As soon as Joe Biden left the White House, journalists and politicians began acknowledging what many saw clearly years ago: the president was failing, both physically and mentally. Though his critics had expressed concerns for several years, leaders of his own party and the mainstream media resolutely insisted he was quite healthy and fully able to carry out the duties of his office. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson signal the beginning of what’s sure to be an avalanche of publications in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (New York: Penguin Press, c. 2025; Kindle Edition). Tapper, the main writer, is a TV anchor for CNN and very much an insider in Washington, D.C. Thompson is a CNN contributor. They interviewed 200 people—mainly prominent Democrats, few of whom wanted to be named—and the book often reads like a litany of quotations lamenting the fact that virtually no one dared tell the truth about an ailing president. As George Orwell once wrote; “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” Still more, said he: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” So Tapper and Thompson now endeavor to tell us “what was in front of our noses” during the Biden years, leaving us wondering why they failed to tell us.
Biden’s “original sin,” say the authors, was his decision to seek reelection in 2024. He, his family and close advisors, refused to face and tried to hide the fact that he was declining. They insisted everyone mouth the party line: Biden’s “‘exactly the same person he always was. Age is not an issue. He’s incredibly sharp in meetings. There are no accommodations being made for him because of his age.’ Those answers were not true.” (p. 102). Then came his disastrous debate with Donald Trump—probably the worst performance of a presidential candidate since the debates began in 1960—and all the world saw the truth. A frail, often incoherent man was leading the most powerful nation on earth and wanted to keep doing so. So soon thereafter the power brokers within the Democrat Party began to orchestrate his exit. They realized, as West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin said, “there comes a time when you have to tell your dad, ‘It’s time for me to take away the car keys’” (p. 256). And (ignoring the party’s primaries) they did!
Original Sin is not a great book. Better ones will doubtlessly be better. It’s as much Tapper’s effort to explain why he and his media colleagues failed as an effort to get at the truth. Hundreds of quotations basically say the same thing—and they almost all claim to have not really known the condition of the president when obviously they should have. In fact they knew he was ailing but feared to say anything lest they lose their standing within the Democrat Party. Tapper and they Washington establishment were actually willing to endanger this country while pretending its Chief Executive was doing quite well!
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Unlike Jeff Tapper, Miranda Devine is an independent-minded investigative New York Post journalist who does the hard homework necessary to write solid stories. She researches and asks critical questions, cites sources and provides meticulous documentation. Her study of Joe Biden—The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America (New York: Broadside Books, c. 2024; Kindle Edition)—tells us much we need to know about the former president. She had earlier published Laptop from Hell, examining Joe’s son Hunter and the Biden family’s involvement in Ukraine and China. But there’s more to the story—the “coverup” which “is what this book is about. It is the story of how the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the IRS and the Department of Justice conspired to protect Joe, his crack addict son Hunter and his scandal-prone brother Jim from the consequences of their reckless greed. The extent and nature of their crimes are coming to light as the United States and the world it leads face grave dangers from the very countries where the Bidens made millions of dollars” (p. xxii). Corrupt politicians are ever with us, but the Biden family did more—they managed to corrupt several federal bureaucracies.
As in Laptop from Hell Joe Biden’s son plays a major role in The Big Guy—a title for Joe used by Hunter’s business partners, including Tony Bobulinski. Hunter’s drug addictions, his sexual adventures, and his compulsive need for large amounts of cash certainly played a prominent role in his father’s life. But Joe worked with his son in getting money, particularly from partners in Ukraine and China. A Chinese company, suitably threatened by Joe Biden, sent Hunter a total of $8 million “for services rendered” while Joe was Vice President. “So much for Joe’s claim in the 2020 campaign: ‘my son has not made money in terms of this thing about—what are you talking about—China’” (p. 31). Much of the money surfaced after Joe left the vice presidency; “Six weeks after he became a “private citizen” in 2017, “millions started to flow to nine Biden family members” (p 41).
In her earlier treatise, Devine provided significant evidence showing the Bidens’ financial corruption. We found therein “corporate documents, bank transfers, and emails detailing a vast international influence-peddling scheme, sanctioned by the world’s most despotic regimes—and implicating ‘Honest Joe’ Biden himself. It would provide a window onto the corruption that is Washington’s original sin, as conducted on a global scale by one of its most skilled and calculating practitioners” (p. 9). Laptop from Hell gave us glimpses into “the Biden family business, involving the president’s brothers as well as Hunter” from 2010 to 2019, detailing “Joe’s life as the globe-trotting vice president of the Obama administration, the favor-trading senator from Delaware who would go on to become leader of the free world. The laptop also puts the lie to President Biden’s repeated claims that he knew nothing about his son’s shady business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, and beyond” (p. 11). He was a discreet but deeply involved player in Hunter’s endeavors. This was simply part of the “Delaware Way” whereby Joe Biden (for four decades) “had leveraged a quid pro quo system of cronyism and trading favors for political influence” (p. 57). As Vice President, Joe determined to “extend the ‘Delaware Way’ template internationally by using his son (often assisted by Joe’s devoted younger brother Jim) as bagman for family. During his decades as a senator, “Joe had become expert at not getting caught doing anything illegal or too obviously unethical. Never be too greedy, never leave a trail, never say too much—and always, but always, play the sympathy card if the heat comes on” (p. 58). He carefully cultivated his public persona as an honest man with a wholesome family.
Privately, however, Biden wanted to head up a Delaware version of the Kennedy clan. “He constructed a mythical persona full of tall tales of derring-do, exaggerations, and outright lies about his accomplishments. He lied about nonexistent academic awards and scholarships. He plagiarized speeches willy-nilly, and in one infamous case, appropriated the personal life story of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, pretending that he, too, was descended from coal miners and was the first in his family to get a college degree ‘in a thousand generations.’ He routinely repeated far-fetched stories with himself as the big guy, including a favorite in which he single-handedly faced down a ‘bad dude’ named ‘Corn Pop’ who was armed with a straight razor and ‘ran a bunch of bad boys.’ He pretended that he trained as a racial activist in black churches, claimed he was at the center of the civil rights movement in Selma and Birmingham, and stated he had been arrested in Soweto on his way to see Nelson Mandela in prison. None of it was true. Each lie served to boost his ego, to place him as the shining superhero of every grandiose story, smarter, tougher, more honorable than anyone, with the best marriage, the best children, the best house, the best life” (p. 77).
Back to The Big Guy! Miranda reassesses the cultural elites’ reaction to her 2020 New York Post articles. “There was,” she says, “a whole constellation of government and private organizations that came together to pre-bunk and then crush the story of alleged Biden corruption, illustrating what one journalist called the “Censorship Industrial Complex” (p. 135). Anthony Blinken, who would become Joe Biden’s secretary of state, “set in motion one of the most brazen dirty tricks in US electoral history. Using the intelligence community to sound the false alarm of ‘Russian disinformation,’ ground already prepared by corrupt elements inside the FBI, he set out to discredit the whole laptop story” (p. 140). He persuaded 51 prominent, retired members of the CIA and FBI to sign a letter claiming Russia was somehow responsible for the laptop and it certainly helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.
One congressman concerned by the Bidens’ financial affairs was Kentucky’s James Comer. Given his background in banking he understood the complex records covering their endeavors. The more corruption he found “and the closer he got to Joe, the more vicious and personal were the attacks from opposition research groups funded by deep-pocketed Democrat dark money groups that were supporting Joe and Hunter” (p. 68). But the facts roared like thunder. “Comer’s committee produced five detailed ‘Bank Memorandums’ in 2023 tracing some of the millions of dollars in foreign money that had flowed through the accounts and laying out the opaque corporate structure of shell companies associated with the Bidens, most of which were formed in Delaware during the eight years of Joe’s vice presidency” (p. 68). Before Joe announced his run for the presidency in 2016, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, Dr. Gal Luft, tried to inform the DOJ about the Biden’s “shady business with China” (p. 85). “Luft told them about the millions of dollars CEFC had paid Hunter and Jim Biden, and that Biden family associate Rob Walker was involved in distributing the payments, a fact later corroborated by bank records subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee” (p. 87). But rather than follow up on this lead, the DOJ turned on Luft and tried to prosecute him for various misdeeds.
Shortly before the 2020 election a former Hunter Biden business associate, Tony Bobulinski, went public with details concerning the family’s China connections. The FBI had told Bobulinski “not to walk in the front door when he came for a ‘proffer’ interview to warn them about his former business partner Hunter Biden’s lucrative deals with China, and the potential compromise of his father, who might soon be president.” He entered a nondescript office rather than the official FBI facility. A day earlier he “had appeared in Nashville at a press conference before the final presidential debate, as a ‘special guest’ of the Trump campaign to corroborate the New York Post’s reporting from Hunter’s laptop about Joe’s alleged involvement in his son’s seeming foreign influence peddling operation” (p. 150). He disputed Joe Biden’s claims to have no role in his son’s business deals. He said he had “first-hand” knowledge to the contrary, having dealt personally with Joe as well as Hunter. “In fact, Hunter often referred to his father as ‘the big guy’ or ‘my chairman’” (p. 153). Though Bobulinski’s words were largely disregarded by most of the media in 2020, he would, in 2024, testify before Congress: “From my direct personal experience . . . it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family. Joe Biden was more than a participant in and beneficiary of his family’s business; he was an enabler, despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability. The only reason any of these international business transactions took place—with tens of millions of dollars flowing directly to the Biden family—was because Joe Biden was in high office. The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period” (p. 163).
In addition to Bobulinski, Devon Archer provided details regarding the Bidens. One of Hunter ’s closest business associates, Archer went to prison for crimes committed after the two parted ways. Hoping to shorten his sentence, Archer offered to testify before the congressional Oversight Committee and “testified that Hunter put his VP dad on the speakerphone more than 20 times during meetings with foreign clients. The very point of getting Joe on the phone was to demonstrate that his important father was available at a moment’s notice to chat with the shady oligarchs in Paris or Dubai or Lake Como who showered Hunter with millions of dollars and lavish gifts. ‘You do a favor for me you are my friend; you do a favor for my son, and you are a friend for life’ was one of Joe’s favorite sayings, according to Archer. He would repeat the phrase time and again to his son’s business partners. It left nobody in any doubt that paying money to Hunter was the equivalent of paying it to Joe, only better” (p. 252). Archer believed Joe was the titular head of the family business and oversaw a process garnering millions of dollars for its coffers.
Devine devotes a number of chapters to the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt country with which Joe Biden had extensive involvements. Hunter wanted to get appointed to the board of Burisma, an energy company, providing an $83,333 monthly payment. Soon after securing his seat, a Burisma executive urged him to “use your influence” in Washington to promote the company. In Ukraine, a prominent prosecutor, Viktor Slokin, was assigned the task of investigating Burisma. “He prides himself on his integrity and was not” regarded as corrupt by ordinary Ukrainians during his decades as a prosecutor, a miracle in a country where nothing is as it seems, oligarchs rule the roost, and prosecuting your political opponents is par for the course (p. 291). Then Vice President Joe Biden flew in and denounced the “cancer of corruption” harming Ukraine, though privately he was working to get Prosecutor General Shokin fired. Later Biden bragged that he told the Ukrainians: “‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’” (p. 310). And, sure enough, Shokin was summarily fired.
Devine considers Shokin a credible witness. In 2020 he published a book telling his side of the story (which the CIA tried to suppress) entitled: True Stories Of Joe Biden’s International Corruption In Ukraine or Who Cannot Be The President Of The United States. The next year he talked with Brian Kilmeade on Fox TV and said he was fired “‘at the insistence of the then Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma’ . . . . When asked about Devon Archer’s testimony that he was a threat to Burisma, Shokin agreed he was, ‘because [Archer] understood, and so did Vice President Biden, that if I had continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have found the facts about the [allegedly] corrupt activities that they were engaging in. That included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others.’ When asked: ‘Do you believe that Joe Biden or Hunter Biden got bribes?’ Shokin replied, ‘I do not want to deal in unproven facts, but my firm personal conviction is that, yes, this was the case’” (p. 334).
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Miranda Devine’s appraisal of the Bidens is not new. For years Peter Schweizer has scoured the records of powerful political and business figures, diligently exposing the corruption of both Republicans and Democrats. He critiqued the Clintons but also exposed Republicans such as Senator Mitch McConnell who had questionable ties to China. Very much a muckraker, Schweizer doubtlessly seizes upon especially egregious details and probably fails to provide proper contexts, but he does give us the kind of investigative journalism needed to hold the powerful accountable. The Biden family has appeared in three of his works. Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption: The Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2020; Kindle Edition) devotes one chapter to Joe Biden and his “self-enriching” schemes, involving “no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie” (p. 48). In Joe’s endless political campaigns, beginning in 1972, family members served as campaign and finance managers and were richly rewarded for doing so. “Valerie ran all of his senate campaigns, as well as his presidential runs in 1988 and 2008. But she was also a senior partner in a political messaging firm named Joe Slade White & Company; the only two executives listed at the firm were Joe Slade White and Valerie. The firm received large fees from the Biden campaigns that Valerie was running. Two and a half million dollars in consulting fees flowed to her firm from” contributions for his “2008 presidential bid alone” (p. 54). Running for the Senate in 1972 Biden admitted he “went to the big guys for the money” and was willing “to prostitute” himself in the process. This meant delivering the goods the “big guys” wanted. Predictably, as a senator he routinely supported legislation favoring the corporations chartered in Delaware, including banks, credit card giants, and law firms engaged in lucrative litigation, especially dubious asbestos-damage suits. He also helped his sons Beau and Hunter get good positions with legal firms or as lobbyists pulling in high-dollar “consulting fees.”
An illuminating episode showing the Biden family strategy involved StartUp Health, established by three Philadelphia family members. Obamacare had just been enacted, and various firms were competing to cash in on its provisions. In 2011 two StartUp executives scored a meeting with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office. The very next day the company was featured at a HHS conference. “StartUp Health would continue to enjoy access to the highest levels of the White House as they worked to build up the business. Indeed, StartUp Health executives became regular visitors to the White House. Should you wonder why, just note that the chief medical officer of StartUp Health was Howard Krein, who was married to Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley. “Advancing the commercial interests of StartUp Health using the Oval Office and Air Force Two would continue over the next half-decade while Biden was in office” (p. 71). Needless to say, StartUp Health prospered. As did Ashley Biden!
The most recent Schweizer treatise is Red Handed: How America’s Elites Get Rich Helping China Win (New York: HarperCollins, c. 2022; Kindle Edition), showing how congressmen, Silicon Valley technocrats, Wall Street brokers, diplomats, the Bush and Trouderau “dynasties,” and scores of academics line up get lucrative deals with China. Leading the crowd, naturally, are the Bidens. Repeating much of what he detailed in earlier books, Schweizer says the Biden-China ties continued. Father and son simply follow a “business model offering access to the highest levels of power in Washington in exchange for big-money international deals” (p. 15). This was evident when, soon after Joe Biden was elected in 2020, a meeting of prominent Chinese businessmen and Communist Party leaders revealed their delight at the good news. “They smiled, laughed, and applauded as [a respected insider, Di] discussed the global stage and China’s influence in the United States.” “Old friends” in Washington and on Wall Street, he assured them would prove helpful. Alluding to the new president’s “son’s deals, the audience laughed knowingly. ‘There are indeed buy-and-sell transactions involved in here, Di added” (p. 10). Vice President Biden’s door was frequently (if secretly and off-the-books) open to Chinese leaders, and Di obviously expected the pattern would continue while he was president. Such transactions, Schweizer calculates, have brought the Bidens “some $31 million from Chinese businessmen with very close ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence during and after Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president. Indeed, as of this writing, some of those financial relationships remain intact.” Though Hunter Biden was most visible in these endeavors, newly-uncovered documents “provide even more evidence that this is a story about not just Hunter Biden, but Joe Biden himself” (p. 11). Emails from Hunter show him claiming he gave “Pop” significant sums. The initials JRB (Joseph Robinette Biden) appear in correspondence discussing money. For a decade Hunter paid for his father’s multiple private phone lines. He also paid remodeling costs for Joe’s Delaware home. As the cascade of data flows on, the pattern gets ever-clearer: the Biden Family “Delaware Way” brought them carloads of cash. That Joe Biden occupied the very highest offices in Washington, despite a tawdry record easily accessible to the public, says much about the state of this nation. Given the Biden record, it’s no surprise that he granted last minute pardons to family and friends as he walked out of the White House. # # #