Joe Biden apparently never called the Senate Ethics office during his 36-year career on Capitol Hill.
“If you have to call the Ethics Department to get advice, it’s probably not the right thing to do in the first place.” That was the answer I got many times when I called the Senate or House ethics offices for guidance about a specific invitation or request for our office.
It is good advice in general. If you need someone else’s advice as to whether something you want to do is right or wrong ― your internal ethical balance scale is probably off-kilter.
Who in their right mind would ever ask a sitting Vice President of the United States of America, who happened to be your father, to join in on a conference call with a shady foreign government official in the first place? And then threaten said official to pay you ― “or else my daddy is going to do something really, really bad to you!” as his son, Hunter Biden, did?
And who in their right mind would have done it? I worked for Congressman Alex McMillan who said he would rather have hot pokers stuck in both eyes before he would overstep ethical boundaries as a public servant.
It defies common-sense and congressional propriety. It may not rise to the level of treason ― unless Hunter sold nuclear secrets he got from Joe to the Chinese ― but it sure was unethical and it sure was stupid.
Every new Member of Congress, Senator and their staff are told explicitly during Capitol Hill orientation sessions to assiduously avoid any contact with anyone requesting help on A) any business transaction and B) any case which was already in the court system.
Not only does it look bad, it is bad. The Bidens were complicit in using the imprimatur of a US-sanctioned federal office for personal gain which is exactly the opposite of what the United States was set up to avoid in the first place ― no special favors by coercive government practices to benefit kings, dukes and duchesses.
Then-VP Joe Biden publicly bragged about how he ― and he alone ― got Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin fired before he could investigate Burisma, an oil and natural gas company in 2016. Burisma was paying Hunter Biden at least $1 million per year to be their general counsel and on their board of directors at the time.
The Obama-Biden Administration then proceeded to send $1 billion of your US tax dollars to Ukraine for some reason. If that doesn’t sound fishy and under-handed, nothing in government is. At the very least, Biden should have kept his mouth shut and no one would have known about his son’s relationship with Burisma.
Biden didn’t because he couldn’t.
Biden was proud of the fact he was an “Average Joe from Scranton.” When annual financial disclosures were published, he almost always was ranked as one of the Senators with the lowest net worth throughout his career starting in 1973. And yet he owns a home in Wilmington, Delaware and a mansion in Rehoboth Beach he bought for $2.7 million in 2017 when he left the VP position.
His 2007 Senate Ethics Financial Disclosure form revealed the following information:
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Earned income: $185,700. Honoraria, all donated to charity: $800. Major assets: Bank accounts and life insurance policies, $19,000-$110,000; three bank accounts held jointly with his wife, $3,000-$45,000. Major sources of unearned income: Life insurance dividends, $1,000-$2,500. Major liabilities: Loan against life insurance policies, $15,001-$50,000; lines of credit, $114,002-$300,000; credit union note, less than $10,000.
Jill Biden’s assets, which include money market funds, real estate trusts and a pension fund, are worth $40,000-$250,000.
Biden made $235,000 annually as Vice President.
Perhaps Joe Biden is the “real” real estate magician, not Donald Trump. Either that or his son funneled unreported income to pay his dad’s bills on his two mansions in which case there may be tax evasion and tax fraud issues which should be brought against both men.
At the very minimum, what Biden and his son did was stupid and unethical. The worst thing they can do is continue to cover it all up with more lies and subterfuge. Lying is what got Richard Nixon into trouble over Watergate, not the stupidity of the break-in itself.
