ANOTHER WEEK, ANOTHER LAYER IN THE HUNTER BIDEN STORY:

If you put the best possible—least scandalous—face on the Hunter Biden saga, it’s still repellent. A Ukrainian oligarch hired Hunter and paid him a fortune in hopes of influencing his vice-president father’s attitude toward Ukraine—and Joe Biden was just fine with it. Biden and his team falsely dismissed Hunter’s incriminating laptop in 2020 as Russian disinformation not to cover up any crimes but merely to keep embarrassing-but-true information from the American voting public during an election year.

That’s the defense, and it already cops to more sordid official wrongdoing than Donald Trump has ever been found guilty of.

But considering all the facts, the real story has the potential to get much worse. In 2014, Joe Biden was vice president of the United States and the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, with a particular interest in addressing Ukrainian corruption. That year, Hunter Biden was hired by the notoriously opaque Ukrainian energy company Burisma to serve on its board. Despite Hunter’s having no work experience or education in energy exploration and extraction, Burisma paid him a salary of $83,000 a month. (About this arrangement, the State Department declared at the time that there was no conflict of interest.)

While Hunter was working for Burisma, Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian leaders to fire prosecutor general Victor Shokin—whose investigation into the company was, according to Shokin’s former deputy, “dormant” at the time.

America’s Newspaper of Record knows how it will all end: McCarthy Says 783rd Impeachable Offense By Biden Will Be The Last Straw. “At publishing time, Republicans confirmed they will soon retaliate against the Bidens by dragging cabinet members before a committee so Jim Jordan can angrily furrow his brow at them.”