The Chris Moeller Archives

When the “surprise” attempt was sprung by Republican operatives in the tenth month of the year-- timed for maximum damage, we were looking at a reveal that Joe’s son, Hunter, was up to his eyeballs in overseas corruption while trading on his family name. Not only was the story suppressed, however, by the major left-leaning news outlets, but those few outlets that did cover the story-- such as the right-leaning New York Post-- found themselves “de-platformed” from the internet. It was “misinformation,” we were told, which-- with more of the details now available, should tell us all we need to know about what the Democrats in Washington have in store for Mark Zuckerberg. They don’t want to destroy Facebook. They simply want to hijack it. 

Ben Schreckinger of Politico has written a vital book called “The Bidens” that details the soft (and sometimes-hardening) corruption that has infected the first family of Delaware going back to Papa Joe’s first statewide race in 1972. Those aforementioned news outlets have chosen not to review the book, but the literary product is detailed and aggressively sourced. I give you my word as a Biden: It’s a must-read. There’s no agenda. Right-wing pundits momentarily embraced it, but then found that it wasn’t a partisan hit. 

Hunter is referred to in one chapter title as “the Notorious R.H.B.”-- Robert Hunter Biden. Some political reporters, most of them now dead, owe Billy Carter and Roger Clinton retroactive apologies as Joe’s youngest of two sons is, without a doubt, the biggest fuckup in the long history of fucked up presidential relatives. He’s a drunkard and drug addict of the first rate-- present tense-- and those pastimes probably qualify as his least-damaging attributes because at least when he’s holed up in a crack den and chasing those big scores, he’s only hurting himself. The rest of his waking hours seem to be spent chasing after and conducting large-scale financial scams, cozying up to corrupt international businessmen, and ripping off U.S. taxpayers. If he were the son of any political figure other than the guy that was Donald Trump’s major opponent in the most recent election cycle, Beltway reporters would have come crashing down months ago on both him and his elected relative. 

Choosing just a random starting point to save time, the time was May of 2016. Federal agents arrested two of Hunter’s business partners, Devon Archer and Jason Galanis, plus several other of their associates, with defrauding the Oglala Sioux tribe out of $60 million. Charges were not filed against Hunter in this case, nor would they be later that year when he totaled his car in Joshua Tree National Park and police found a crack pipe, a Delaware attorney general’s badge and a Secret Service calling card inside the cabin. 

He went into business with Ye Jianming, an oil man from China, on a series of lucrative energy projects. One of their partners later confirmed that he had been led to believe that Joe was aware of his son’s business plans, and an email with an authenticity that has never been questioned by its subjects suggested that Joe would hold a ten percent ownership in one of the projects. The email read “10 held by H for the big guy?” Another purported email from Hunter indicated that he was receiving a $10 million annual fee from a Chinese billionaire for “introductions alone.” In 2020, Joe was on the presidential trail telling Americans that President Trump was overhyping the economic threat of China. Ye’s top lieutenant, Patrick Ho, was ultimately arrested for money laundering and for passing bribes to high-ranking government officials in the countries of Chad and Uganda. As Ho went off to prison, Ye disappeared. 

Hunter has more notably served on the board of directors for a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings-- because that’s what the boards of billion dollar companies are looking for-- crack-addicts who have been drummed out of the Navy reserves for failing a drug test. The criminal division of the IRS started investigating the source of his income in 2017, possibly before, and the FBI put him under surveillance. Their concerns included potential money laundering, tax fraud, and counterintelligence complications, but in their investigation, they also found large payments made by Hunter to Eastern European women. 

When Hunter was sued for paternity by a stripper, he denied a sexual relationship with the woman. After a paternity test confirmed he was indeed the father of her child, he claimed he had no recollection of what had been a one-night encounter in September 2017. The child was born eleven months after their night together. This incident is not a crime, except for him to have lied under an oath administered by the court. 

In 2018, in Delaware, Hunter got into a fight with his girlfriend, Hallie, and she threw his gun into a garbage can outside of a grocery store. His relationship with Hallie began when he was married to Kathleen. When Kathleen divorced him, she cited in court documents his extravagant spending on drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts to other women. Hallie held the distinction of being his dead brother’s widow. Their relationship was none of our damn business. When Hallie went back to retrieve the gun that particular night on Hunter’s orders, it could not be found, but the Secret Service was now involved. The agency was working to find the paperwork on the purchase of the gun, even though Hunter was not under Secret Service protection in 2018. On the purchase form for the piece, Hunter had claimed that he was not an active user of illegal drugs, which was not true. It’s a felony to lie on the form. An elderly man who frequently went through the store’s trash bins eventually turned the gun over to authorities and no charges stemmed from the incident. This store was located across the street from a high school. 

The Bidens’ strategy when they’re confronted with Hunter’s various crimes and misdemeanors is to strike back. How dare you try to make my son part of this race, Joe warned non-compliant inquisitors in 2020, in-between Vaseline-smeared verbal odes to his other son, the dead one. When asked about Hunter’s business dealings by a voter in Iowa in 2019, Joe snapped back at him, “You’re a damn liar, man.” Hunter stoops to any depth for self-preservation as well. When he was trying to sneak his homeless, crack-addicted girlfriend, Bicycles, into a Washington D.C. building called the House of Sweden, which houses the embassies of two foreign governments, he accused the building staff of racism, dropping the Obama family name as well as his own. He penned a letter that said, in part, “If (a Sweden House employee) has an issue with the race or dress of my visitors I think we should sit down and discuss with an attorney present.” By the night we’ve reached the grocery store occurrence, he shares with police his opinion that this particular store has a lot of “shady” people working at it. He expressed the sentiment just as two Hispanic employees of the store were walking by the scene. According to the police report, the officer then asked if Hunter was referencing the two men that had just passed by his comment. Hunter replied, “Yea, prolly illegal.” 

In April of 2019, Hunter dropped off a computer laptop for repairs in Wilmington, Delaware. A month later, he was in Los Angeles introducing himself to a woman he would marry within a week. The rest of the Bidens, as close-knit as a family can be, didn’t know he had a girlfriend until after he had tied the knot. 

There’s no question that Joe Biden, as vice president, traveled to Ukraine and demanded that a special prosecutor there be fired. This prosecutor had launched an investigation into Hunter’s company, Burisma. The reason there’s no dispute about this is that Joe bragged about what he had done in 2018 in front of the Council on Foreign Relations. It was a story that made him sound big and tough so he told it. “If the prosecutor is not fired,” he told the council about his tough stance taken with the Ukrainian president, “You’re not getting the (U.S.) money. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.” Nicely done, captain. You’re tough on criminals here at home but tough on rogue prosecutors in the former Soviet bloc. 

Meanwhile, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, “America’s Mayor,” was privy to Biden’s potential conflicts of interest in Ukraine because he was competing with him in a grab for dollars. It often takes one corrupt careerist to recognize another, and business contracts of vast wealth, by their nature, often leave other bidders resentful and out in the cold. Trump proceeded to do what he was accusing Biden of having done. He attempted to pressure the Ukrainian president into opening an investigation into the Bidens. This is the shit we’re forced to swim in because of our leaders. Trump would be impeached, but not removed from office by Congress. 

The charges against the Bidens, as launched from the mouths of Rudy and Donald, held little credibility with voters because the two messengers were mirrored versions of the criminals in question. If anything, their lobs smelled of professional jealousy. The “fake news” companies protected Biden, and-- save for the simplistic, manipulative labels that Trump attached to their actions-- the fact of the media applying a double standard was undeniable. Traditional outlets were now being up front with their customers that the old rules of journalism could no longer be applied due to an unprecedented assault upon democracy being waged by the president. One side’s “fake news” was the other side’s “misinformation.” 

Just days before the 2020 election, details were disclosed in the Post about what was found on Hunter’s laptop. The computer had found its way from the repair shop in Wilmington to Giuliani. Members of the Washington press corps closed ranks against the story. These members were largely left-leaning and in the employ of left-leaning billionaires who despised Trump for the unrepentant, crude and steroid-infused way that he did what they also did. 

The Bidens, for their part, never denied that it was Hunter’s laptop, or that he had left it at a shop and failed to pick it up, or the reports of its contents. Several months after the election, Hunter admitted to CBS News that the laptop could “certainly” be his. 

Included in these emails was a 2015 one from a Burisma executive to Hunter thanking him for setting up a meeting with his father, the vice president. The email served to contradict Joe’s steadfast claims that he kept an iron wall of separation between his political career and the business dealings of his family. Only a fool would have ever believed him, but even Lincoln had once recognized a nation of fools. 

The press had strong recall for the manner in which Hillary Clinton had been supposedly done dirty in 2016 by that election cycle’s “October surprise”-- emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee detailing the organization’s internal machinations, descriptions of undemocratic scale-thumbing, and stirring the public towards a strengthened distaste for the party’s nominee. Never again.

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the network television news refused to share the specifics of the Hunter charges, except to dismiss them outright. Twitter and Facebook both blocked the story completely, disabling the account of the Post, the oldest newspaper in the United States. Twitter claimed that was operating under an existing policy of stifling the information contained in stolen materials, but the owner of the shop displayed a copy of his repair agreement outlining that any item left in his shop for 90 days was considered abandoned and now his possession. 

It only made sense that the social media giants would do this. While left-leaning Americans started talking a big game, post-Trump’s election, about how private companies had the right to censor what was on their platforms, replacing the liberals' previously-avowed First Amendment principles with an alternative argument in favor of so-called “consequences,” they collectively neglected to address the fact that social media titans had been called to testify before Congress no less than three times in 2020 prior to election day and threatened there with greater regulation in the case of potential non-compliance with the legislature’s wishes. There was also the fact that America has now essentially privatized the First Amendment. 

Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, later categorized his company’s killing of the Post story as a “mistake,” but by then, the Donald dragon had been slayed-- at least for a period of four years. Another example of recent “misinformation” permitted and perhaps even perpetuated by rogue social media companies is the “right wing” and “racist” claim that the Covid-19 virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than in a zoonotic “wet market” of that city’s streets, as first suspected. Shortly after Biden took office, however, his administration began a formal investigation into whether the lab escape hypothesis was, in fact, true. 

The Biden campaign put out a new statement in response to the laptop matter just before Election Tuesday. The legalese within was much richer than at any time previous: “Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever. He has never held stock in any such business arrangements nor has any family member or any other person ever held stock for him.” So unless the Barisma or Chinese reps are dumb enough to put his name in an email, we’re on solid ground here. And in related news this week, the owner of the NFL’s Washington D.C. football team was similarly "punished" for operating under a business atmosphere of sexual intimidation and harassment so his team was transferred into his wife’s name. We’re not all stupid, Joe. We know that you can help yourself by helping your son. The impropriety is still there even if Hunter is set up to be the one to wear the black and white horizontal stripes. 

Having Donald Trump be the person to outline the case against Hunter Biden and explain to the public why it should lead to a general distrust in a theoretical “President Biden” is much like having a 12-year-old do those things. Not only does Trump struggle at communicating complicated words and ideas, particularly to people generally predisposed to oppose him, he’s also a compromised spokesman for clean government. During the second televised debate, Joe combatted Trump’s attacks by calling the Hunter charges “a Russian plant.” He did not elaborate. Screw the details, America. Putin is hiding under your bed. This next time around, Republicans might consider the possibility that a brighter, more trustworthy candidate could make a stronger case for the now-incumbent’s malfeasance. 

Ultimately, the news media succeeded in making a strong enough claim to us that the unreliable players bringing the charges against Hunter and Joe made the charges unreliable also. (In this way, it was precisely the same as the charge of sexual assault that had been brought against Joe during the campaign by a former Senate staffer of his named Tara Reade. Only one broad? Trump still loses.) And it’s apparently no longer the job requirement of a professional journalist to attempt to prove or disprove a volatile charge that’s been made in the public arena, only to wait for leaks and then make an editorial decision about whether the accuser seems credible. And then also go with what’s best for the media company’s financial bottom line. I’m sure we’ll take a hit to our credibility for not investigating this charge, but our credibility is already in the crapper. We don’t have to be trusted, only more trusted than the competition. 

Even “right wing” Fox News didn’t seem to fight hard for the Post story. That outfit was pissed with Trump too, and Biden is not really viewed as a threat to their hustle. Their decision-makers are not allowed to talk openly about this, but I’ll disclose the truth finally: Fox News’ ratings actually go up when a Democrat is in control of the nation’s highest office. Inversely, the financial fortunes of MSNBC are in a long-term committed relationship with Trump Derangement Syndrome. They win even when they “lose.” They’re all in it together, as a wise person once said. Just as Bill and Hillary happily attended the wedding of Donald and Melania, it seems that Hunter Biden once wrote a letter of recommendation for a young relative of Fox News’ biggest superstar, Tucker Carlson. We know this because the truth of it was on Hunter’s laptop. It was actually Bernie Sanders that was the only true threat to the nation’s council of power. 

This laptop story has legs. It had legs in October of 2020. A crack addict wanted to get a laptop repaired. Then he left town on a drug-fueled trip to California and forgot that he had taken it into the shop. That’s a plenty believable scenario. In fact, a second Hunter laptop wound up in the possession of the government. This one was grabbed up by the DEA after a raid on the office of one of Hunter’s former partners. The guy is a little sloppy when he’s spiraling. 

All of this dirty Biden activity is just what transpired during the age of Trump. There’s a closet full of Biden family skeletons dating back decades, as chronicled by Schreckinger. It’s only because of Hunter’s wide shadow, for example, that we hear so little talk of how Joe’s brothers, Jim and Frank, also enjoy sticking their hands in your pockets and getting in bed with the same type of unsavory global player that their nephew does. The family’s laundry list is so long that even the loudest Biden apologists have had to audible at the line to ultimately dismiss Hunter as a “troubled” chip off the old uncles while it was tragic Beau, now lost, that would have been the straight-shooter like dear old Dad. Joe successfully spun the Trump attacks on his son into electoral gold-- he successfully fended them off, at least. The Bidens have relatable family problems, as far as many Americans are concerned-- the tragedy of death and the scourge of addiction, if not the multi-million dollar Chinese oil deals. 

Had enough of political dynasties yet, America? You loved the Bushes and the Clintons. The Biden’s “Delaware Way” would-be dynasty ran into a roadblock of a cemetery and a crack den, but there’s still Don Jr. out there. Conflicts of interest, undue influence, and special treatment are as American as your mother’s apple fritter and the ground-rule double. This foundation of our nation shows no sign of crumbling as the people refuse to demand anything better than the already-used tissue they’re always being handed. And I give you my word on that as a Biden.