he personally took bribes and sold out America to foreign adversaries.
That’s the justification Dems and the media used when they charged Trump with colluding with Russia.
That was a hoax, but we already have solid evidence that Biden actually did something far in excess of what Trump was ever accused of doing.
In this case, the whole truth is essential to our national security. It must be told.