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| Hunter Biden -- New York Post |
“There is no public evidence that Joe Biden abused his government powers to help his family,” CNN asserts.
On the other hand, The Daily Caller insists, “Here’s
All The Evidence Connecting Joe Biden To Hunter Biden’s Foreign Business
Dealings.” The Caller cites a raft of
evidence: “Witness testimony, emails, text messages, flights and additional
evidence indicate Joe Biden was knowledgeable about Hunter Biden’s business
dealings and communicated with his son’s business associates on numerous
occasions.”
Henry David Thoreau memorably said that sometimes
“coincidence” is important – “as when you find a fish in the milk pail.”
The presence of a fish in a milk pail almost certainly means
that some guilty party put the fish in the milk pail. Fish do not swim from the
Concord River across farmland and plop themselves in milk pails. And though the
fish in the milk pail coincidentally suggests the presence of solid evidence
that some kid is playing pranks, we need not assemble a jury of his peers to find
him guilty as supposed.
There are two kinds of “evidence.” When a lawyer speaks of
evidence, he means – provable data that will support an indictable charge. When
the editor of your daily newspaper speaks of evidence, he means – damaging fish-in-the-milk-pail
data pointing to the guilt of some party that the editor need not suppose is
“innocent until proven guilty.” If the opinion editors of publications were
seriously to embrace the notion that “everyone is innocent until proven guilty”
in a court of law, we all might have been spared tons of editorials trumpeting
the guilt of former President Donald Trump that is transparently obvious to
editorial sleuths.
The notion that “there is no evidence” tying together the
Bidens, father and son, and other Biden family members, in what may be a
bribery scheme to personally enrich them is a non sequitur, if one is using the word in its legal sense --
because there can be no jury finding of guilt or innocence of a charge that has
not yet been adjudicated in court.
Though a bold writer, Thoreau was not careless in his use of
words. Often, the good people of Boston did not wish to hear them. Bostonians
could tolerate and even appreciate Walden
Pond, but they drew a red line at Slavery in Massachusetts, a roiling
protest of Massachusetts’ indifference to the Fugitive Slave Law, which
permitted slave owners to enter Massachusetts and reclaim their “property.”
In our own day, many environmentalists and public school
teachers continue to have their students read Walden Pond, but Slavery in
Massachusetts, written by a white, privileged male … not so much. The
author of Walden Pond also wrote an
appreciation of John Brown, the notorious, Connecticut born abolitionist who jump-started
the Civil War by raiding Harper’s Ferry hand in hand with the property of
slaveholders who sought to reclaim their escaped slaves from abolitionists like
Thoreau and Brown.
Hunter Biden, like Thoreau a white privileged male –
Thoreau’s father owned a prosperous pencil making factory -- last week was
indicted on three felony counts involving the illegal possession of a firearm,
according to the New
York Times. If convicted on all counts – including lying to a federally
licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on a federal firearms application
used to screen applicants, and possession of an illegally obtained gun – the
president’s son is facing about twenty years in the pokey.
Even so, some consider the indictment less problematic a matter
than Hunter’s peculations with serious enemies of the United States such as
Russia and China. The indictment was brought forward after a backroom deal
between the prosecution and Hunter Biden’s defense attorneys fell apart like a
handful of brittle lace.
ABC
News tells us, “Federal authorities with the U.S. attorney's office in
Delaware, led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump-era appointee, have been
investigating Hunter Biden since 2018, before Joe Biden announced his 2020
presidential bid.” So far, five years of a careful investigation of the
“evidence” against the Bidens has produced a squealing mouse.
The prosecution of Hunter Biden by a laggard prosecutor
whose hand ultimately was forced by a judge cannot please the Bidens, father
and son.
Still less pleasing is a Republican led U.S. House
investigation of Biden the younger on tax charges and his failure to register
as a foreign agent in the service of countries such as fascist China and
Vladimir Putin’s colonialist regime. No loyalists in the Biden administration
want prosecutors to trace foreign payments -- possibly for services rendered --
to “the Big Guy,” a reference in Hunter Biden’s emails to then Vice President
Joe Biden.
But, not to worry. Hunter Biden’s lawyers have just filed a
suit that seeks to prevent witness testimony from two FBI whistleblowers, and
possible tax charges are self-elapsing on account of statute of limitation laws.
Then too, the Bidens can rely on strong winds at their backs
blowing their tattered cause forward by an incurious media and faithful
political accomplices, many now busily showing Joe Biden’s presidential
competitor the road to the Big House.
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