About two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article finally conceding that the Hunter Biden laptop and many of the emails on it are authentic. Yesterday (March 30), the Washington Post followed suit. The laptop in question is the one that Hunter left at a Delaware computer repair shop, and whose contents the New York Post revealed in a series of explosive October 2020 articles. Those articles got the NY Post banned from Twitter in the run-up to the 2020 election, while some 51 ex-intelligence officials denounced the laptop as likely “Russian disinformation.” Meanwhile, the Times and the WaPo never breathed a word about the laptop’s existence or its contents for the intervening year and a half.

Both the recent Times and Washington Post articles mention the laptop in the context of reporting on a federal criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax liabilities and business dealings in foreign countries including Ukraine and China. Clearly the newspapers are trying to get out in front of a likely impending indictment of the President’s son. After all, it would be quite embarrassing for them if the President’s son were to get indicted based on events that have long been public but which events have never been mentioned in either of those two papers.

But how about the question of how this investigation, and Hunter’s underlying conduct, relate to President Biden himself? To read the Times and the WaPo, you would think that that whole question is somehow out of line. The Times’s piece doesn’t even discuss Joe’s role or involvement, although it does include this bizarre line:

It is not clear whether the criminal probe is focused solely on Hunter Biden, or if he is among a group of individuals and companies being scrutinized.

As if anyone, let alone China or Burisma, would pay Hunter Biden millions of dollars without an expectation that it would influence his father. Over in the WaPo, in the context of paragraphs relating to Hunter’s dealings with Chinese government-controlled energy company CEFC, we have this:

The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC. . . .

The funny thing is that outside the sole exception of the Biden family, large payments to the children of powerful government officials by those with interests potentially affected by those officials’ actions are universally understood to be corrupt efforts to influence the officials. In cases involving people other than the Bidens, whether the official/parent “personally benefited” from the payments or “knew details” of the transactions are considered completely irrelevant.

For example, in the early 2000s the investment bank JP Morgan Chase in its operations in China had a program of hiring the sons and daughters of powerful Chinese government and business officials in positions of junior analysts. The Wall Street Journal provides background on the program and its results in this piece from November 2016:

[Beginning in about 2008, JPM] had begun orchestrating the hiring of dozens of relatives of powerful government officials in Asia. . . . All told, the bank hired around 100 applicants referred by government officials at Chinese state-owned firms. . . .

According to the WSJ, the bank’s idea was that by hiring the offspring of top executives, it would get a leg up in winning investment banking business from those state-controlled firms. The U.S. Justice Department was not amused. There is no mention in the WSJ piece of whether the parents/officials in question either “personally benefited” from the JPM jobs or “knew the details” of the kids’ involvement. But Justice’s position was that the jobs were inherently a corrupt effort to influence the parents. In November 2016 Justice extracted a settlement of $264 million from JPM. From the WSJ:

“The so-called Sons and Daughters Program was nothing more than bribery by another name,” said Leslie Caldwell, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.

According to this May 2019 piece from Reuters, JPM Asian investment banking head Catherine Leong was subsequently criminally indicted in Hong Kong in connection with the sons and daughters hiring program.

Or back here in the U.S., consider the case of Dean Skelos and his son Adam. I have written about the Skelos case several times in the past, for example this post from September 2019. In about 2010/11, Skelos was the (Repubican) Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, and his son Adam was mostly unemployed. Skelos made a practice of asking some of his big supporters and campaign contributors if they “had anything” that his son could do. An environmental consulting firm called AbTech gave Adam a relatively low-level job paying about $50,000 per year. AbTech was looking to get a large contract with Nassau County, an entity where Dean Skelos had no job (although it was alleged that Dean had indirect influence over Nassau County through his ability to affect legislation in Albany).

Thus in the Skelos case, all of the money went to Skelos’s son Adam, and there was no allegation of any specific thing that Dean was expected to accomplish in the legislature in Albany in order to assist AbTech in getting its contract. Nevertheless, Dean was convicted, and the conviction was affirmed by the Second Circuit in 2021. Here is a link to the Second Circuit decision affirming the conviction. The main issue on the appeal, as framed by the Second Circuit, was whether it can be bribery when a payment is made not in return for some specific official act, but rather in return for a general expectation that the politician will act favorably “as opportunities arise” in the future. In other words, can a payment be a bribe when it is for no more than an inchoate expectation of ongoing influence? Here is some of the Second Circuit’s discussion of that subject:

We turn first to the defendants’ general challenge to the “as opportunities arise” theory of bribery. . . . [T]his theory means that the government “does not have to prove an explicit promise to perform a particular act made at the time of payment” so long as the general nature of the act to be taken was understood at the time of the payment. . . . In United States v. Silver, however, we reaffirmed that the “as opportunities arise” theory of bribery survived McDonnell.

Since Dean Skelos’s conviction was affirmed, we therefore know that at least if you are a Republican in New York, it is definitely bribery if your son gets money from an influence seeker in return for a general expectation of favorable treatment from you. Skelos, by the way, is currently serving a four-year sentence in federal prison.

It seemed to me that Dean Skelos had some pretty good defenses in the case, most particularly that he had no direct role in the decision-making in Nassau County. That defense, of course, would have no use for Joe Biden, who was, for example, the “point man” for U.S. policy, and for dispensing U.S. aid, in Ukraine at the relevant time. As to the question of all the money going to Adam rather than to Dean, the Second Circuit doesn’t even discuss the subject. That argument wouldn’t even pass the red face test as a defense for Dean.