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      Trump ‘very intent on bringing my brother down’, Joe Biden’s sister says

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      Trump ‘very intent on bringing my brother down’, Joe Biden’s sister saysValerie Biden Owens, who has worked on all her brother’s campaigns, also says ‘no there there’ on her nephew Hunter Donald Trump is “very intent on bringing my brother down”, Joe Biden’s sister said.The Republican judge blocking her party from rigging electoral districtsRead more“The only race I wasn’t enthusiastic about Joe getting involved in was the 2020 presidency,” Valerie Biden Owens told CBS News.“Because I expected, and was not disappointed, that it would be ugly and mean, and it would be an attack on my brother, Joe, personally and professionally, because the former president is very intent on bringing my brother down.”A year and a half into his presidency, Biden is battling crises at home including inflation and the coronavirus pandemic and abroad, over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Trump dominates the Republican party, propagating the “big lie” about voter fraud in his defeat by Biden which fueled the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, continuing to attack Biden as incapable of the demands of office, flirting with a third White House run and dispensing endorsements to candidates in the midterm elections.On Sunday, the Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, claimed Republicans would not swiftly impeach Biden “for political purposes”, should as expected the party take the House in November.Biden Owens helped raise her brother’s children after his first wife and daughter were killed in a car crash and has worked on all his campaigns. She has written a book called Growing Up Biden: A Memoir.“I assumed from the beginning that the former president and his entourage would attack my brother by going and attacking my family,” she said.Trump has focused on Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who has written his own book about his struggle with addiction and whose business affairs are the subject of scrutiny.Hunter Biden was one subject of Trump’s attempt to withhold military aid from Ukraine in exchange for political dirt, an attempt that led to Trump’s first impeachment. To Republicans, Hunter Biden remains a tempting target. Federal investigators are known to be looking at his financial affairs.His aunt told CBS: “There hasn’t been a there, there since it was mentioned in 2019 or whenever it was.”‘TV is like a poll’: Trump endorses Dr Oz for Pennsylvania Senate nominationRead moreShe also said: “Hunter has written in exquisite detail about his struggle with addiction, his walk through hell, and I am so grateful he has been able to walk out of hell, but I don’t think there’s a family in this country who hasn’t tasted it.”Trump’s destructive power remains widely feared. Pundits and rivals are watching his endorsements closely, among them a choice to back Mehmet Oz, a TV doctor, for the Senate nomination in Pennsylvania, a pick many Republicans opposed.On Monday, a possible rival to Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, Ron DeSantis, was offered a warning that might have sounded familiar to Valerie Biden Owens.Nikki Fried, a Democrat running to oppose DeSantis for governor in Florida, told Business Insider that if Trump runs again and gets back on Twitter – from which he has been banned since the Capitol attack – “I say one tweet created [DeSantis] and one tweet can destroy him”.TopicsJoe BidenDonald TrumpHunter BidenUS politicsUS elections 2024US elections 2020DemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Mosquito in a nudist colony’: Republican Ron Johnson targets Fauci and Hunter Biden

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      ‘Mosquito in a nudist colony’: Republican Ron Johnson targets Fauci and Hunter BidenWisconsin senator says if GOP retakes control it will use committees to move against Democrats and Biden Hunter Biden and Anthony Fauci will be prime targets of Senate Republicans should the party win control in November, a senior senator said.Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative angerRead moreAsked by the Hill what he would want to investigate should he control a committee with subpoena power, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said: “Like everything? It’s like a mosquito in a nudist colony, it’s a target-rich environment.”Fauci, 81, has served seven presidents as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. He has played a lead role in the response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 970,000 in the US. He has become a hate figure on the political right, even leading to threats against his security.Fauci suggested this week he could soon retire, telling ABC News: “I’d love to spend more time with my wife and family. That would really be good.”But high-profile clashes with Republicans including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky have shown Fauci is likely to remain a prime target for GOP attacks.Paul is in line to chair the Senate health committee. In one headline-making clash with Fauci, in July 2021, Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser told the hectoring senator: “You do not know what you are talking about.”Earlier this year, Paul said: “If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records.”Johnson, who has advanced Covid conspiracy theories and advocated unproven treatments, told the Hill: “There’s so much more in terms of what happened with our federal health agencies that we need to explore.”02:49Hunter Biden, 52, is the president’s surviving son. His business activities, particularly regarding Ukraine, have long been a Republican priority. Donald Trump was impeached for the first time for withholding military aid to Kyiv while seeking dirt on the Bidens.A laptop once belonging to Hunter Biden has re-emerged as the subject of scrutiny, particularly after the New York Times this week reported on his tax affairs.In 2020, Johnson played a prominent role in a Republican investigation which counted Hunter Biden among its subjects. Democrats then won two run-offs in Georgia, to control the 50-50 Senate via the vote of the vice-president, Kamala Harris.Johnson will seek a third term in November but faces a tough fight in Wisconsin.“I’d kind of like to wrap that up,” he told the Hill of his investigation of Hunter Biden. “We’ve been trying to get his travel records for a couple of years now.”Other areas of likely Republican attack, the Hill said, included border security and immigration and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.A spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said Republicans were preparing to pursue a “toxic agenda”.Johnson returned to his nudist camp analogy.“I’ll be that mosquito,” he said. “Hard to tell what targets I might pick. They’ll all be juicy.”TopicsRepublicansUS SenateUS CongressUS politicsBiden administrationJoe BidenAnthony FaucinewsReuse this content More

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      Stealth Hunter: Biden’s tangled business dealings are becoming hard to ignore

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      Stealth Hunter: Biden’s tangled business dealings are becoming hard to ignoreInfluence-peddling is Washington’s ‘spectator sport’ – but now there’s an interest in taking a closer look at the president’s son To the political right in America, Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been the gift that keeps on giving, with his public struggles with addiction, scandalous private life and tangled business life. To the left, Hunter’s travails are dismissed as a Republican political obsession and a talking point for tabloid journalism and internet gossip.But last week, two witnesses called before a federal grand jury seated in Wilmington, Delaware, which is looking into the tax affairs of the president’s son, made the subject harder to avoid.First there was Lunden Roberts, with whom Biden has a three-year-old unacknowledged child. Then Zoe Kestan, an ex-girlfriend and lingerie and textile designer, spent five hours giving testimony on Biden’s spending, including – reportedly – stays at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where, in 2018, allegedly, Biden was preoccupied with cooking crack cocaine.Wretched and salacious as that sounds, much of Hunter Biden’s story, detailed at length in his autobiography Beautiful Things, published last year, tends that way. “I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” Biden claimed in his book. “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, [I] rose and fell on my own.”But that’s not how Joe Biden’s political enemies see it.Donald Trump tried to make issue out of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, Russia and China, which included high paid consultancies and gifts, and allegations that, as vice-president, Joe Biden had shaped American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son.For Trump, it backfired, when efforts to uncover information about the Bidens and Ukraine helped to trigger his first impeachment. Then came the surfacing of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop, with its library of decadent pictures and business email chains, mysteriously left at a Wilmington repair shop, which found its way to Republican political operatives including Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, plus the rightwing press and the FBI.On the political flip-side, House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff said the laptop was a “smear” from Russian intelligence, and 50 former intelligence officials said it was probably Russian disinformation. Now, however, almost no one disputes its authenticity.Hunter Biden confirmed that he was under federal investigation over a tax matter in December 2020, days after his father was elected president. Attorney general Bill Barr said he had “not seen a reason” to appoint a special counsel to oversee investigations, which include an investigation by a federal securities fraud unit in New York and another in Pennsylvania.Biden has not been charged with any crime, and David Weiss, US Attorney for Delaware who oversees the inquiry, is regarded as a straight-shooter unlikely to be swayed by political pressure. He was appointed by Trump on the recommendation of the state’s two Democratic senators and has not been replaced by Joe Biden.Weiss, according to Politico, avoided taking any decisions that would alert the public to the existence of the inquiry before the 2020 presidential election – and a repeat of the FBI’s Hillary Clinton missing emails investigation, which may have influenced the outcome of the 2016 contest.But the larger question – beyond whether Hunter Biden correctly met tax obligations during a period in which, by his own telling, he was being paid $50,000 a month by Ukrainian firm Burisma – are Biden’s financial ties to foreign figures and businesses while his father served as Barack Obama’s No 2.Illegal lobbying is an issue that shadowed Trump throughout his presidency, leading to the conviction of Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, on tax fraud charges. Manafort later pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) by providing false statements, laundering money, witness tampering and failing to register as an agent of the Ukrainian government.Last year, Thomas Barrack, a friend and former adviser to Trump, was arrested on charges that he and others failed to inform the US government that they were working to influence US foreign policy on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.Under US statutes, all persons acting politically or quasi-politically on behalf of foreign entities in the US must properly disclose their activities.In addition to Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukraine through the gas company Burisma, he has sat on the boards of BHR Partners, a private investment fund backed by a number of Chinese state entities; a hedge fund, Paradigm; a consultancy, Seneca Global Advisors; and the fundraising firm Rosemont Seneca.Republicans, including the senior Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, have called on the justice department to evaluate whether Hunter or Joe Biden’s brother James Biden should have registered as foreign agents over their business arrangements with the Chinese government-backed energy company CEFC.In 2018, Business Insider reported that Hunter Biden sought an annual $2m retainer to aid in the recovery of Libyan assets frozen by the Obama administration during Muammar Gaddafi’s rule. The list of accusations goes on.According to Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar at the George Washington University Law School, “influence-peddling is a virtual spectator sport in the nation’s capital – a protected corruption”.Turley said: “It’s how powerful ruling elites make much of their money, and Congress has never seriously tried to crack down on it. The children and spouses of powerful leaders continue to receive windfall payments from companies and foreign interests, but we’ve never quite seen the likes of Hunter Biden’s enterprises. His contracts go beyond anything we’ve seen before.”Joe Biden has long insisted that his son did nothing wrong. “There’s nobody that’s indicated there’s a single solitary thing that he did that was inappropriate, wrong … or anything other than the appearance,” Biden said two years ago.But should the Delaware panel recommend criminal charges, it could ricochet around the second half of his father’s administration.Like Barr, the current US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has declined to appoint a special counsel. But if Republicans gain control of the legislature in November, pressure to appoint a prosecutor will certainly build, as it did from Trump with Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling or with Ken Starr, appointed to investigate the Clinton’s Whitewater investment dealings.“I don’t have any doubts that if they [Republicans] can, they will,” said James Carville, architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory and Democratic party strategist throughout the 90s, with a long memory of politically inspired investigations.“At first you’re outraged, then it becomes the standard routine of everyday life. You become battle-hardened and immune to it. I think they spent 687 hours investigating the Clinton Christmas card list – a major, major investigation. I can’t tell you the amount of coverage and investigations that went into Whitewater, which was nothing. [And] Travelgate. Then you end up with an act of consensual sex and they go, ‘A-ha! We were right the whole time!’”But for presidential children, the stakes are different, and may have only have risen as Washington has become more partisan. “They find themselves in the spotlight whether they want to or not,” said Nancy Reagan biographer Bob Colacello.“Lynda Bird Johnson dating playboy movie star George Hamilton, Ron Reagan dropping out of Yale to become a ballet dancer, his sister Patti Davis marching with Nuclear Freeze protesters, Chelsea Clinton flopping as a TV news reporter, the Bush girls partying at downtown Manhattan clubs … all were tempests in teapots compared to the mess Hunter Biden has got himself into with his questionable business ventures in China and Ukraine.”One issue, says Kathleen Clark, a professor of Law at Washington University in St Louis, is that the financial conflict of interest law does not reach the adult children of elected officials. “There were similar, if not exactly parallel, problems with the adult children of Donald Trump trying to sell condos in India, [trying to] pursue business in other countries,” Clark points out.But efforts to investigate the Trump family are faltering.Last week, the New York district attorney’s investigation into whether the Trump Organization – which includes Trump sons Eric and Donald Jr as senior executives – inflated the value of assets to obtain favorable bank loans, appeared near to collapse when two prosecutors hired for the purpose resigned.But the Delaware grand jury in Hunter Biden’s affairs has greater scope.According to Tessa Capeloto, an attorney specializing in the Foreign Agents Registration Act at Wiley Rein, the impetus to look at influence-peddling violations has increased since a 2016 inspector-general’s report found that Fara was not being enforced as aggressively as needed.“There’s been a concerted effort by DOJ to see that the statute has some teeth and is being effectively administered and enforced. The statute is out there for a reason, which is to ensure that certain political and quasi-political activities undertaken on behalf of foreign interests are reported and made transparent.”TopicsHunter BidenUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      American muckrakers: Peter Schweizer, James O’Keefe and a rightwing full court press

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      American muckrakers: Peter Schweizer, James O’Keefe and a rightwing full court pressThe author of Clinton Cash takes aim at the Bidens, the founder of Project Veritas stakes a claim for legitimacy. The results are murky – but offer a map for political battles to come The official investigation of Hunter Biden’s dealings in China and elsewhere rests in the hands of David Weiss, a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor in Delaware, and the US justice department under Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland. Politically speaking, we now have Red-Handed by Peter Schweizer, who would very much like to help us digest the business past of the 46th president’s troublesome son.Clinton Cash: errors dog Bill and Hillary exposé – but is there any ‘there’ there?Read moreSchweizer’s works include Clinton Cash, a compendium of opposition research that helped shape the presidential election in 2016. These days, he is president of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank funded by the Mercer family, part of the rightwing ecosystem.Rebekah Mercer chairs the GAI board, a position previously held by Steve Bannon, whom Donald Trump pardoned of fraud charges but who is now under indictment for contempt of Congress. Mercer is also a founding investor in Parler, a rightwing alternative to Twitter and communications vehicle for Trump’s faithful in the run-up to the 6 January insurrection.The Mercers are mainstays of Breitbart News and once funded James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas – of which, more later. Via Cambridge Analytica, the Mercers helped hijack Brexit. Not surprisingly, Nigel Farage counts the Mercers as allies.If Republicans recapture the House in November, as expected, most see investigations of Hunter Biden and his father an inevitable sequel. Schweizer has published a roadmap, from sources including Secret Service travel logs, materials from former business associates and that infamous laptop.Schweizer argues that the rich and powerful have grown too cozy with China, at the expense of their own country. His central contention is that the Biden family garnered approximately $31m from individuals with direct ties to Chinese intelligence.Hunter Biden has denied wrongdoing. In 2020, Politifact said Schweizer’s claims about Joe Biden did “not add up to a picture” of his “being corrupt or pursuing policies contrary to the national interest”.Schweizer, however, fires shots across the political spectrum. John Boehner, a Republican speaker of the House, and Henry Kissinger, secretary of state to two Republican presidents, are in his sights. So are the Bushes. Chuck Schumer, Mark Warner, Chris Coons and Joe Manchin, all Democratic senators, are praised.Schweizer lambasts Silicon Valley for enabling China’s rise and turning a blind eye to human rights abuses. Elon Musk and Bill Gates are criticized, Wall Street (prominently Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Black Rock), the National Basketball Association and academe too. Yale University receives particular attention.Not surprisingly, Schweizer does not consider links to China enjoyed by Trump and his most ardent followers. He ignores, for example, tax records that show Trump International Hotels Management paid more than $188,000 in China while pursuing licensing deals between 2013 and 2015, and maintained a bank account there.Likewise, Schweizer looks away from Ted Cruz. The Texas senator’s wife is a banker at Goldman. The Cruzes hold direct investments of between $15,000 and $50,000 in the Goldman Sachs China Equity Fund Class P, a mutual fund with positions in Alibaba and Tencent – companies firmly in Schweizer’s sights.Then again, the Mercers are Cruz donors. In 2016, Cruz’s presidential campaign was a Cambridge Analytica client.Schweizer calls for a US lobbying ban on companies linked to the Chinese military and Chinese intelligence, and their exclusion from US stock exchanges. He also demands the press pursue big tech involvement with China.As models for how to resist the Chinese, he holds out Peter Thiel and his company Palantir. Thiel, a rightwing megadonor, gained notoriety when he wrote in 2009 that women and minorities had mucked up democratic capitalism. A Palantir employee planted the concept of data harvesting with Cambridge Analytica.The scandal that wasn’t: Republicans deflated as nation shrugs at Hunter Biden revelationsRead moreAs for China’s territorial ambitions? In another book, Trump was quoted by the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin. If the Chinese were to invade Taiwan, he told a senator, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do”.It seems unlikely the US could be capable of decoupling its economy from China while avoiding clashes. China’s opacity with regard to Covid does not instill confidence. Schweizer’s book does at least deliver food for thought.‘Free speech for me …’If Red-Handed is an amalgam of more than 1,100 footnotes, facts, arguments and innuendos, American Muckraker by James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, is a 288-page exercise in self-reverence.“The American Muckraker understands that the path to truth involves suffering and sacrifice,” O’Keefe writes. OK. Elsewhere, he compares his plight to that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Alabama in the late 1950s, as it worked for “equality”. Really. He also repeatedly refers to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian dissident.What does O’Keefe do for a living? Mostly, he makes sting videos targeting Democrats and progressives. Targets have included Planned Parenthood and a teachers’ union.Practically speaking, American Muckraker is O’Keefe’s attempt to bolster his claim of being a journalist while re-defining what the media actually is in an era of cold civil war. On that note, he recounts a conversation with Brian Karem after the Playboy White House reporter had a dust-up with a Trump loyalist, Sebastian Gorka.“I’m on the same team as you,” said O’Keefe. “I respect you guys.”Really? Project Veritas counts the Donald J Trump Foundation among past donors and Erik Prince, former head of the Blackwater private security company and brother of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was involved in its sting operations against Trump adversaries. O’Keefe makes clear he is not keen on a shedding a light on those who fund his work.He does have a genuine grievance. In early November 2021, the FBI raided his apartment, handcuffed him in his underwear and seized two phones. He was not arrested.Reportedly, the feds swooped in connection with the disappearance and unauthorized publication of a diary kept by Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter. Project Veritas never wrote anything on the topic and handed the document over. The justice department had placed the first amendment and O’Keefe’s civil liberties in its crosshairs, notwithstanding a court-ordered warrant.But that is only part of the story. In 2020, O’Keefe sued the New York Times for libel in connection with its coverage of videos concerning alleged voter fraud in Minnesota. A New York judge refused to dismiss the suit and O’Keefe has obtained an injunction that bars the paper from publishing documents written by a Project Veritas lawyer.O’Keefe’s mantra might be: “Free speech for me – but not for thee.”Despite the efforts of Richard Nixon in the case of the Pentagon Papers, prior restraint remains anathema to a free press – as Donald Trump’s late brother, Robert, learned when he failed to block publication of a niece’s tell-all.Nonetheless, Trump allies are urging the supreme court to reconsider protections afforded to the media under US libel law. Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have indicated they are willing. The fact that the decision in question was rendered by a unanimous court a half-century ago means little. American Muckraker is a book for such troubled times.
      Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win is published in the US by Harper. American Muckraker: Rethinking Journalism for the 21st Century is published by Post Hill Press
      TopicsBooksPolitics booksUS politicsJoe BidenHunter BidenRepublicansChinareviewsReuse this content More

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      Is Hunter Biden’s art project painting the president into an ethical corner?

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      Hunter BidenIs Hunter Biden’s art project painting the president into an ethical corner? The sale of artwork by Joe Biden’s son – a novice artist – could generate up to half a million dollars. Critics say it is an open door to influence-peddlingDavid Smith in Washington@smithinamericaSat 16 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 16 Oct 2021 03.01 EDTIt was another starry night in Hollywood. In a white-walled room at the Milk Studios art gallery, where a lone violinist played before a projected animation, musician Moby, artist Shepard Fairey and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti reportedly mingled with about 200 guests.On display were artworks that combine canvas, yupo paper, wood and metal with oil, acrylic, ink and the written word. Organizers hope they will sell for up to half a million dollars – unusually high for an emerging artist. But then, this artist also happens to be son of the president of the United States.Republicans will try to create an ‘ethics’ trap for Democrats. Don’t fall for it | David LittRead moreHunter Biden’s potentially lucrative new career – he is represented by the Georges Bergès Gallery in New York, which credits him with “powerful and impactful paintings ranging from photogenic to mixed media to the abstract” – is presenting ethical headaches for a White House that has promised to lead by example.Experts have raised alarms that individuals might buy the artworks – expected to fetch between $75,000 and $500,000 – to try to curry favor and gain influence with Joe Biden. They also accuse Hunter of trading on his father’s name and position in a manner that, while not illegal, flouts ethical norms.“I find it deeply troubling,” said Walter Shaub, who was director of the Office of Government Ethics under President Barack Obama. “Merely following the incredibly weak ethics rules that we have doesn’t win you any points and the legalistic approach blinds you to obvious commonsense problems. And here we have an obvious problem.“We’ve got a family member clearly trading on his father’s name. The man has never sold a piece of art before, has never even juried into a community centre art show, but suddenly he’s selling art at fantastical prices. There is simply no way anybody paid $75,000 for anything other than his name.”Biden has always been a fierce defender of Hunter, 51, who has been dogged by controversies for years and whose tax affairs are currently under investigation by the justice department. Donald Trump’s attempts to weaponise Hunter’s problems for political gain in the 2020 presidential election fell flat.Earlier this year Hunter published a memoir in which he detailed his struggle with alcoholism and drug abuse and denied wrongdoing in joining the board of Burisma, a gas company in Ukraine, where he earned more than $50,000 a month from 2014 to 2019. Again, he did not inflict political damage on his father as some feared.But his latest pursuit, painting, could prove more complicated. Hunter said in a New York Times interview last year that he took it up as a hobby during his recovery from addiction and found solace in art when he was at the centre of Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial.In July he told the Nota Bene: This Week in the Art World podcast that art prices are “completely subjective”, insisting: “Look, man, I never set my prices – what my art was going to cost, what it costs or how much it would be priced at. I would be amazed, you know, if my art had sold at, um, you know, for $10.”The sale of his work, however. appears to be cutting through as a media narrative in a way that lurid rightwing conspiracy theories never did. Just as President Jimmy Carter’s younger brother marketed and sold “Billy Beer” in 1977, Hunter faces accusations that he is cashing in.Shaub, now a senior fellow at the Project on Government Oversight watchdog, commented: “You hear people trying to justify it by saying, ‘Well, of course, he’s famous, he’s the president’s son,’ but that’s the exact problem because he may not be in public office and there may be no laws that apply to him but he is a citizen whose father happens to be the leader of the country and so he has a patriotic duty to not run around trying to capitalise on that relationship.“Sure, he’s not a criminal if he fails to comply with that duty, but he’s not a patriot either. He’s not a man who cares about a country that has just been through a four-year ethical nightmare. He sees an opportunity for profiteering and says, ‘Well, you know, it’s legal. I’m just going to do it. Who cares what that does to my country?’”The conflict-of-interest concerns cast a shadow over efforts by the president – who likes to vow “my word as a Biden” – to show the world that America has turned the corner after the constant allegations that Trump’s business and family benefited from his office, including the appointment of his daughter and son-in-law to senior White House positions.Biden issued a memorandum establishing fighting corruption as a core national security interest. His administration responded to the Pandora Papers by promising to push for greater transparency in financial systems.It sought to pre-empt questions over Hunter’s art by striking an agreement, first reported by the Washington Post in July, under which the gallery owner, Georges Bergès, would set the prices of the art and not reveal who bid on or bought it, as well as rejecting offers that seemed extortionate.But there is no mechanism to monitor the agreement. Critics say Hunter’s presence at the recent gallery event in Hollywood undercut claims that neither he nor the White House would know the identity of buyers. And Garcetti, who also attended, is Biden’s nominee to be the next US ambassador to India and a former national co-chair of his 2020 presidential campaign.The issue was given short shrift this week by Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.She told a reporter at the daily briefing: “It still is the purview of the gallerist. We still do not know and will not know who purchases any paintings. And the president remains proud of his son.” When the reporter tried to follow up, Psaki interjected sharply: “Did you have another question on something else?”Shaub condemned her manner as “surly” and described the agreement to keep buyers anonymous as “an insult to our intelligence”. He explained: “Anybody who spends tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy art because it was created by the president’s son is going to be very open and vocal about the fact that they bought it. It’s going to be the showpiece at cocktail parties and so that information will eventually come out. This is a farce.”Some commentators have argued that transparency would work better than secrecy, allowing the public to know whether a buyer such as a political lobbyist had paid a suspiciously high price. When the Guardian called the Georges Bergès Gallery, it was told to send an email and did so, but did not receive a reply. When the Guardian called the Milk Studios, which hosted Hunter’s show, a man twice answered and twice hung up.Ethics expert Kathleen Clark, a professor at Washington University School of Law, joined criticism of the arrangement. “It’s really unfortunate that Hunter Biden has chosen to attempt to make money in a way that is vulnerable to influence peddling.“Now, he’s an adult and the ethics standards that bind elected officials and civil servants don’t apply to him directly. On the other hand, not all forms of compensated work have this kind of vulnerability but this kind of work does because it’s so difficult to know exactly what the value of a painting is.”The previous White House set a historically low bar, Clark added. “The Trump administration gave the impression that they were attempting to be unethical, like that was the goal, like they were seeking some kind of championship bid in unethical if not criminal conduct. It’s nothing like that. But it still could be a disappointment when the Biden administration doesn’t live up to what it might do in terms of transparency, for example.”Indeed, the sheer breadth and depth of Trump scandals that captivated the media for four years might have partially shielded Biden and Hunter from sustained scrutiny. A recent book on the Biden family by the Politico journalist Ben Schreckinger presents evidence that some emails allegedly leaked from Hunter’s laptop regarding business deals were genuine and not, as widely assumed, planted by Russian intelligence.Shaub suggested that many people are blinded to the ethical problem of the artwork for two reasons. “One is just the hyper-partisanship that has evolved in our country and so people who voted for Biden run around saying, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as Trump.’“Of course it’s not even close to as bad as Trump but ‘better than Trump’ should never, ever, ever become the standard in this country because that’s saying, ‘I’m better than the absolute worst that prior to 2016 you couldn’t have even conceived of.’”He continued: “The second thing that’s blinding people is that there was a lot of unfair smearing of Hunter Biden by very well-funded political actors who were completely disingenuous in their ridiculous accusations. I guess that worked well with their base but it really clouded the issue because the truth is Hunter Biden is not the villain these political actors make him out to be.“But he’s also not the upstanding citizen that the White House wants you to believe. This is a man whose entire life has been is based off of making money on his father’s political career and that is not something we should embrace in this country and celebrate and tolerate. So two things can be true at the same time.”US allies around the world have been looking at the US for evidence that the country has stabilized in the aftermath of Trump’s presidency, Shaub said. “Yeah, we have a new administration that isn’t rampantly thumbing its nose at the rule of law, but it is going right up to the line and saying, if it’s legal, we’re going to do it and we’re not going to focus on reforms, we’re not going to focus on setting a squeaky clean tone, we’re going to go back to the way things were before Trump.”TopicsHunter BidenJoe BidenUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Trump ramped up attacks on me to distract my father, Hunter Biden says

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      Donald Trump, his family and supporters hoped their attacks on Hunter Biden would distract Joe Biden rather than convince people not to vote for him, the president’s son said in an interview on Friday, “whether it ended up in some horrible death, or whatever was their intention”.Hunter Biden is the author of the memoir Beautiful Things. He was speaking to the New Abnormal, a Daily Beast podcast. He discussed his struggles with addiction and attempts to find dirt to use against his father which resulted in Donald Trump’s first impeachment.Host Molly Jong-Fast asked: “Do you think they did it because they wanted you to kill yourself?”Biden said: “There literally is nothing more important to my dad than his family, and if they could, whether it ended up in some horrible death or whatever was their intention, I think they thought they would be able to distract my dad enough that he wouldn’t be able to focus on the campaign. And they had the exact opposite effect.”Jong-Fast also asked Biden about his dealings with energy companies in Ukraine and China, the subject of Trump’s attacks.“Vadim Pozharskyi, the Burisma executive, thanked you in an email ‘for giving me the opportunity to meet your father and spend some time with him’. Did you in fact introduce the two, did they meet, and what was the purpose of the meeting?”“No,” Biden said. “100% not … [neither] my father or myself did anything that is wrong, that is unethical. As I said in so many times, I made a huge mistake in my calculation about how far they would go to smear my dad, by using me.”Jong-Fast asked: “In spring of 2017 you sent an email titled ‘expectations’, which involve China’s largest private energy company, and it discussed details of remuneration packages. And there was a line in the email that said ‘interesting for me and my family’ and then your pay was set at ‘850’. Do you remember this?”“I literally don’t know what you’re even referring to,” Biden said. “Is it from me?”“This email is sent by you,” said Jesse Cannon, Jong-Fast’s producer and co-host. “And it does refer to these things though.”“I don’t have it in front of me,” Biden said, “but I do know this. It’s that my dad was never involved in any of my business, period, 100% … But you know there’s an intelligence report from, from all of our intelligence agencies that has come to the conclusion that this was a Russian operation from the get-go.”US intelligence agencies have said Russia sought to stoke the Hunter Biden affair and hurt his father in the 2020 election. Biden’s book deals with his addiction to crack and alcohol and events including the death of his brother Beau Biden in 2015. It has not detonated problems for his father as many feared or expected. Jong-Fast told the Guardian she “knew the relapse story was something a lot of sober readers could relate to”.Returning to Trump’s failure to derail his father, Biden said: “Right around when I started to get sober and clean, I guess it was only then did I realize the level of their obsession, because I took long enough to look up from whatever drink or drug I was pursuing at the moment, and it seemed like every word out of the president’s mouth was some kind of demeaning or just horrible insult towards me.“I didn’t think that it could possibly grow and they just kept digging that hole, which was a dry hole, in my opinion, politically.”In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org More