WASHINGTON — For two years, Republicans hounded former President Joe Biden’s family for any evidence he participated in his son Hunter’s foreign business deals.
Lawmakers grilled witnesses about the Bidens’ phone habits, sifted through family bank records, hauled in Hunter Biden’s art dealer for questioning and even subpoenaed people who bought his paintings. Republicans swore they uncovered impeachable offenses, even if they uncovered no direct evidence of wrongdoing.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is openly inviting anyone to put money directly in his pockets by purchasing his crypto token. He’s rewarded the biggest spenders with direct access to himself personally.
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By any reasonable standard, Trump’s self-enrichment is more contrary to ethical standards and norms of good governance than anything Joe Biden did. But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has a ready rationalization for why it’s OK.
“The difference, of course, is that President Trump does everything out in the open. He’s not trying to hide anything. There’s no shell companies or fake LLCs or fake family businesses. He’s putting it out there so everybody can evaluate for themselves,” Johnson said Sunday.
Scott Jennings, a CNN analyst who frequently defends the White House, offered a similar defense of Trump pardoning political allies, saying Thursday, “It’s being done out in the open. It’s being done in the light of day.”
It’s a variation of the frequent White House boast that Trump, by virtue of his frequent interactions with reporters, is the most transparent president in history, and especially so compared to the reclusive Biden.
In the final report of their impeachment inquiry last year, Republicans said “overwhelming evidence demonstrates that President Biden participated in a conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich his family.” Biden allegedly participated by “attending dinners with his family’s foreign business partners and speaking to them by phone, often when being placed on speakerphone by Hunter Biden.”
Last week, Trump hosted a dinner at his Virginia golf club for the 225 top purchasers of his $TRUMP meme coin, including several who told reporters they hoped to influence the president. One attendee had already seen fraud charges dismissed after he invested in a separate crypto venture backed by the Trump family.
Richard Briffault, an expert on government ethics at Columbia Law School, said Trump’s private enterprises create a clear conflict of interest with his public service.
“Conflict of interest questions come up when somebody is taking action in an official position, like being president, setting law enforcement policy or setting regulatory policy, in an area in which that person also has a significant financial interest,” Briffault told HuffPost.
“The Biden stuff was incredibly trivial compared to this,” Briffault said.
The Trump administration has abandoned the Biden administration’s efforts to enforce securities laws against crypto firms, and Congress is working to entrench crypto in the financial system by giving bank regulators an oversight role.
As for the claim that the openness of Trump’s business schemes makes them OK, Briffault said the transparency would be useful to voters if Trump were going to run for reelection, which he can’t do under the Constitution’s prohibition on a president serving more than two terms.
“In some ways, it’s much more subversive, because at least when it’s hidden, it reflects some respect for the idea that this stuff is improper,” Briffault said. “If the president’s doing it, why can’t a governor do it? Why can’t a senator do it? Why can’t a mayor do it?”
(On Capitol Hill, most Republicans HuffPost interviewed pleaded ignorance about Trump’s crypto dinner. GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri sounded a skeptical note: “I don’t love the sound of that.”)
Biden seemed to realize his son’s entanglement with foreign business interests, which started while Biden was vice president but stopped before he became president, created the appearance of a conflict of interest. He repeatedly denied having spoken to his son or his son’s business associates about their work.
Several of Hunter Biden’s former partners told lawmakers in transcribed interviews, however, that Joe and Hunter Biden would talk on the phone almost every day, and that Hunter Biden would sometimes put his father on speaker in their company. Business associates also described the elder Biden attending a dinner and greeting them at a bar.
In every instance, the witnesses described Biden exchanging pleasantries, such as by talking about the weather, and not discussing business. None had evidence of Biden getting involved or changing U.S. policy for their benefit. But the testimony gave Republicans what they needed to claim they’d uncovered secret acts of corruption.
“The reason many people refer to the Bidens as the Biden Crime Family is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains, in the back rooms. They were trying to conceal it, and they repeatedly lied about it,” Johnson said last week.
The centerpiece of Republicans’ impeachment inquiry against Biden was an allegation, sourced to a mysterious FBI informant, that Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian employer paid the former vice president a $5 million bribe in exchange for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor. The allegation turned out to have been made up, and in January the informant was sentenced to six years in prison for fabricating the story.
The House never voted to impeach Biden, but Republicans are continuing their focus on his administration, demanding interviews with Biden’s doctor and other White House aides who might have helped conceal Biden’s increasing frailty in office.
Polling released Thursday by the progressive messaging firm Navigator Research suggests voters view Republicans as more corrupt than Democrats, especially with Trump in the mix, but also that voters may be more receptive to messages about corruption being a bipartisan problem in Washington.
Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive watchdog group focused on corporate influence in politics, said Democrats are squandering their advantages on corruption. Democrats highlighted Trump’s crypto dinner last week, for instance, but they also helped Republicans advance Senate legislation that would benefit the crypto industry.
“We have American hospitals that get shut down, we have elderly people who are being scammed out of their life savings, and this is all made possible by a crypto industry that Trump is unleashing because it is how Trump is becoming a genuine mega billionaire,” Hauser said. “Democrats voting for Trump’s bill, that really undercuts the notion that this is abhorrent behavior and one on which you can make a partisan distinction.”