The week that Donald Trump was arrested in New York, less than a mile away from the courthouse, Hunter Biden was all smiles as he checked in on his latest art exhibition in Soho, at the George Berges Gallery, where his paintings reportedly sell for as much as $500,000 apiece to persons unknown.
The first son seemed untroubled by the ongoing investigations into the millions he was paid by China in return for leveraging the power of his father’s vice presidency around the world.
As his wife Melissa Cohen flashed shopping bags from nearby boutiques, Hunter was positively cocky, posing for a Post photographer outside the gallery Sunday and thanking the paper for publicizing his latest grift.
If ever you wanted proof of a dual system of justice, merry, privileged Hunter is its ultimate embodiment.
When the president was asked by a reporter Tuesday if Trump’s indictment is “politically divisive,” his face broke into a sly grin and then he quietly chuckled to himself, seeming to bite his lip to contain his glee.
Yes, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s sham indictment of Trump is a political gift to Joe Biden, whose bid for a second term rightly should be a dead duck in 2024, given his disastrous reign, advancing decrepitude, and growing family corruption scandals.
But everything — from Chinese spy balloons and mishandled classified documents to the border and debt crises — is buried under an avalanche of Trump derangement pumped out 24/7 by the media.
With at least another three political witch hunts being cooked up by partisan prosecutors around the country, it’s clear that “Get Trump” is the Democrats’ 2024 campaign strategy.
We are watching in real time as they interfere with another election — by trying to take out the GOP front-runner with flimsy allegations that he hid hush money to a porn star.
Biden foreshadowed this move the day after the midterms last November.
When asked about Trump running for president again, he said he would make sure he never takes power again.
“We just have to demonstrate that he will not take power if he does run, making sure he — under legitimate efforts of our Constitution — does not become the next president again.”
The next month, one of the top-ranking left-wing ideologues in Biden’s Department of Justice, Matthew Colangelo, was sent to Bragg’s office to run the Trump case.
As Mike Davis, former chief counsel for nominations to the Senate Judiciary Committee, put it, Colangelo, a former NAACP lawyer, is “the key link” between Bragg and the DOJ “in their efforts to politicize and weaponize our federal and state justice systems to get Trump.”
The irony of Bragg’s case is that Democrats are interfering with the 2024 election with allegations that Trump interfered with the 2016 election.
And they are doing it right as the Republican House is investigating their interference in the 2020 election, when they colluded with Big Tech, the FBI and 51 dishonest former intelligence officials to censor The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Trump railed about that election interference to supporters at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night: “The FBI and DOJ in collusion with Twitter and Facebook, in order not to say anything bad about the Hunter Biden laptop from hell — which exposes the Biden family as criminals — which according to the pollsters would have made a 17-point difference in the election result.”
Everyone knows the Trump indictment is a joke that never should have made it to court.
But it already has served its purpose as a giant smokescreen to hide Biden corruption revelations from Republican investigators.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has been methodically subpoenaing bank records to reveal the money trail from China to the Biden family.
His first break two weeks ago was drowned out within 24 hours by a convenient leak about an impending Trump arrest — but it is still a bombshell that isn’t going away.
Comer revealed that within weeks of Biden’s vice presidency ending, $1.075 million was paid by State Energy HK, an affiliate of Chinese Communist Party-controlled CEFC China Energy, to his son Hunter, his brother Jim Biden, his daughter-in-law Hallie Biden, who was Hunter’s lover, and a fourth unidentified “Biden.”
The money was funneled through a proxy and parceled out in 15 smaller payments to five accounts over two months, which is what you do if you’re trying to disguise a dicey transaction.
There are plenty more bank records to come, and Hunter’s former business partners are starting to sing.
“The Committee is concerned about the national security implications of a President’s or Vice President’s immediate family receiving such lucrative financial deals from foreign nationals and foreign companies without any oversight,” Comer wrote in a letter to the White House.
But when a reporter asked Biden about the payments as he was heading off for a long weekend in Delaware, he snarled, “That’s not true.”
Comer won’t let the lie stand and has demanded an apology.
“It’s rich that the president just stood there and lied to the American people,” he told Fox News.
“It’s also rich that the mainstream media hasn’t called him out on it. Where are the fact-checkers?”
“Eventually, the mainstream media is not going to be able to let him stand up there and lie to the American people about the fact that his family’s taken millions and millions of dollars from our adversary.”
Even as Trump was being arraigned, Comer’s committee was hearing “startling” testimony from Kathy Chung, Biden’s former assistant when he was VP, who was hired on Hunter’s recommendation.
What she said under oath Tuesday “undermines” the White House narrative about Biden’s classified documents.
In 2017 when Biden left office, boxes of classified documents were driven around in personal vehicles and stored in three locations in Washington, DC, including in an office in Chinatown.
“The boxes were not in a ‘locked closet’ at the Penn Biden Center and remained accessible to Penn Biden employees as well as potentially others,” Comer said in a statement. “We need to find out who had access to these documents.”
What’s more, Chung was told by then-White House counsel Dana Remus to retrieve the boxes in May 2022, not November 2022, as Biden’s attorneys claimed.
So when Biden signed off on the FBI raid of Trump’s Florida home in August and denounced his predecessor’s handling of classified material as “totally irresponsible” in September, he knew very well that he had a far bigger problem.
Classified documents so far have been found in at least four locations, including his garage and office in Delaware, and his lawyer’s Boston office.
Was the Mar-a-Lago raid to take the heat off Biden?
Anything is possible, given how shamelessly unprincipled today’s Democrats are in their pursuit of power.
The fact they haven’t bothered to make the Trump indictment even marginally plausible is a sign of their cocksure arrogance. They don’t even pretend to abide by the rules.
Progressives take the Midwest
Most of us were too distracted by the Trump drama Tuesday to notice two crucial elections playing out in the Midwest.
Radical leftist Brandon Johnson, who promised to defund the police and raise taxes, is the new mayor of Chicago. You have to wonder about voters who would get rid of Lori Lightfoot only to choose someone arguably worse. They rejected a relatively sensible moderate Democrat to do so. Chicago’s crime problem is not getting better anytime soon.
Then, in Wisconsin, a soft-on-crime liberal, Janet Protasiewicz, beat conservative former Justice Daniel Kelly for a berth on the state Supreme Court.
Protasiewicz is a Bragg type who reportedly sentenced a man who raped his cousin to just 14 months in prison.
Her victory will flip the court liberal, from the conservative majority it has enjoyed for 15 years.
Given Democrats’ current propensity for meddling in electoral technicalities to suit themselves, a court that gives them a green light doesn’t bode well for Republicans in 2024.
