We've come a long way in the discussion about Hunter Biden in the last two-plus years. As a tense exchange between Chuck Todd and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) on Meet the Press this past weekend illustrated, establishment media has gone from regarding the Biden laptop as potential political dynamite that warranted complete denial to a topic not important enough to warrant discussion, let alone congressional hearings.
That's the line you can expect to hear more often as the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, armed with the power to issue subpoenas, prepares to investigate the matter. And there are likely to be some on the Right who have similarly moved on from concern about it.
As much as the effort to suppress the scandal still rankles conservatives, House Republicans have other priorities. First among the is the ongoing disaster at the southern border. Plus they need to investigate misconduct and partisan bias at the FBI and the rest of the intelligence establishment. And then there are the revelations about President Joe Biden's mishandling of classified material, and the hypocrisy of the Department of Justice's efforts to target former president Donald Trump for similar behavior.
Yet neither those priorities nor media efforts to downplay the implications of the laptop scandal should deter the House GOP from taking a deep dive into it.
For all the denials that the president was involved in his son's business, Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine and China stand as among the most egregious examples of a conflict of interest involving the executive branch in living memory.
Critics characterize a potential investigation as a pointless endeavor that will harm the investigators more than their subject, as many think was true of the House investigation into the behavior of the Obama administration during the 2011 Benghazi terror attack. But a full investigation into Hunter Biden's business activities isn't merely a matter of political payback.
The laptop scandal illustrates something that the beltway establishment doesn't want to talk about: the practice by which people with no credentials but a close tie to someone in high office can enrich themselves and potentially influence government policy.
If Congress is ever to make a serious attempt to reform the Washington swamp, in which members of both parties' establishments abuse the public trust, there will never be a better platform for doing so than the one provided by the president's prodigal son.
Democrats and their allies initially claimed that the evidence of misdeeds on the presidential son's laptop was Russian disinformation. They also mobilized the national security establishment to circle the wagons around the Bidens and—as we've learned from the Twitter files recently made available by Elon Musk—pressured social media companies to suppress reporting and commentary about the story in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
Long after it mattered, liberal outlets that suppressed the story during the 2020 campaign admitted last year that the laptop and the embarrassing information on it was real and not the result of a plot by Moscow to help former president Donald Trump.
The effort to discredit the story was based on a lie that was as egregious as the Russia collusion hoax designed to hamstring the Trump administration. The material on the laptop painted a shocking picture of how Hunter Biden made a fortune peddling influence in Ukraine and China while his father, as vice president, was closely involved in issues that affected the interests of Hunter's clients. It also revealed him to have led a dissipated life involving profligate spending, debt, addiction, and tawdry affairs.
Hunter is now facing possible prosecution over tax charges, and for allegedly lying on a federal form he used to purchase a firearm. But it's not clear that either he or his father will ever be in legal jeopardy over his involvement in Ukraine or even his role in helping communist China wrest control of strategic materials.
But the important point is not whether any member of the Biden family ever goes on trial or sees a day of jail time for peddling influence. As Todd said, it isn't necessarily a crime "to make money off your last name," even if the policy and security implications of an indebted and drug-addicted son of the then-vice president are obvious.
Yet it is equally obvious is that a political culture that tolerates grifters like Hunter Biden is broken. His ability to parachute into American foreign policy problems like Ukraine and China and make fortunes from actors that are potentially hostile to the United States is, regardless of whether it ever gets prosecuted, intrinsically corrupt and presents a clear danger to the integrity of our governmental system. And that is true whether or not, as may well be likely, his father also benefited in one way or another from his activities.
The only way to begin addressing this endemic problem is to hold hearings that illustrate the crass cynicism of the Biden family business and the way it was tolerated and protected by the Washington establishment.
Giving a pass to the Bidens wouldn't just mean letting them get away with one of the worst scandals in the history of the American press. It would also throw away a perfect opportunity to deal with exactly the kind of corruption that establishment talking heads want us to ignore.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
