New York Post

Oh, those Hunter Biden emails? At least some of them are real, according to a new book. Politico staffers casually smuggled a ‘revelation’ from their colleague Ben Schreckinger’s The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty Years of Tragedy into Tuesday’s edition of the Playbook AM email. By sheer coincidence, Schreckinger’s book was also released on Tuesday. Schreckinger independently verified both the ’10 held by H for the big guy?’ email and a 2015 email ‘from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden’. Politico further confirms that ‘emails released by a Swedish government agency also match emails in the leaked cache, and two people who corresponded with Hunter Biden confirmed emails from the cache were genuine’.

Surely they can’t keep getting away with it. Oh, who is Cockburn kidding? Of course they can. Tuesday was a glorious day for karmic Houdini acts. Over at the New York Post, yet another story of Hunter Biden’s escapades landed with a graceless thud. Throughout Miranda Devine’s 1,300-word piece, one can sense her desperate desire to overwhelm with enough salacious details for the public to care. The First Son hired a Russian prostitute for an $8,000 weekend sex romp! He smoked crack! They made a porno! He balanced a line of M&Ms on his phallus! And Joe Biden, the current President of the United States, might have paid for it all! No, really! A literal ex-Secret Service agent texted Hunter about issues with 'Celtic’’s account. Celtic was Biden’s codename.

Biden is dishonest. His memory is shot. He’s an influence-peddler pretending to be a victim, a lifelong exploiter of his public position who hides behind the lowest forms of sentimentality. Hunter Biden, of course. You’d have to be on the wrong end of a three-day crack binge to confuse Hunter Biden with the impeccably honest, mentally agile and profoundly principled multimillionaire career politician Joe Biden. Hunter has written an autobiography. Or rather, some desperate and shameless mercenary has ghosted it for him. It belongs to the most execrable category of literature, the political memoir — the sort of book written to launch a political career (Dreams From My Father) or, as in this case, to end one (Ten Percent for the Big Guy).

I’ve watched with a mixture of amusement and surprise over the last few days as my right-wing friends have descended into indignation and finger-wagging on Twitter. Their disapproval is aimed at the mainstream media, Democrats, Big Tech and their henchmen over the Eric Swalwell and Hunter Biden developments. The amusement came from watching people post old tweets from hacks like Ben Rhodes or CNN anchor Christine Amanpour, expecting them to atone for being wrong. The surprise came from the same activity — surprise that my friends just don’t get it. They don’t give a damn. They won.

Are the chickens coming home for Hunter Biden? It certainly seems so, though experts differ on the critical question of whether they are coming home to roost or roast. Wednesday’s news, splashed via an official communiqué from his father’s transition operation, that Hunter is being investigated by the US Attorney’s Office for possible tax fraud makes me want to bet for ‘roast’ not ‘roost’. Here’s Hunter’s statement from Wednesday, in full: ‘I learned yesterday for the first time that the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs.