Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
The strategies of saving the Biden presidency from an impeachment and a Senate trial despite overwhelming evidence of his corruption are starting to emerge.
The Family is confronted with damning evidence from the laptop, from the testimonies of Hunter’s business associates Bobulinksi and Archer, from Ukrainian oligarchs and Viktor Shokin, from IRS whistleblowers, from FBI writs, from a likely pseudonymous Biden trove of 4,000 emails to his son and associates, and from the absolute paranoia of a White House that must constantly change its narrative of denials to adjust to a growing portrait of utter corruption, bribery, and perhaps even the treason of warping U.S. policy to fit Biden family interests.
The Defense in Depth
One of their strategies is to deny, then hedge, then ignore, then grow silent—and repeat the wash/rinse/spin cycle of stonewalling as many times as necessary to evade the mounting truth.
Insidiously Joe Biden has retreated from his once loud protestations that he supposedly had no idea of what Hunter and his associates were doing. Such a patently dishonest denial set the model that the President would have no compunction about lying to the American people until the evidence of his wrongdoing becomes overwhelming.
But this first line of defense did not crumble for years—only to be replaced by a second line of denial: Biden may have known of Hunter’s shenanigans, but he had no business interests with him. That was another blatant untruth.
And that additional stalling also allowed Biden to ignore the closing walls of incrimination for even more months. When these two forward lines of defense collapsed, as the Biden consortium knew they eventually would, a retreat to a third line of defense followed: yes, Joe knew, after all, of Hunter’s miscreant shakedowns; and, yes, Joe, after all, conceded that from time to time he did meet Hunter’s business associates, and upon requests made phone calls to Hunter’s clientele. But he did not profit from such knowledge and associations. Instead an upright old Joe from Scranton was playing along with the “illusion” of influence peddling: Scranton naiveté is not D.C. criminality.
Biden’s tripartite lines of defense always got shorter and shallower as evidence mounted. But so far Biden has managed to consume 31 months of his presidency through these strategic retreats. His fourth and final line of defense will likely be that he was involved, that he had rather than feigned contact, but that he did nothing other than what scores of other high-ranking politicians do who rub shoulders with would-be miscreants, sycophants, and crooks—and so did not knowingly take “loans” and “gifts” that had strings attached.
To breach this fourth defense line, House Republicans will have to break through the labyrinth of Biden paywalls and find how much money was rerouted into Biden coffers. And then they must additionally compare what came into the Biden hands with a) what the family reported on their respective income tax returns, and b) whether their various properties and lifestyles were remotely possible without such massive hidden income. And getting bank records from the Bidens will be near impossible.
The Ukraine Factor
Joe Biden has successfully profited by using American foreign aid to stop prosecutorial inquiries into his son’s and, indirectly per the laptop admissions, his own quid pro quo payments from corrupt Ukrainians.
The firing of Viktor Shokin who knew of Hunter Biden’s corruption was one of the most blatantly corrupt and self-interested acts of a Vice President since the career of Spiro Agnew. Still, there is no reason why Biden would now give up such a proven successful strategy.
Yet there are important issues for Biden at stake. One, Viktor Shokin is convinced that the Bidens were recipients of Ukrainian bribes intended to win U.S. foreign aid and influence over American foreign policy in Eastern Europe and vis a vis Russia.
And two, an FBI confidential source has sworn that “a foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them — 17 such recordings.” And three, to corroborate testimonies from these Ukrainian players or to subpoena the purported 17 recordings would now translate into risking the wrath of Joe Biden the giver of massive Ukrainian military aid—now likely over $100 billion—and formerly on record of being perfectly willing to cancel Ukrainian aid unless Kyiv bent to his personal agenda.
Now in an existential war, Ukrainians will likely not wish either Viktor Shokin or Mykola Zlochevsky, former head of Burisma and said to be in possession of the 17 recordings (including two that purportedly involve Joe Biden directly), to embarrass much less help to remove Biden by producing evidence confirming their charges.
So we should assume the Ukrainian government will do its best to protect Biden from fellow Ukrainian accusers, mostly by silencing any Ukrainian who would dare endanger their stream of arms and money. For Kyiv, the ongoing Biden exemption from impeachment and conviction is likely seen as a matter of life and death.
The Big Lie
A third defense has been outright lying, the bolder and more absurd, all the better. Here Joe Biden has prepped the lying battlefield, whether deliberately or inadvertently, both through his pathological fabrications about his autobiography and the events of our time, and by the collapse of his cognitive facilities.
Either way, his lies are contextualized by the media as “that’s just ole Joe spinning his tales.” In Biden’s fantasy world, he visited Ground Zero the day after the September 11 attacks, he taught a course on “political theory” at the University of Pennsylvania, his son Beau came home from Iraq in a coffin, and a catastrophic fire nearly consumed the Biden residence.
All these were not only lies, but callous lies that played on the emotions of those in crisis and suffering—to the purported empathetic advantage of Joe Biden himself. So Biden has no compunction of lying ad infinitum.
Remember, for years he lied that he fired Shokin because he was corrupt, that his government knew that, that the Europeans agreed, and that he did not leverage U.S. aid to ensure Shokin did not pursue Hunter’s Burisma nefariousness.
All that was a total lie, but a media-protected lie nonetheless that served Biden well for at least five years.
So we should expect the Left to embrace the full Biden lie and claim his serial contact with Hunter was the natural concern of a dutiful father, one who has suffered family tragedies and merely periodically called and emailed to cement family solidarity with other equally aggrieved Bidens.
And when evidence mounts that Biden really did receive funds via Hunter’s dummy companies we will be told that these were loans, or Joe was gifting them to grandchildren—or, most likely, Joe was completely unaware that such funds eventually found their way into his bank accounts and were used to buy and rent his various sumptuous residences.
Trump 24/7
At each stage of the walls closing around Joe Biden, a commensurate “Trump did it” news bulletin emerged. Collate the indictments or the leaks about impending indictments from the supposedly uncoordinated work of Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis both with iconic primary election dates ahead, and periodic revelations about the depth of Biden family corruption—and the synchronized distraction is quite stunning.
Expect in the next year for each new incriminating document released, each new witness that comes forward with a tale of Biden corruption, almost immediately the headlines will blare about a new Trump gag order, a new scheduled Trump court appearance, a new flipped witness cooperating with a prosecutor, and a new leak about a “certain” conviction and jail time. The new media war will make its old Russian collusion’s “all-star,” “hunter-killer team,” and “dream team” prosecutors and the “bombshell” and “walls are closing in” revelations seem like child’s play.
A Hit-bottom Media
After being utterly discredited by fixating for years on the Russian “collusion” hoax, and hyping the laptop Russian “disinformation” fable, any professional media would by now have apologized, conducted mass firings, and pledged to report the news rather than massage and invent it.
But no sooner does one media embarrassment end than the media ventures onto another, on the theory that it is so discredited and has hit bottom that it no longer has any reputation to defend. So a now liberated but bankrupt media feels it matters nothing whether its mythologies have a grain of truth.
The Biden family corruption and the exemptions given Hunter Biden by a corrupt Biden department of Justice have been contextualized by the media as a prelude to what we can expect of the impeachment inquiry.
In the modern American media, a Trump phone call threatening to delay offensive military aid until the Ukraine government could guarantee that its operatives were not empowering the Biden quid pro quo clan was an impeachable offense. A self-confessed Biden effort to alter US policy to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor, dutifully investigating the Hunter Biden/Biden family corruption, by threatening to cancel all U.S. aid to Kyiv was mere “familial” concern. Where incidentally is the outrage from current vehement supporters of blank-check, on-to-Moscow support for Ukraine over Joe Biden’s prior threats to cut critical military aid to Ukraine in efforts to ensure uninterrupted money streams to his own family treasure chest
In sum, the media is more tarnished than ever, and therefore more dangerous because it accepts it has no reputation left to defend and now is entirely unbound to invent, to fabricate, and to smear.
The Deep State
In 2017 under media and Democratic pressure, the Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions was bullied into recusing himself. He appointed in his place Robert Mueller as special counsel, empowered by an unlimited budget and a blank-check concerning time and resources to find “collusion.”
In contrast, in 2023 the Biden-appointed AG Merrick Garland, under fierce criticism for delaying the Hunter Biden investigation in order to run out of the clock on the statute of limitations on tax fraud, appointed David Weiss as special counsel. He was the prior chief culprit in providing cover for Hunter from indictments. So the proverbial fox is now in charge of the hen house.
In 2019 the “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella was considered a sacrosanct patriot, even though he had no firsthand knowledge of the supposed crimes he was accusing the president of committing. Instead, the whistleblower was selectively being spoon-fed information from Alexander Vindman, the expatriate U.S. Lt. Colonel, who, in the midst of his accusations, admitted he was offered the Ministry of Defense by the Ukrainian government. Vindman, currently in the second round of his careerist Ukrainian melodrama, is self-appointed CEO of his middleman company, seeking to profit from the war by facilitating the transfer and service of arms from the U.S. government to Ukraine.
Note the difference: in 2023 whistle blowers are now considered rogues, whether they be honest IRS investigators sickened by the corruption of their own DOJ prosecutorial counterparts, or FBI agents tired of the warping of their agency to facilitate the Biden coverups.
The net result will be a near impossible congressional task in forcing any federal agency to honor a congressional subpoena, as most will follow the Eric Holder model of a cocky snub of Congress with certainty of exemption.
The “Do You Really Want President Harris?” Factor
If the evidence trumps the Biden reliance on administrative state suppression, media bias and character assassination, there is one ace in the Biden hole—Kamala Harris. She is, as has been widely remarked upon, the Spiro Agnew of our age. (Yet the latter, in fact, on the stump was a Cicero in comparison to Harris’s 500-word vocabulary.)
In other words, the country is more scared of a not corrupt Harris than it is a senile and crooked Biden. And Biden has done nothing to dispel those impressions given that such a Nixonian fear of his Vice President is his last ticket to finishing out his term.
Not just Biden but millions in the country are anxious that the president is one fall, one new email disclosure from oblivion. His ensuing removal would not just give Harris the presidency in the next year and a half, but also the advantage of incumbency going into the 2024 election year and beyond.
So expect that the more the proverbial noose tightens around Biden, all the more his West Wing will leak daily stories about Harris’s puerility, her lightness of being, and her abject incompetence, and the dangers she would pose to the republic.
The DEFCON 1 Option
There is a final nihilist gambit. If Biden is confronted with his own email evidence of corruption, tapes of his agreement to financial exchanges, bank accounts with large foreign deposits, and direct testimonies that he received cash, he has one last refuge: the “Hunter did it all!” ruse.
Hunter is all too aware of his own danger. Collate his mischievous recent grifting artistic career, the Malibu-renting Hunter trying to plead poverty to reduce child-support payments, the mysterious cocaine that turns up in a West Wing cubicle, his laptop anger at his Mr. Big Guy’s and Mr. 10 Percent’s underappreciation of Hunter’s bagman role, and Hunter’s threat to call the President of the United States to testify that a now trapped Hunter is innocent of everything.
The resulting picture that emerges is an out-of-control Hunter—who lost a laptop, a crack pipe, and an illegally registered handgun—now very worried that he will become Joe’s scapegoat.
Hunter still believes he is a Samson that can pull down the Biden temple upon them all—if the alternative is that he is the only Biden to stew for years in jail.
Remember, Hunter also knows his father all too well—Joe’s long resume of plagiarism, greed, arrogance, corruption, lying, and fantasies—and so rightly believes at some point Joe might easily shrug, and in one of his “senile” moments, utter, “Well, no Joke, man—it was all Hunter’s stuff, not mine.”
This is a CAPITAL offense and punishment should be based on the harm done.
And the legislators, academics, WALL STREETERS and corporate America
should be examined by the same standards.
The founders must be shivering in thier graves!@
Another aspect of Biden’s strategy is the “normalization” of impeachment and criminality. Democrats pretend to believe that Trump is a felon and RINO-leaning commentators make a big deal over the number of felonies that Trump is accused of. No consideration is given to the possibility that this vast constellation of apparent criminality is nothing more than the fevered imaginations of delusional Democrats. And then there is the Paxton impeachment in Texas. This was doomed to failure, but that is the point. It discredits the impeachment process which will comfort Biden’s supporters. Paxton faced sixteen different accusations, and the Democrats needed to get 21 guilty votes on any one of those sixteen. The high-water mark for the Democrats was 14 votes for guilty, and most of the other votes split on party lines of 12 votes to convict, 18 not guilty. This was a purely political act by the Democrats. Thus, we can expect Biden’s impeachment to be characterized by the Democrats as nothing but a political quid pro quo for the Trump and Paxton travesties. It would be good for the country if the Biden impeachment forced a significant number of Democrats to defect from their lockstep adherence to the party, it would be better if the country saw the Democrats support a felon and a traitor. We will take back our country one step at a time, and the coming impeachment is a good first step.
The Paxton impeachment trial gave rise to the new “legal” term, hearsay squared.
VDH–excellent recounting of Biden coverups. Thanks, Bob Geist MD
The impeachment of Joe “the bald face liar” Biden will most likely not take place before mid January 2024 if at all. The twenty-fifth amendment will be his out since the medical professionals retained by the deep state will suddenly declare him incompetent to continue his duties, upon which he will be trundled back to his basement under the care of Doctor Jill. As for the rest of the actors don’t hold your breath waiting for the DOJ to do their job, the deep state will not permit it. And even if Trump wins in 2024 he would need to dismantle the DOJ, the FBI, and a host of other agencies to take the Biden empire down. To break up the deep state the next president would have to move the operation of the various agencies into the hinterland, out of DC. If the democrats cheat and get their man elected then we can kiss what we use to know as America goodbye until the revolution restores not only our freedoms and rights but our collective sanity.
Follow the money. Same applies to Clinton Foundation. Kushner’s also a sleeze bag. To cynically say they all peddle influence is unacceptable, because it undermines our democratic institutions.
Treason isn’t “Treason treason” if Democrats do it.
Here’s a chestnut to digest; 0bama knew all of this was going on and not just the Biden stuff, all of Clinton malfeasance as well. The Russia “collusion” scandal…all of it. 0bama knew.
When the “Fourth Estate” became a 5th Column, our fate as a nation was sealed.
Democrats have eviscerated the rule of law. They are now a criminal organization. A political mafia.
No matter how solid the evidence, the Senate will NOT convict Biden.
No matter how solid the evidence, Biden’s DOJ will NOT prosecute.
The democrat party has embraced Bill Ayer’s mantra; “Guilty as hell, free as a bird…”
Here’s the problem – impeaching him solves nothing.
Even on the off chance that they get the votes to impeach Biden, it’s not like the Senate is going to convict him.
Even if they did, it’s not like removing him from office will change anything as Kamala will then become president and whoever was giving Biden his orders will now give those orders to Kamala – so same orders, different packaging.
And it’s not like this is going to change anyone’s mind – liberals aren’t going to suddenly say “Oh shoot, I didn’t realize Biden was corrupt – I’m voting for Trump!”
Nope – Satan himself could be running as the Democrat candidate for President and everyone who voted Democrat last time would vote for him.
This impeachment nonsense is simply grandstanding by establishment Republicans to distract from the fact that they’re doing nothing to prevent 2024 from being stolen like 2020 was.
VDH KEEPS US IN HOPE THAT COMMON SENSE WILL PREVAIL!
We know that the current Administration hates America, what bothers me are the people who keep voting them in!
Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
Harold Asikyan
That coke was not left behind by accident. It was planted and exposed in the mainstream to great fanfare. It’s a part of the scheme to demoralize as many as possible: “Nothing will be done and there is nothing we can do. Oh, oh, woe is me.” The mutts in charge of the D.C. circus are incorrigible, irrepressible, resolute and implacable. They want you silent or dead and they don’t care which.
With an impeachment action approved by the House now Jurassic Joe’s personal financial records, previously not attainable are now subject to subpoena and disclosure. Simple addition of the cost of his lifestyle and mega valued residences will be of a total value beyond the income of his tax returns. Tracing the money flow of shell companies to Biden (aka Corleone) would be will not be necessary for proof that bribes were taken, the excuse of “loans” and “gifts” won’t cut it.
The degradation of the mainstream media into party propaganda arm that VDH opines on has been long in the making. What once were left leaning but mostly fair independent institutions were purchased in the 80’s by big corporations with demands to become profit centers. This was the beginning of the end for their integrity.
Soon, we were treated to celebrity gossip as news to attract more eyeballs and juice ratings. The ‘hard news’ became mostly thin gruel. The descendants of fiercely independent news men and women whose main agenda was to expose the truth became corporate lackeys looking to please the endless strata of management above them.
Ultimately, when many of these corporations were coerced into going ‘woke’, the rank and file in the news departments they owned saw adopting this outlook as their means of survival. What’s ironic is many of these ‘news’ departments are no longer able to be profit centers but are valued by their corporate owners as ways to appease the left leaning government leviathan and keep them out of their other businesses.
It appears that like spring grass breaking through the dead wood, the only hope for a revival of honesty and integrity in the news media are the ‘one man band’ internet based reporters like Andy Ngo.
“In other words, the country is more scared of a not corrupt Harris than it is a senile and crooked Biden.”
A clarification: she’s not a “not corrupt” Harris. She’s just not as corrupt as Biden. But she’s not where she is today because of merit. She’s there because she gamed a corrupt system to get ahead.
She slept her way up the political ladder with Willie Brown!
When political corruption becomes convincing by the preponderance of actual evidence and not fabricated witch hunts, eventually the public despite MSM coverups will discover the truth. Biden will not go down at the hands of any further revelations of corruption but when his handlers decide he is too much of a liability for the 2024 election.
They believe, (Biden’s handlers) and probably are correct, that they are in control of the election outcome despite the voters. However if the margin of voter rejection of Biden over Trump, if it becomes too great there will have to be either an overwhelming crisis to distract the voters from Biden’s corruption, or he will be told to step down for an alternative candidate, most likely not VP Kamala.
The historic evidence is that government corruption is so entrenched across all branches that no matter how outraged the voters, the government’s control of the media and the elections, will no longer permit the citizens to adjudicate their crimes at the ballot box.
What VDH leaves out is the Republican leaders who collaborate with the forces of evil. They were aware Biden was senile and corrupt before the election. They knew Hunter’s laptop was authentic. They supported Biden anyway. I imagine VDH’S animus towards Trump now explains the elisions.
I read and very much liked VDH’s book “A Case For Trump”, and a chief plus was an objectivity that avoided coming off like 300 pages of partisan cheerleading and a job application… or at least he skipped calling Trump the devil, if I remember correctly.
Excellent review.
To what degree is US military aid to Ukraine hush money?
99% of it if the whole war is not a big shakedown from each side , slaughtering heir own civilians to grease the money wheels. The middle east has nothing compared to the blood that has been spilled in this region over the last three hundred years.
Ukraine has the goods on Biden, just as does Russia, China, Romania & the Democrat establishment. He does want he’s told to do, “just sign it!”
We the people must shoot flaming arrows at the circled wagons. Biden’s last stand should go down in history as the flaming pile of crap that describes his entire career.
Biden is the most venal President I’ve ever seen – and I’m 66.
While I’d like to see The DEFCON 1 Option play out, I suspect we’ll see instead a combination of all the other options, each played depending on the day of the week.
This is just the Orwellian final act playing out with amoral DOJ and corrupt entitled media. We may be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic with next years election because in my humble opinion no nation can survive the tectonic forces pushing demographic aging , corruption of the federal bureacracy, unfettered immigration, green policy price impacts, Chinese ascendency, a debt to GDP ratio north of 125%, racial and gender equity madness. December of 2019 was the acme of the US, the grade going down if we miss next years runaway ramp election, is a cliff.
How pathetic.
The thief’s greatest fun is to run rings around those he sees as fools, watching with glee at the timidity and confusion – like an addict, stopping only at a rock bottom.
If we were to objectively examine the different aspects of what has caused our horrible condition today, we’d find that the single most important factor is a biased media, determined to defeat Trump and all who support him, as well as to promote the various woke ideologies. Dishonesty is not the primary cause – many believe they are nobly pursuing a “fundamentally changed” America, and truly believe America needs changing. To them, Trump is an authoritarian danger to the entire world. The “ends justify the means” belief is thus enabled. Because the media is the primary means by which dishonesty and dangerous policy are exposed, we cannot hope to reverse our decline until the media is reformed.
Greed
Bias confirmation
Rationalization
While we, the readers, focus on punishment of the #bidencrimesyndicate, rightly so, the People will also be punished whether or not the Bidens receive their due, via the slow march to pre-civilization, inflation, tribalism, and the kinetic hegemony of the totalitarian states abroad.
Ted Salgado
Milwaukee WI
That 4th line of defense, that Biden was only doing what every one else does, just does not hold water in a true justice system! I don’t think any attorney would let a client use a defense that since Willie Sutton robbed banks they should be free to do the same!
While it may get the Menendezes of the Senate to go along and not convict Biden, it will clearly leave Joe Biden open to legal charges after the 2024 election, when we may have an honest DOJ!
“In contrast, in 2023 the Biden-appointed AG Merrick Garland, under fierce criticism for delaying the Hunter Biden investigation in order to run out of the clock on the statute of limitations on tax fraud, appointed David Weiss as special counsel. He was the prior chief culprit in providing cover for Hunter from indictments. So the proverbial fox is now in charge of the hen house”
I’m confused, the VDH point is non-sensical.
the Hunter Biden investigation for tax fraud began in 2018 under Weiss.
Weiss later requested, and Garland granted, Weiss’s request to be made special counsel.
There has been no public reason given for Weiss’s request.