Joe Biden? -- You Must Be Kidding

Back in October, after looking some into the Hunter Biden/Burisma situation, and watching a few clips of Joe Biden on the campaign trail, I offered the following insightful prognostication:

I’m sorry to say that I don’t think Joe Biden is going to last much longer in this presidential contest.

That shows you what I know about these things.

The particular context there was a couple of posts I had just researched and written on the Ukraine affair, titled “The Bidens: Stone Cold Crooked” and “The Bidens: Stone Cold Crooked (2).” My conclusion in the two posts was that there was a lay-down case of corruption against Joe Biden in the Burisma situation, and I couldn’t even see what his defense would be. Yes, Joe could try saying “Sure I got my son $3 million in Ukraine by leveraging foreign aid money put up by U.S. taxpayers, but my motives were pure because I was also getting a corrupt prosecutor fired.” But why would or should anyone buy that line, when Joe could have told his son to get off the board before getting the prosecutor fired?

For several months after those posts, the impeachment business kept the Bidens’ graft in the news, and Joe gradually sank lower in the polls. But then impeachment ended, and now suddenly, after Super Tuesday and mini-Super Tuesday, Joe Biden has become the presumptive Democratic nominee. Really?

Many observers have attributed Joe’s revival to the sudden realization by the “party establishment” and the “donor class,” as the field of prospective candidates was narrowing, of how disastrous a Bernie Sanders nomination could prove to be for the party. If you are unsure of what the terms “party establishment” and “donor class” mean, I would commend to you this December 30, 2019 piece from the New York Law Journal with the headline “Big Law Chairmen and Prominent Trial Lawyers Help Drive Biden Fundraising.” It seems that Biden had just made a campaign finance filing revealing the identities of his top donors and “bundlers.” Summary:

Biden's newly disclosed list of campaign bundlers includes Big Law chairmen, practice group leaders, prominent trial lawyers and tech and finance executives. The list of 250 names revealed the individuals and couples who have raised at least $25,000 for his presidential run.

Care to name some names?:

Biden’s list of top volunteer fundraisers included Stephen Cozen, founder and chairman of Cozen O’Connor; Bradley Butwin, chairman of O’Melveny & Myers; Brad Karp, chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Robert Brady, chairman of the Wilmington-based firm Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor; Mitchell Berger, founder and co-chairman of Florida’s Berger Singerman; and Ace Werner and Peter Shields, managing partner of Wiley Rein.

My favorite of these is Brad Karp of Paul Weiss. For prior Manhattan Contrarian coverage of the Paul Weiss firm, see “Progressive Hypocrisy At The Highest Levels: The Case Of Paul Weiss” (December 2018) and “Is Lack Of ‘Diversity’ At Big Law Firms A Crisis?” (January 2014). Paul Weiss is a law firm at the peak of the New York legal firmament, with top drawer clients including Citigroup and Exxon, and partners reportedly earning an average of over $4 million per year. The firm has long been known for its association with Democratic politics and politicians. (Ted Sorenson was a partner!). You really couldn’t get more “party establishment” and “donor class” than this.

But wait a minute. On December 29, the very day before that NYLJ article appeared, Biden was holding a town hall in Peterborough, New Hampshire (video at the link), in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary. Asked what he would do about climate change, Biden offered up “holding [fossil fuel executives] liable for what they have done,” and “when they don’t deliver, put them in jail.” Can you now be a credible candidate for President while threatening to jail the people who provide the energy for our light and heat and transportation and internet? You would think that these threats would be particularly jarring for partners of Paul Weiss, where Exxon is a major client. And it’s not like Exxon is just a run-of-the-mill corporate client in various investment deals. No, Paul Weiss is actually representing Exxon in the specific “climate change” litigations that seek to hold the company (and in many cases other oil companies) financially liable for supposed effects of carbon “pollution,” like rising seas (or something). Do you think that maybe those kind of threats against one of their most important clients and its executives would slow the Paul Weiss partners down before they contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Biden’s campaign? The answer is that no amount of cognitive dissonance is too much when the issue is whether “our team” wins the next election.

Further on the question of how much cognitive dissonance a Democrat partisan can suffer, we have David Ignatius in The Washington Post on March 5 with a column titled “The Ukraine conversation Joe Biden needs to have.” This is Ignatius acknowledging that Biden has a problem with the evidence of corruption in Ukraine, and advising Biden that he must address the issue, and then also advising him how to address the issue. Why a supposedly non-partisan journalist should be offering advice to the presumptive Democratic frontrunner on this subject is one question. But in any event, here is the advice:

[T]his is a story that most Americans can relate to. It’s about a loving father and a son whose life was falling apart. It’s about families in pain and the difficulty of keeping faith with people we love. It brings out what’s most likable in Biden, if he would let himself explain the story honestly.

In other words, the advice is not to proclaim innocence — that’s really impossible, as I have repeatedly pointed out — but rather to beg the American voter for forgiveness. Even as Hunter pockets the $3 mil. “It’s about a loving father and a son whose life was falling apart. It’s about families in pain . . .” Funny, that sounds just like the situation of Dean Skelos, former Republican Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, who got his own ne’er-do-well unemployed adult son a full-time $50,000 per year job (Hunter’s was a two-day-per-year $1 million per year gig). Skelos had minimal if any influence over the business the employer wanted to do with the government entity (which was Nassau County, whereas Skelos served at the State level); while Biden had total control over the U.S. aid on which Ukraine depended. Skelos is currently serving a four-year federal prison term. The “families in pain” thing went exactly nowhere in Skelos’s defense. And Biden is supposedly a credible candidate for President?

And I haven’t even gotten to Hunter Biden’s securing of a billion dollar investment from a Chinese government-owned bank; or to Joe’s brother James’s securing of a billion-dollar contract to build houses in Iraq while Joe was “point man” for U.S. relations in that country; or to Joe’s daughter Ashley’s access to government influence on behalf of her husband Howard Krein’s healthcare startup. Or to the whole subject of Joe’s cognitive decline. That you can observe for yourself.

It looks like there will bee plenty of fodder for future posts. But, Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate for President? You must be kidding. I still don’t believe he’ll make it all the way to the election.