JANUARY 4, 2024
The heart of the Republican effort to potentially (or probably: inevitably) impeach President Biden are business agreements involving his son Hunter Biden. Even before Republicans took control of the House a year ago, party leaders, such as then-incoming House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), announced their intention to explore how money from foreign actors might have made its way through Hunter Biden to his father. When then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) opened an impeachment inquiry in September, he cited a need to figure out how money might have flowed to the president — though he did not claim, as others have, that this had already been demonstrated.
On Thursday, members of the Oversight Committee finally offered actual concrete evidence of a president benefiting from an influx of foreign money. This isn’t particularly useful for the Republican impeachment effort, though: The president at issue was Donald Trump.
It’s worth pointing out that this has always been the problem with the Republican targeting of Biden. Their insistence on the nefariousness of layered corporations or money from overseas was always more applicable to Trump and his family than to Biden and his. Comer repeatedly claimed that one of his desired goals is to come up with rules governing how presidential family members might leverage their relationships, but he has also repeatedly ignored evidence of how Trump’s family — and Trump himself — did so.
The new evidence was presented not by the Republican majority on Oversight but by the Democratic minority, which explains why it offers details about money received by Trump-owned companies. What’s new isn’t the mechanisms; it’s been obvious since even before Trump took office in 2017 that there would be money filtering into his pockets through properties that were part of the Trump Organization. The Washington Post has reported more than once on money paid to Trump properties while he was president — some of which almost necessarily filtered through Trump’s corporate organizations to his pockets.
In total, the Oversight Democrats allege that Trump benefited from nearly $7.9 million in foreign payments to Trump-owned properties while he was president. The bulk of that came from interests in China, which spent more than $5.5 million at his businesses, including rent paid by Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
ICBC is owned by the Chinese government; a source familiar with the data indicates that all of the $5.5 million included in the Democrats’ report links back to the Chinese government or state-owned entities.
Another million-plus of the $7.9 million came from interests in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar. This total does not include whatever the Trump Organization gained from its partnership with LIV Golf, itself linked to the Saudi government.
What isn’t demonstrated — and probably can’t be — is how much of this money went directly to Trump or other members of his family. Unlike the allegations involving Hunter Biden, though, there is an obvious, direct path for the money to have gone from Trump Organization properties to Donald Trump, the company’s owner.
Comer and other Republicans have repeatedly touted the idea that “the Biden family” took in $20 million in foreign payments. Washington Post analysis of the presented evidence found that the actual total going to any Biden (excluding Hunter Biden’s business partners) was about $7.5 million. That included money linked to the Chinese government — but also private-sector businesses. None of it has been shown to have gone to Joe Biden, nor has any evidence emerged showing that Biden tried to boost Hunter Biden’s business for his gain. Republican arguments that Biden took official actions to benefit Hunter Biden are fatally flawed, and most of the money Hunter Biden made came after Joe Biden left office in 2017.
The point here isn’t the hypocrisy on the part of Republicans allied with Donald Trump (including people such as Fox News host Sean Hannity). It would have been impossible for Comer and others to not recognize how their accusations against Hunter Biden potentially looped in Trump and his family. By focusing relentlessly on trying to impugn Hunter Biden, though — including deliberately spacing out accusations to heighten a sense of wrongdoing — Republicans have effectively blunted Trump’s foreign profits as something akin to business as usual. Polling released by YouGov in August showed that Americans were only slightly more likely to say that Trump and his family were corrupt than said the same of Biden.
The idea that Joe Biden must have benefited from Hunter Biden’s work is central to Republican arguments for impeachment. Comer and others, such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), have pointed to circuitous loan repayments made to the president from his son and brother as evidence that Biden benefited from foreign money, a demonstration of how important this idea is to their case.
If these tenuous links, this desperately weak argument suggest that Biden is unfit to serve as president, what should we think of Trump’s in-office receipt of money from foreign governments?
Courtesy: The Washington Post
