We agree that Hunter Biden should drop the attitude and go before Congress to testify, as he has now agreed to do.
His refusal to testify initially, while setting conditions under which he would agree to be questioned by Congress, was Trumpian in its contempt for duly elected and empowered authority.
It wouldn’t have happened at all without the disgraceful example already set by the Republicans who became spitting mad last week when Mr. Biden showed up in the audience of a committee hearing in which he had been subpoenaed to testify.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R., S.C.) furiously called for Mr. Biden to be arrested immediately.
Smartly, Mr. Biden didn’t stick around for the other scorned Republicans to join the chorus and send the sergeant-at-arms over to where Mr. Biden was sitting and clap him in chains then and there.
It is Republicans who have popularized this kind of behavior. And we’re not just talking about people who happen to identify with the Republican Party, such as Steve Bannon, who was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to appear in front of the Jan. 6 committee, and Roger Stone who initially refused and then appeared but refused to testify, citing his 5th Amendment rights.
We’re talking about elected Republicans, including Ohio’s own Jim Jordan.
Mr. Jordan, of Urbana, was subpoenaed to give testimony on the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. 2021. Mr. Jordan and two other members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability all had intimate knowledge of what happened that day, and were in communication with the insurrectionist-in-chief, President Trump.
Mr. Jordan appears to claim that he had a privilege to thumb his nose at the House committee investigating the insurrection. It’s a thin tissue of a claim, a fig leaf, and it has no validity except to those who have a vested interest in not being held accountable for their actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
We don’t recall Ms. Mace calling for Mr. Jordan’s arrest on the spot. What we recall is Republicans cheering on those GOP obstructionists who tried to prevent the U.S. House of Representatives getting to the bottom of the attack on America’s tradition of peacefully transferring power from one lawfully elected president to the next.
Now the tactics that they practiced and which they made acceptable behavior in the House are utilized against them.
We don’t have any love of Hunter Biden, though we are entertained by the way he has thrown the sophomoric tactics of Republicans back in their faces.
His attempts to monetize his relationship with his father have compromised the legacy of his father, who remains under a cloud of impropriety as a result.
Hunter Biden wouldn’t have been sought out as a member of corporation boards based in Ukraine and China if he didn’t convey that he would be able to corrupt his father.
He got paid handsomely for it, which leads many to believe that his father was corrupted.
So far, the House committee is flailing in its quest for evidence. It desperately wants a pretext to impeach Mr. Biden to begin to even up the score with the twice-impeached Donald Trump.
Yes, Hunter Biden should speak to the committee.
In a country and Congress that respected the rule of law, he would have done so, respectfully, in the first place.
First Published January 16, 2024, 5:00 a.m.
