RUTHFULLY YOURS

Leaving Washington with classified documents must be a tradition for outgoing presidents and vice presidents. Sensitive government papers have now been found in the private homes and offices of Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Maybe every president going back for decades has taken documents he shouldn’t have.

But only one has a crooked son who could have easily accessed those documents and used them to enrich himself and his corrupt family.

The public sure seems to believe that is the case. Six in 10 American voters are convinced it is likely that Biden’s son Hunter used information from the unsecured classified documents found in the current president’s Delaware home to sweeten “his foreign business deals.” Rasmussen Reports head pollster Mark Mitchell says the 60% figure is the “highest number we’ve ever seen implicating Joe Biden in anything.”

Republicans of course are overwhelmingly suspicious of Hunter Biden. But a large majority of independents, 62%, also believe that the president’s son used sensitive government documents to leverage his foreign business interests, according to the Rasmussen poll of 1,000 voters that was finalized over the weekend.

Voters also reckon that the Biden family has been “influence peddling for a decade.” Forty-three percent strongly agree with that statement while another 13% somewhat agree.

As voters have discerned, the likelihood that Hunter Biden used classified documents for profit is high, and their misgivings are warranted. Last week Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson noted that information in an April 2014 Hunter Biden email to a business partner included “highly detailed information in terms of Ukraine.”

“Where did Hunter get this information?” Johnson asked.

Three days after the email – found by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, and containing 22-detailed bullet points – was sent, Johnson says the business partner, Devon Archer, met with then-Vice President Biden in the White House; shortly after that the Big Guy traveled to Ukraine.

Johnson believes the documents were a preview of what the Biden family could do for officials of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, with Hunter Biden and Archer telling them that if “you pay us millions of dollars, this is the kind of information you’re going to have access to because of our connection to the vice president.”

Not long after Biden visited Ukraine – actually in the same month – both Archer and Hunter Biden were appointed to seats on the Burisma board, enjoying sinecures for which they were generously compensated, says Johnson. Devine reports that Hunter was “paid as much as $83,000 a month – equivalent to $1 million a year – despite having no experience in the energy industry, according to information stored on his infamous laptop.”

Is it reasonable to believe that Biden has been squirelling away classified documents for years if not decades to provide his family members with inside information that would make them all rich? Of course it is. Before the public had even heard of Hunter Biden’s laptop, there was Biden Inc., a racket described by Politico as an operation closely tracking his political career that boosted the fortunes of “Middle Class Joe’s’” family. The pattern is there, the stories sordid, the many hands involved dirty.

Joe Biden will likely be gone from the White House in two years, either beaten in the 2024 election or forced to sit it out altogether due to his scandals. The shame of it is he was ever elected to any lawmaking position. His comeuppance will have arrived more than a half century too late.