If There�s Any Family That Should Sit Out Attacking Others For Alleged
Corruption, It�s The Trumps.

The stunning hypocrisy of the Trump family�s attacks on Hunter Biden

If there�s any family that should sit out attacking others for alleged
corruption, it�s the Trumps.
By Aaron Rupar@atrupar Oct 21, 2020, 2:50pm EDT
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Donald Trump is the first president in modern history to refuse to divest
from his business interests upon taking office. As a result, he reportedly
took in at least $73 million from foreign sources during his first two
years in office, creating an unprecedented tangle of conflicts of interest
with countries like the Philippines, India, and Turkey that are home to
Trump-branded buildings.

Meanwhile, Trump�s adult sons � who said before his inauguration that
they�d stay out of politics to avoid conflicts of interest � serve as key
political surrogates for their father while running the family business,
which has benefited from Trump�s presidency both directly and indirectly.

Somehow, none of this has stopped the president or his family from making
his closing reelection case about corruption. Not his, mind you, but the
flimsily supported idea that Joe Biden committed crimes by letting Obama
administration foreign policy be influenced by his son Hunter�s foreign
business dealings.

Various aspects of these allegations have been debunked before (more on
that later), but Trump�s attacks have nevertheless been echoed by his sons
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

�The Biden family has spent decades in Washington, DC enriching themselves
by selling access to Joe Biden�s taxpayer funded office. Hunter Biden is
corrupt. Jim Biden is corrupt. Joe Biden is corrupt,� Trump Jr. tweeted
last week, with Eric Trump making a similar attack on Tuesday.

Of course, the first rule of Trumpism seems to be to never let shame or
hypocrisy get in the way of attacking your enemies, so it�s not
necessarily surprising that Trump is trying to weaponize one of his
weaknesses in a last-ditch effort to turn his flailing reelection campaign
around. But it�s still worth devoting some attention to the projection
involved in Trump posturing as some sort of anti-corruption crusader.
The thin Hunter Biden �scandal,� briefly explained

Hunter Biden is back in the news following the New York Post�s October 14
piece about unverified emails found on a hard drive of dubious provenance.
The story suggests emails found on the drive indicate that while Biden was
vice president, his son used his connections to get the vice president to
meet with an executive from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company Hunter
served on the board of for $50,000 a month.

It�s not clear whether the meeting ever happened (the Biden campaign says
no one-on-one time ever did). But the implication, conservatives say, is
that the purported meeting led to Joe Biden abusing his office by
pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who had been
investigating a company that was paying his son.

While it�s unclear what qualifications Hunter had for that gig beyond
having Biden as a last name, the accusation that his role on Burisma�s
board somehow compromised the Obama administration�s Ukraine policy has
been long debunked.

For one, the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, was widely regarded as
corrupt, and his ouster in March 2016 had broad international support. As
Parker Molloy recently wrote for Media Matters, �Biden�s role in carrying
out that internationally supported action actually made it more likely
that Burisma would face increased legal scrutiny, not less.� Secondly,
while Shokin had investigated Burisma, his probe was reportedly dormant at
the time Biden advocated for his ouster.

In short, there�s no there there. So it tracks that, according to
reporting from the New York Times, Post staffers were unwilling to put
their names on the October 14 piece. The article was ultimately co-bylined
by Emma-Jo Morris, a former staffer for Sean Hannity�s Fox News show who
had never bylined a piece for the Post before, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, who
reportedly �learned that her byline was on the story only after it was
published.�

�Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to
verify the authenticity of the hard drive�s contents, said five people
with knowledge of the tabloid�s inner workings,� the Times wrote. �Staff
members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its
timing, the people said.�

As a result, Trump acolytes who have been pushing the Burisma story �
including Rudy Giuliani � have already moved the goalposts from �Biden is
guilty of wrongdoing� to �even if the premise of the Post story is false,
the American people deserve to see the contents of Hunter Biden�s laptop.�

Trump and his acolytes have also accused Hunter Biden of selling his name
and connections in China.

�He�s like a vacuum cleaner � he follows his father around collecting,�
Trump said on October 16. �What a disgrace. It�s a crime family.�

But as the New York Times detailed in a story on Tuesday that, ironically,
is about a previously undisclosed bank account Trump has in China, there�s
no evidence Hunter did anything wrong here either:

In a misleading claim amplified by surrogates like his son Donald
Trump Jr. and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president has said the
younger Mr. Biden �walked out of China� with $1.5 billion after
accompanying his father on an official trip in 2013. Numerous news
articles and fact-checking sites have explained that the huge figure was
actually a fund-raising goal set by an investment firm in which Hunter
Biden obtained a 10 percent stake after his father left office. The firm
did receive financial backing from a large state-controlled bank, but it
is not clear the fund-raising target was ever met, and there is no
evidence Hunter Biden received a large personal payout.

Even if Hunter Biden were as shady as the president�s circle is alleging,
the Trump family should still probably sit this one out.
From �drain the swamp� to being the swamp

Very few people would argue that there isn�t something unseemly about
Hunter Biden seemingly cashing in on his family name while his father was
still serving as vice president. But if there�s anybody who should refrain
from making that case, it�s the Trump children.

Since Trump�s inauguration, Don Jr. and Eric have been responsible for the
Trump Organization, which sprawls across more than 30 countries and about
500 business entities, and, according to Trump, generated about $9.5
billion in revenue annually before he took office. And while Trump and his
family insist that they�ve honored the promise Trump made before his
inauguration not to do any new foreign deals while he�s in office, the
business has still provided the family multiple chances to cash in since
January 2017:

In January 2019, Eric Trump took a business trip to Uruguay to visit a
Trump property, and taxpayers ended up spending more than $80,000 on
Eric�s Secret Service protection.
In September 2019, Donald Trump Jr. met in New York City with about
100 purchasers of Trump-branded condos in India, and told an Indian
newspaper that �India is a market that we would be very interested post
politics.�
In October 2019, Eric Trump claimed that �when my father became
commander in chief of this country, we got out of all international
business� � but days later, the Trump Organization refuted Eric�s claim by
publicly touting a new deal to expand the Trump Doonbeg project in
Ireland.

As I wrote last February, shortly after the Washington Post broke news
about the Secret Service spending more than $500,000 at Trump properties
since he took office, the Trump family has become the swamp that Donald
Trump once promised to drain:

The irony is that the Trump children have made a fortune from foreign
dealings, and not just before their dad took office. In October, Forbes
reported that Eric and Donald Jr. have sold more than $100 million of the
family�s real estate since the January 2017 inauguration � including a
$3.2 million deal in the Dominican Republic in 2018 that is �the clearest
violation of their father�s pledge to do no new foreign deals while in
office.� Foreign money has also poured into the Trump International Hotel,
located just blocks from the White House, which the president�s most
recent financial disclosure indicated made him $41 million in 2018 alone.

All of this comes on top of President Trump having visited properties he
still owns and profits from more than 500 times while in office, according
to a count kept by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
(CREW), which found last month that Trump has racked up 3,403 conflicts of
interest while in office.

Not only that, but on numerous occasions Trump has used White House events
to promote his businesses, such as the following free ad for Trump
National Doral Miami he cut last year during his failed push to hold the
G7 there.

In addition to Ukraine, the Trumps have accused Hunter Biden of cashing in
in China. But as the New York Times detailed last year, a $1.7 billion
Trump Organization project in Indonesia received a $500 million infusion
from a state-owned Chinese construction company. And it�s not just Eric
and Don Jr.; Ivanka Trump, despite working in the White House, continues
to do business in China as well.