Hunter Biden’s Abandoned Laptop

The recent revelations from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop are simply stunning to anyone with a background in national security. The emails, photos and videos found on it not only document the owner’s pathetic decline into personal dissolution, drug addiction and moral depravity. They portray a huge liability for his father while he was the serving Vice President of the United States and potentially a ticking time-bomb for our country in the future.

To be sure, the conduct of others in the Obama administration – including, notably, that of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – created similar vulnerabilities to blackmail, extortion or other forms of manipulation by hostile powers.

Still, the record that is now becoming clear is of one or more members of Joe Biden’s family cashing in – in Hunter’s case, massively – on the then-Vice President’s official position. It appears that “Pop” or “The Big Guy” actually had a piece of the action, as well.

Among those providing the cash were not only corrupt businessmen in a relatively friendly country like Ukraine. It also flowed from the wife of the kleptocratic mayor of Moscow, a crony of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who is an avowed enemy of the United States. And billions of dollars were provided by the Bank of China , a state-owned enterprise of our most dangerous adversary: the Chinese Communist Party.

It will likely take a serious investigation to unravel fully precisely what all that these corrupting elements got for their money from what the former anti-Mafia prosecutor Rudy Giuliani has described as “the Biden crime family.”. By the way, the man who will forever be known as “America’s Mayor” played, to his credit, a critical role in bringing Hunter’s laptop to light after the FBI reportedly sat on its contents for a full year. Congressional Republicans and President Trump are now calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to conduct such an investigation.

One hugely consequential “quid pro quo” is already in plain sight, however. In May of 2013, then-Vice President Biden was instrumental in negotiating a bilateral U.S.-China Memorandum of Understanding that afforded the CCP access to America’s capital markets without requiring its front companies to abide by U.S. securities laws and regulations. As those statutes and regs were designed to protect investors from undisclosed material risk and financial liabilities, this sweetheart arrangement ensured that the Chinese were not only able to attract Americans’ investment dollars. They were able to do so on behalf of companies that, in some cases at least, are engaged in malevolent and/or fraudulent activities.

Incredibly, some of these Chinese corporations have been identified by the Pentagon as “Communist Chinese military companies.” Why on earth would we want our countrymen and women to be, presumably unwittingly, underwriting the businesses of the PRC’s military-industrial complex whose primary mission is building weapon systems with which to kill us?

Then, six months after Mr. Biden’s MoU was signed, his son, Hunter, was given $1.5 billion by the Bank of China for his firm to invest. This extraordinary windfall is so huge, it would not appear to qualify as a bribe so much as a commission on the estimated $3 trillion the Chinese Communist Party has been able to extract from U.S. capital markets, thanks to the one-sided bilateral deal engineered by Joe Biden.

Whatever the amounts involved and whatever the extent of former Vice President Biden’s personal knowledge of his son’s business dealings with the Chinese Communists, let alone his own enrichment at their hands, one thing is clear:

The evidence of massive corruption in the Biden family is a vulnerability that would deny any ordinary government employee or contractor a security clearance. Even if it were not evidence of criminal wrongdoing, it would be an intolerable vulnerability and grounds for prohibiting access to classified or other sensitive information.

Four decades ago, I worked for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington State. He was a life-long and proud Democrat back when most in that party took national security seriously and prized good, albeit big, government.

I am trying to imagine the conversation that Scoop Jackson would be having at the moment with his party’s nominee for President of the United States. I am pretty sure that it would be short and to the point, maybe even just one word: “Withdraw.”

After all, it is inconceivable that any American political party – even one that has moved since Scoop Jackson’s day so far to the extreme left – would want the voting public to believe that it finds the Bidens’ evident misconduct and attendant vulnerabilities acceptable, let alone a basis for promotion to the highest position in the land.

While the Democrats’ transparent plan is – if they can manage, by hook or more likely by crook – to get Joe Biden across the finish line, promptly to replace him with Kamala Harris, they will forever be tarred with the implications of accommodating and promoting behavior that imperils the national security and makes a mockery of ethical and accountable governance.

If the Democratic Party does, indeed, tolerate such behavior, it will form the basis of one of the most profoundly troubling aspects of “The Choice” we must make in two weeks.