Biden, Scandals, and His Place in History: A First Look

I was going to write a post a few days ago regarding the historical legacy of the Biden administration, but I had a sense that the scoundrel wasn’t quite done yet and so I held off.

With the news this morning that Biden has pardoned Milley, Fauci, and the J6 Committee members I’m glad I did.

That old villain Lenin once said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Well, four years is a bit more than a few weeks, but in one very important respect this has been one of the most consequential administrations in American history.

That one respect I am speaking of is scandal.

We’ve had presidential scandals in the past: presidents obstructing justice over flings with interns, presidents obstructing justice over second-rate burglaries, presidents selling arms to Iran in order to run guns to the Contras. Note those are just the ones we know about. I would argue that the way Carter treated the country as his moral possession was an underappreciated scandal.

However, all of those scandals (that we know of) constitute the JV team compared to the record of the Biden years. With Scranton Joe and friends we are talking about historical, shaking faith in the Constitutional system to the core, type stuff. Things that you find only in a Third World country or maybe a Mel Brooks movie.

I’m going to take a historian’s view and list five scandals that not only constitute things that are hard to square with the notion of a republic governed by laws and beholden to a free people with inalienable rights, butt that will have damaged our political norms for decades to come. This record of scandal should follow Biden, and those who enabled him, through history.

These are not the abusive actions of some faceless bureaucrat in the CIA, or subterranean troll toiling away in the bowls of the EPA, but rather deliberate and active conspiracies at the highest levels of the Biden administration and government. The enormity of the scandals lies not just with Biden, but with all of those in the DC establishment who enabled him and who will remain when Joe leaves town.

You can add other scandals such as fiscal insolvency, immigration and the hollowing out of the military. However, those scandals, while possibly dramatic in their future outcomes, are more policy blunders with effects as-yet unrealized. Don’t think so? We’ll see. But several thousand years of empirical evidence shows that it’s hard to predict things, especially the future. We’ll just have to keep playing the game and find out about those.

The Cover-Up of Biden’s Physical and Mental Disabilities

The fact that Biden was in mental decline has been obvious for years, even during the 2020 Election. That decline seemed to accelerate once he took office, and the alarming nature of his various missteps was rivaled only by the political establishment’s closing of ranks in telling us to ignore our lying eyes. Even when Biden’s disastrous debate performance last June finally allowed the story to break cover, they still tried to cover it up.

Why is this important?

The first reason is that presidential administrations are by nature entropic with power drifting to the bureaucracy. It takes a lot of energy from the West Wing, and from the president specifically, to keep things on track. From Day 1 Biden’s team was limiting him to what amounted to a six-hour daily schedule. In all likelihood, given the terms under which he got the nomination in March 2020, that was a feature and not a bug of his presidency. Biden was attractive to the Democrats not only because he was willing to be a figurehead but because he had little ability to be anything else.

The second and more damaging reason is that it violates Constitutional norms. Executive power is outlined in Article II and is embodied in the person of the president. The executive power of the federal government comes from only that one person, the president. No one may wield that power independently of him. However, as we have seen recently from belated news accounts in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, Biden was unable to wield that power. In a recent interview with Bari Weiss, Speaker Mike Johnson related a meeting with Biden where the man couldn’t even remember executive orders (in this case, regarding LNG exports) that he had signed just a few weeks before.

So who was exercising executive power in the federal government? Who was enabling the Biden regency?

The other violation of Constitutional norms is that there already was a remedy for presidential incapacity, the 25th Amendment. There were to be no more Edith Wilson scenarios. Jill and Joe Biden and indeed the powers in the Democratic Party decided to ignore the Constitution and allow a medically unfit man to remain in office because it fit their own purposes.

In short, the Biden presidency was enabled from the beginning as a cross between a soft coup and a Mafia bust-out, with the various parts of the DC establishment propping up a decrepit man in order to use his Constitutional power for their own benefit.

The Biden Family Corruption

Another “secret” of the Biden family was its corruption. Nobody denied that Hunter Biden was the curious recipient of millions of dollars of foreign money, but the powers-that-be maintained the polite fiction that it had nothing to do with Joe. We were told that the fact that Hunter Biden’s only asset was his last name was just coincidental.

James Comer’s House Oversight Committee released a series of reports detailing the flow of said foreign money to various Biden family members.

Despite Joe’s repeated insistence that he had no interaction with any of Hunter’s business associates, Comer’s committee found that Joe had met with nearly every one of Hunter’s foreign associates who was funneling money to his family.

The belief that those foreign entities that had shoveled all that money at the Biden family would just walk away once their old “business partner” became the most powerful person in the world is delusional. The thing about political corruption, outside of the specific quid pro quo involved, is that once you go on the take you can never get off. You’re stuck. Remember, this was after we were fed years of the Russian Collusion Hoax, according to which a once-compromised Trump was somehow forever Putin’s puppet.

We are supposed to believe that there is no connection between the fact that two of the main sources of Biden’s foreign lucre are Ukraine and China, and the fact that those countries comprise two of the greatest foreign-policy challenges of the Biden administration.

The ugly truth is that President Joe Biden was as corrupt as a Chicago politician. And as shocking as it may seem, we need to ask whether the President of the United State was an unregistered foreign agent.

Lawfare Against Political Opponents

The Biden Administration’s unprecedented use of law enforcement and the legal system, from FBI raids to criminal indictments, against a once-and-future political opponent (Trump) of the President of the United States has been well-documented.

I have documented the probable conspiracy of the Biden Department of Justice with various local district attorneys concerning dodgy indictments. As I once said, we are in Lavrentiy Beria/NKVD territory here, where if you show me the man I will show you the crime.

This is more than just about Donald Trump. This is also about the October 5, 2021 letter by Merrick Garland authorizing the FBI to investigate parents who protested at school-board meetings. This is about the FBI investigating congregants at Latin Masses. This about the FBI conducting the largest criminal investigation in American history, against the people who protested Biden’s election on Jan. 6, based on the discredited pretext that the protesters were engaged in an “insurrection.”

To top it off, Joe Biden himself, in a major presidential address on September 1, 2022, called his political opponents, not only Donald Trump but also Trump’s supporters, “… an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” — thereby legitimizing the use of extraordinary measures to stop them.

Censorship of American Citizens

We learned from the Twitter Files and other information sources about a vast government effort to censor speech under the framework of “fighting misinformation.” From phone calls by government officials to social media companies, demanding that information be suppressed, to public funding of entities such as the State Department’s “Global Information Center” and DHS’s “Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” to allied NGOs such as the “Election Integrity Project” which acted as Biden administration cut-outs, there was a vast conspiracy to suppress American’s Constitutional rights.

US District Court Judge Terry Doughty, in a ruling on Missouri v. Biden, called the Biden administration’s actions “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” A few months after that a federal appellate court nailed the Biden administration for “suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.”

There have been previous attempts by the government to censor free speech: The Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, and the Sedition Act of 1918. Those acts were quickly struck down and have been acknowledged as a black stain on American freedoms.

In contrast, former Democratic presidential candidate and Biden administration official John Kerry probably spoke for many of his colleagues when he stated, in regard to those opposing the Democrats’ climate change agenda, that “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win…the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”

Abuse of the Pardon Privilege

Presidents have the constitutional power to issue pardons. There are few if any limits on that power. That power was granted to the Executive in order to correct those times when people have been wrongly prosecuted and convicted. Sometimes that power is abused, witness Clinton’s last-minute pardon of the financier Marc Rich.

Last month, Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, after promising that he would not do so after the younger Biden was convicted of lying on a federal form in order to acquire a firearm. What was even more controversial was that the pardon did not only apply to the gun case and an unrelated tax case, but to any and all of Hunter’s unspecified activities over a 10 year period.

The accepted norm is that the power to pardon exists for those who have been already prosecuted and convicted of a crime. Therefore, we know as a matter of public record for what crime the individual has been pardoned.

Hunter of course was the bag man for the Biden family, collecting millions of dollars through shady business deals with foreign actors, as part of one the greatest scandals in American history. His father’s pardon of him immunized him from prosecution for any of those actions. Not only did Joe protect himself by pardoning Hunter, but in all probability he buried a list of unknown crimes that will never see the light of day.

Just this morning, at almost the final hour, Biden issued similar preemptive pardons for General Milley, Anthony Fauci, and members of the Jan. 6 Committee under the pretext of shielding them from politically motivated prosecutions. Of course, shielding them from politically-motivated prosecutions is simply another way of protecting one’s political allies from accountability.

So we see that, as his parting gift, Joe (or his handlers) has through his pardons legitimated the obstruction of justice by his abuse of the Constitution.

12:00 PM cannot come fast enough.