(April 1, but not an April Fool’s story) Count on Hunter Biden to remind us, no matter what else is in the news, what ethical obliviousness looks like.
Biden and his latest wife, Melissa, had a baby boy Saturday. In the course of discussing it, he insisted, yet again (when the questioning digressed), that he had not done “anything improper … in any way whatsoever” in his dealings with the Burisma energy company that was at the center of President Trump’s impeachment drama.
His only error, Biden said, was in showing the “poor judgment” of not realizing his board position with a dicey foreign corporation might give “a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father. That’s where I made the mistake.”
Of course. His perfectly ethical behavior gave other people an excuse to act unethically.
(Not exactly!)
We can limn the younger Biden’s ethics even without delving into him ditching his wife for the widow of his late brother, cheating on the widow to father a child with a random woman in Arkansas, falsely denying paternity of the Arkansas child, and then ditching both his ex-sister-in-law and the Arkansas woman in order to marry his current wife six days after they first met. We’ll also ignore his discharge from the U.S. Navy due to cocaine use.
Let’s focus instead merely on his Burisma dealings.
First, to act unethically does not necessarily entail acting illegally. The two standards are different. Trump has not identified a single crime that Hunter Biden is suspected of committing — largely because there isn’t necessarily anything criminal in trading on a family name to take a cushy job.
Still, the huge ethical problem with taking Burisma’s highly paid board position was that it unambiguously put a cloud over important U.S. diplomacy….
[The full column is at this link.]
