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“We have great confidence in our son,” Joe Biden said Thursday in a CBS interview with his wife Jill. But the old political fox knows it very well: the revelations about Hunter Biden will make his life difficult in the first months of the presidency.
On December 9, Hunter Biden announced that he was under investigation in Delaware for alleged tax crimes. Conservative media and Republican politicians feel confirmed in their criticism of House Biden. For years they have tried to prove that Hunter Biden has corrupt deals, so far without success.
Connection to China
Hunter Biden’s international business connections are now under attack again. His position on the board of directors of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma has already provided the background to the impeachment process against President Trump. Its connection to the state-controlled Chinese energy company CEFC is also increasingly becoming a problem.
According to media reports, Hunter Biden struggled to pay taxes and mortgage interest for years. The question of where you got the money and whether you correctly reported this income is at the heart of the matter. Did Hunter Biden use the influence of his father, who was then vice president at the time, to do international business? And did Joe Biden know?
In search of answers, the conservative media rummaged through records apparently found on a laptop that Hunter Biden allegedly left in a repair shop. A former business associate also criticized Hunter Biden in public appearances.
Verifiable evidence of illegal operations has yet to be released. And the New York Times, when examining encrypted messages, emails and other documents, found no evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s international business.
Inept handling of scandals
Yet in recent United States history, leading Democratic politicians have repeatedly shown a knack for keeping relatively harmless scandals simmering for years through clumsy procedures. The motto is to cover up and deny, rather than putting the facts on the table and promising to improve.
The affair with intern Monica Lewinsky nearly cost Bill Clinton the presidency because he was caught lying. And Hillary Clinton probably lost the election four years ago because she never did a clean sweep of the email subject. In this way, their opponents were able to make them difficult to explain with new revelations.
Who will be Minister of Justice?
Something similar may threaten in the case of Hunter Biden. Republican politicians are calling for a special investigator. Fox News and company will not give up, having deliberately ignored nepotism in the Trump home for four years.
In the coming days, Joe Biden is likely to announce who he intends to serve as attorney general. Now he is under pressure to choose someone who is not close to him and to guarantee an independent investigation against his son. Either way, the case will not disappear from the headlines anytime soon.
Thomas von Grünigen
USA-Correspondent, SRF
