Joe Biden is one of the least intelligent, least accomplished individuals to ever secure a major party nomination for President. He was one of the least intelligent persons to ever hold the office of Vice President, which he “earned” by virtue of the fact that Barack Obama had no fear of him in any respect, and no one expected he would ever use the Vice Presidency as a springboard to run for President.
Even when he was young he had below-average capacity for intelligent thought and has always had only a loose association with the truth. It is hard to imagine what limitations he might have encountered in life if he had not stumbled upon the fact that personal family tragedy and the need to get only 120,000 votes could earn you a spot for life in the World’s Most Exclusive Club. It says something about the residents of Deleware that they would continue to send this slug of a human being to the Senate for 36 years when, according to Robert Gates, a longtime Washington insider in both GOP and Democrat Administrations, Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy issue his entire career. And Gates has made it clear he’s not offering that as hyperbole or an exaggeration — Biden has been on the wrong side of history with respect to every issue of significance.
Charles Grassley has long been one of the most aggressive GOP Senators in challenging the orthodoxy on the origins of Crossfire Hurricane and the “Russian Hoax” investigation. But he’s also been instrumental in using his years of experience in heading up both the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Finance Committee to help steer the investigation of Senator Ron Johnson’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee into whether Hunter Biden’s business dealings during the Obama Administration constituted a national security threat to the United States.
Remember that Congressional investigations are “backwards looking” and undertaken for the purpose of informing potential legislative action to address problems that are uncovered by the investigation. They are about digging out information and acting thereon, not necessarily about holding anyone responsible for their past conduct.
Senator Johnson announced this weekend that his Committee will be issuing its report this week, and the report is unsparing in terms of finding fault — and likely corruption — with Hunter Biden’s conduct, and by implication the conduct of Joe Biden in facilitating what Hunter Biden was able to do. Neither Johnson nor Grassley are shying away from the political implications of issuing the report at this point in time:
As reported in The Hill:
“I think it’s time for the American people to see what we’ve got,” said Johnson….
“What our investigations are uncovering, I think, will reveal this is not somebody we should be electing president of the United States,” Johnson said in an interview with local Wisconsin radio station WCLO.
Ron Johnson came late to politics in his life. First elected in 2010 when he took down Democrat incumbent Russ Feingold in the first midterm election year of the Obama Administration, he’s only two years into his second term at age 66.
At age 66 Joe Biden was finishing his 6th and final term in the Senate. Ron Johnson spent his entire adult life up to 2010 operating a family-owned business in Wisconsin. Joe Biden spent his entire adult life bloviating into a Senate microphone — or whatever microphone happened to be handy and nearby.
Ron Johnson believes he’s now found corruption in the manner by which the Biden family was able to enrich itself as a function of Joe Biden being Vice President for eight years, and I believe Ron Johnson — who never served in the Senate with Joe Biden — will not be shy about putting out that information for the world to see.
Charles Grassley comes at the task from a completely different point of view. Grassley was a colleague of Joe Biden’s in the Senate for 28 years — from 1980 to 2008. Grassley’s tenure in the Senate has now reached nearly the same length as Biden’s tenure. Grassley is actually a decade older than Biden, having turned 87 recently. But two things have long been remarkable about Grassley’s tenure in Washingon. First, he has remained the owner and operator of a family farm in Iowa, having inherited 80 acres from his father in 1960, and turning that into a 750-acre operation that he farms now with his son. Second, Grassley has long had a contentious relationship with the FBI from his position as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He has been among the most outspoken critics of the FBI’s conduct with regard to Gen. Michael Flynn and Carter Page. He and Sen. Lindsay Graham wrote letters to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that not only backed up but advanced points made by the “Nunes Memo” from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence which called into legitimacy the Page FISA warrant on the basis that it relied almost entirely on the dubious Steele Dossier.
Democrats in the Senate, as well as the Biden campaign, have been ratcheting up their attacks on Johnson and his intended release of the report, claiming the information Johnson is relying on is itself Russian disinformation intended to hurt Joe Biden and is part of efforts by Russian to undermine the 2020 election. Democrats Chuck Schumer and Ron Wyden have been attempted to introduce a resolution condemning Johnson’s probe.
But some of the attacks on the probe have been telling in the way they are limited to a defense of only Joe Biden, and not Hunter Biden.
Wyden offered a prebuttal of the GOP report, noting that — while he won’t publicly disclose classified information — he has not seen any indication of wrongdoing by the former vice president either as part of the closed-door depositions or in his role as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“Chairman Johnson has repeatedly claimed in the media that he has uncovered new and damaging information about Vice President Biden’s activity in Ukraine,” Wyden said. “This is simply not true. Nothing I have seen — not one bit of evidence — could lead to the conclusion that Vice President Biden did anything wrong in Ukraine.”
But the implications of the probe have always been that Joe Biden’s awareness and at least tacit approval of ne’er-do-well son Hunter Biden’s activities and the circumstances under which he was doing business in Ukraine and China while Biden was Vice President was the source of corrupt influence. Whether there is evidence of actual misconduct on the part of Joe Biden as having played in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, or if the evidence merely shows an awareness and acceptance of corruption that is apparent on the face of his appointment as a Director of Burisma — and later an equitable owner of a portion of Burisma — will lead to further coverage of Hunter Biden’s susceptibility to influence by US adversaries in China and Russia.
Sen. Johnson has agreed with the Democrats on the Committee that depositions taken of witnesses in the probe will be released at the same time as the Committee’s report so that the public will be able to see not just what the Committee has to say, but what the witnesses told the Committee behind closed doors. The report is expected sometime this week.
