Vice President Joe Biden sits with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on February 7, 2015, before a bilateral meeting also attended by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Toria Nuland on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
The Democratic front-runner did not politely tell the man that — while his concerns about corruption were valid — he had actually been badly misinformed. Biden did not patiently explain how Hunter’s conduct differs from that of the Trump children or how he would differ from Trump in his handling of potential conflicts of interest as president. Instead, Biden called the voter a “damn liar,” challenged him to a push-up contest, and appeared to implicitly mock his potential constituent for being overweight. In between these Trump-esque displays of strained machismo, Biden made the patently false claim that “no one has said my son did anything wrong.” In truth, not only have many, many people said Hunter Biden was wrong to take the job at Burisma, Hunter is himself one of those people.
His father held up no better in an interview with “Axios on HBO” on Sunday night. Mike Allen asked, “What’s your understanding of what your son was doing [for Burisma] for an extraordinary amount of money?”
Biden replied, “I don’t know what he was doing. I know he was on the board. I found out he was on the board after he was on the board, and that was it.”
“You’ve had a lot of time. Isn’t this something you want to get to the bottom of?,” Allen countered.
“No,” Biden said, “because I trust my son.”
In other words, Biden’s message on Burisma boils down to “I don’t know what Hunter did, but I know he did nothing wrong because I have personal trust in my son. Ergo, if Hunter does something, it is by definition not wrong because a trustworthy person did it.”
Pressed further, Biden attempted to pivot away from the subject, saying, “If you want to talk about problems, ya know, let’s talk about Trump’s family.” This would have been a sound enough diversionary tactic, but Biden did not proceed with a litany of the first family’s indiscretions. Instead, he simply stopped speaking — having ostensibly failed to prepare any talking points on the subject — and then, after a pause, said merely, “I mean, c’mon.” Biden began saying something else but once again found himself bereft of words and thus pretended to laugh while saying contemptuously of the media, “You guys are amazing.”
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