Guest post: What children of powerful people do
Originally a comment by Eava on All rotten.
Hunter Biden gets his share of blame for this, parlaying Daddy’s job into a fat salary for him.
This is what children of famous people do, opportunities find them.
George W. Bush had Saudi investors bail out failing businesses. He was majority owner of the Texas rangers and almost became the commissione of baseball. Jenna Bush is a talk show host with multiple book deals. Chelsea Clinton gets book deals. Andrew Cuomo got positions in the Clinton Administration. At the same time, these are people who are highly educated and steeped in the business/political world. Hunter wasn’t a strung out junkie when he was on the Burisma board.
He was a Georgetown undergrad and Yale law school graduate. He had high level jobs in the finance sector, worked at the Department of Commerece during the Clinton Administration and the George Bush appointed him to a five year term on the Board of Directors of Amtrak. When Joe became VP he stepped down.
Biden was on the board of directors of World Food Program USA, a 501(c)(3) charity based in Washington, D.C., that supports the work of the UN World Food Programme from 2011 to 2017; he served as board chairman from 2011 to 2015.
Before he joined the Burisma board, Biden was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, while still an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, something he was more than qualified to do. Him joining the Board after that isn’t surprising.
The whole conspiracy theory that Burisma had him on the Board to get Biden and the US to fire the prosecutor allegedly investigating Burisma has been debunked repeatedly. The prosecutor was corrupt and wasn’t investigating the company. Keeping the corrupt prosecutor in place would have been in the company’s interest.
One of his partners in his investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was John Kerry’s step-son. RSP was an investor in a Chinese private equity fund. No one is going after John Kerry, who was Secretary of State for part of the time RSP was invested in the Chinese fund.
Hunter did nothing wrong, and nothing but what the vast majority of well connected people do. The fact that Russia is feeding stupid US politicians lies isn’t Hunter’s fault. Hunter wasn’t the one working in his father’s administration selling information to the Saudis in exchange for a $2 billion investment once he left office, for a fund in an area he has no expertise.
And Russian interference absolutely changed the outcome of the election, on multiple levels. They ran a propaganda operation to turn off Democrats from voting or to vote 3rd party. Given the narrow margin by which Trump won several states, which was smaller than the 3rd party vote, it had the desired effect. It was especially targeted to Black voters, which partially explains Clinton’s loss in Michigan, the votes they expected to come in from Detroit never materialized. Paul Manafort turned over detailed voter data to a Russian operative so Russia could precisely target people with specifically crafted propaganda.
Trump is a total Putin tool, basically. They interfered with our elections.
of course, just like we do. And if that doesn’t work, the U.S. just sends in the marines