Hunter Biden Is a Geopolitical Disaster

It was a wild roll of the dice by Hunter Biden and government prosecutors to hope a judge wouldn’t ask if their plea agreement precluded further charges and therefore ended the investigation. But of course the judge had to ask. In announcing the deal in June, the Justice Department plainly stated the investigation was continuing while Hunter’s lawyer plainly insisted on an “understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.”

David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, arguably had to speak as he did at the time. If the investigation were over, he and his boss, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, couldn’t avoid questions from a Republican-controlled House about ignored evidence, etc. Add another question now: While saying something else to the public, did the Justice Department sotto voce promise Hunter that no more charges would be considered?

My view is that Joe Biden has been coldly ruthless in embracing and defending his son in his own interest, and will be just as ruthless in throwing Hunter under the bus if necessary.

Hunter is not less ruthless in dealing with his dad. When Hunter’s lawyer threatened to walk away from a plea deal that didn’t close the investigation, he was throwing down a gauntlet before Mr. Biden and his attorney general that Hunter has spent his life throwing down to his father. To state the obvious example, President Obama assigned Vice President Biden to be his point man on Ukrainian corruption. Hunter thereupon took a do-nothing job with a notorious Ukrainian oligarch and essentially dared his father to stop him. As public testimony and news reporting have established, not only did Mr. Biden decline to intervene when State Department officials brought the problem to him, he engaged in an emotional outburst that made them unwilling to bring it up again.

Joe’s ridiculous peril may yet push him out of the presidential race. The bottomless self-abasement of his spokespeople is evident in their recent, studied language adjustment. From Joe “never discussed” Hunter’s international business dealings with him, they now claim Joe was never “in business” with Hunter.

This high-wire act has zero chance of success without a deliberate and voluntary decision of news organizations to pretend they don’t see what’s before their eyes. Don’t put it past them.

But this will only get Mr. Biden through November 2024 unless Democrats also win back the House and retain control of the Senate.

Mr. Biden was unlucky in his son, but he also allowed a family environment in which milking connection to Joe was de rigueur. Paralysis seizes our elite over what has ensued. Suppose a journalistic tick-tock were written today similar to 1969’s “On Borrowed Time,” Leonard Mosley’s microscopic account of events between the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Today’s version would include: Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, President Trump’s impeachment for asking about Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, the laptop episode in which Russia was framed as an imaginary culprit to change the subject from Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine.

What did Vladimir Putin make of these events? How might they have figured in his bet that the U.S. would let Kyiv fall into his pocket? Maybe one day he’ll tell us.

Mr. Biden ultimately summoned the NATO muscle memory to stand up to Russia’s invasion, and this column congratulated him. But Republicans in an election year can rightly ask what else exactly was an American president supposed to do? They can also ask what Mr. Biden failed to do. His surrender on Nord Stream 2, after Mr. Trump quashed the pipeline, sent a message of appeasement. In the war’s opening days, his administration seemed unduly eager to cede Kyiv to the Russian advance and spirit President Zelensky to safety.

At some point, questions should also be asked of Barack Obama. Why allow Mr. Biden to control the Ukraine portfolio when he wouldn’t restrain his son? Was Biden family corruption the reason you skipped over your veep and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016?

The story here is all the more remarkable for being untold. In short order, the Hunter mess has managed to taint our intelligence community, the FBI, IRS and now the Justice Department. If news sense is not completely dulled by neurotic compliance, some editors must also be starting to see the outlines of another approaching debacle, in which skeletons from the Biden closet elect Mr. Trump.

***

On a different subject, you are reading a lot of confused analysis of why Elon Musk renamed Twitter “X.” Mr. Musk needs an IPO, with a growth valuation, to repair his catastrophic losses on last year’s acquisition. Twitter’s current business cannot support the valuation he needs. He needs a new business, and a new story, he can sell to investors in a year or so in hopes of getting them to assign a valuation to “X” that might allow him to dig his way out.