Biden’s corruption is enough to disqualify him from office now By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://nypost.com/2023/04/24/bidens-corruption-is-enough-to-disqualify-him-from-office-now/
A little advice to Republicans overseeing the Biden investigations: Don’t worry if he’s a criminal. It’s bad enough to be corrupt.
James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has been teasing details about his committee’s Biden investigation.
We’re led to believe that a dozen of more Biden family members — not just the president, his ne’er-do-well son Hunter, and his smooth-operator brother Jim — will be implicated in the transfer of piles of foreign money into the family coffers.
Comer suggests that the only rational explanation for this is that foreign regimes, including such hostile ones as Communist China, were buying Biden’s political influence.
This would be shocking if proved.
When the Framers gave Congress the power to remove a president from office by inserting impeachment clauses in the Constitution, nothing more animated them than fear of foreign corruption. A president whose influence and authority had been purchased through shady foreign deals, and who could thus be expected to subordinate American interests to those of anti-American powers, could profoundly damage the United States.
It is among Congress’s most solemn duties to ensure that American power, especially executive power, is insulated from foreign corruption.
That is why even middling executive officials who need security clearances to do their jobs must make extensive disclosure of all their foreign contacts and transactions.
People needn’t be guilty of crimes to be denied such clearances. The rational concern that they could be compromised is enough to wall them off from access to intelligence and national security functions.
With the Bidens, of course, there is a lot more than mere potential to be worried about. They undeniably reaped millions of dollars, mainly through obscure entities patently set up to make the transfers hard to trace, apparently without providing discernible value in good or services to justify thebreadth of the payments.
It looks like sheer influence peddling. We are entitled to presume that it is unless and until an (unlikely) innocent explanation is posited.
Wait a minute, don’t they get a presumption of innocence? No, they don’t. This is a congressional inquiry, not a criminal case.
If foreign payments are proved, we’re entitled to presume Biden is compromised for the same reason the government may deny a security clearance out of well-founded fear of potential corruption.
In a criminal trial, a defendant is presumed innocent because the government seeks to convict him and remove his right to liberty.
But political power is a privilege, not a right. Joe Biden has been trusted to wield the awesome powers of the presidency. There’s no presumption of entitlement to a privilege.
If he and his family cashed in on his political influence, particularly with hostile foreign powers, and if they covered their tracks with labyrinthine money trails and false accusations of “Russian disinformation,” we’re entitled to presume they did so to the detriment of the nation.
That is where Comer needs to keep his focus. Instead, he is intimating that the Justice Department has been derelict in that it has not “indicted everyone who has any type of fingerprints involved in this influence-peddling scheme.”
That’s foolish. The crimes Comer seems to be hinting at may not have been committed. Money laundering, for example, is difficult to prove unless one can show the money was the proceeds of criminal activity before assets started being moved around.
Yes, It is unsavory to take money from apparatchiks of the Chinese Communist Party, from corrupt Ukrainian government cronies, and from Russians in strongman Vladimir Putin’s circle — among many dubious foreigners with whom the Bidens have done business.
But it is not illegal per se to do business with such sources; therefore, the money taken from them for such vague services as, say, “consulting,” may technically be lawful income, even if it stinks to high heaven.
If the revenue was booked accurately — and the Bidens can afford good lawyers and accountants — there may be no major tax violations (at least beyond the Hunter tax offenses that have been widely reported).
If the Bidens took the money to do the bidding of their foreign “partners,” they could be guilty of acting as foreign agents without registering as such with the government (under FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act).
But FARA felonies are rare and notoriously tough to prove. FARA has only been charged only a few times in the last half-century. Even with a slight uptick since the Mueller probe, DOJ’s record of enforcing FARA remains spotty and mostly dormant.
Did President Biden and his family members rake in millions from foreign sources in a manner that is despicable?
It sure looks that way, but Comer is publicly suggesting that they are not only sleazy but guilty of crimes.
If no one is indicted though — other than, perhaps, Hunter on comparatively minor charges — the president will claim that he has been vindicated.
He will use Comer’s public claims to argue that Republicans were wrong and that he has done nothing wrong.
The problem here is that our adversaries in China, among other alien governments, have lavished millions of dollars on the president’s family to buy his influence.
If that is shown to be true, then he is unfit to be president. Whether it is also a crime is beside the point.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor.
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