This is one of the reasons Washington is called the “swamp.”
Beneath the surface of any major issue in the nation’s capital, it seems, there’s always a network of connections that aren’t visible to the public eye, but have a way of pulling even the dankest elements together.
And when it comes to President Joe Biden, that connection always seems to come back to the fetid record of the infamous son Hunter.
In a development that should surprise exactly no one (disgust is a different matter), it turns out that Jeff Zients, the former Biden COVID response coordinator who will be taking over as the president’s chief aide when departing Chief of Staff Ron Klain heads for the exits, met with Hunter at least three times back in 2016, when Joe Biden was still the vice president, according to a Fox News report.
“Jeff Zients, the incoming White House chief of staff, met multiple times in 2016 with President Biden’s son Hunter Biden who is facing criminal and congressional probes into his past business dealings.”https://t.co/sILdB9k8w5
— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) January 24, 2023
The report, which cites the goldmine of information known as Hunter Biden’s laptop, doesn’t describe what took place in the meetings, but does imply that there was serious money and power on the table. And it appears that Joe Biden was present for on at least two of the occasions, which took place at the U.S. Naval Observatory, the vice presidential residence.
According to Fox, the first meeting, Feb. 12, 2016, involved the Bidens, Zients and David Rubinstein, the founder of the massive investment firm The Carlyle Group (incorporated, naturally, in the Bidens’ home state of Delaware).
The second, less than two weeks later on Feb. 23, involved the Bidens, current White House counselor Steve Richetti and David G. Bradley, chairman of Atlantic Media, publisher of the liberal publication The Atlantic.
On May 24, according to Fox, Hunter Biden, Zients and Bradley met with Eric Lander, a biomedical researcher and major investor who became the top science (read COVID) adviser in the Biden White House until he was forced out in February of last year over reports that he “bullied and demeaned subordinates.”
Also in attendance at that meeting, according to Fox, was Richard Klausner, whom the San Francisco Business Journal described in a glowing 2021 profile as “the elder statesman” of biotech. As a man who once served as director of global health for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it’s safe to say Klausner moves in monied atmospheres.
In addition, Hunter was invited to a fourth meeting involving Zients at the Naval Observatory, according to Fox, but it wasn’t clear if he attended.
According to Fox, Zients, Bradley and Lander were all members of the board of the Biden Cancer Initiative, a family non-profit formed in 2017 ostensibly to boost “partnerships” to research cancer treatment and cures, though it appears to have mainly paid exorbitant administrative salaries, as the New York Post reported in November 2020.
So, it’s a fine, incestuous club that’s being run in the Biden White House.
As Biden’s COVID response coordinator, Zients was in charge of just one of the disastrous prongs of White House power. (He can’t be blamed for the disgrace of abandoning Afghanistan to sadistic Islamist thugs who hate the United States, of course, or for economic policies that have led to killer inflation. But in the Biden White House, failure has many fathers.)
And now he’s back to become the chief gatekeeper for Biden and the enforcer of White House policies. And as an associate of Hunter Biden, no less. That should make every American feel comforted.
The fact that he was an acting director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Obama presidency and sat on the board of the Bidens’ shaky, now-suspended cancer nonprofit just makes it all the more interconnected.
And to top all of that off, he has a paper record of meeting with Hunter Biden during the year of 2016, when the ever-industrious Hunter was making a king’s ransom sitting on the board of directors for a Ukraine energy company (which Joe Biden was arguably using U.S. taxpayer dollars to protect), serving as a board member and chairman of the World Food Program USA, and living the kind of life that led him to return a rental car in the middle of the night in Prescott, Arizona, that was still full of personal belongings like driver’s licenses, a Secret Service business card, and an attorney general’s badge.
There was also a crack pipe and “a white powdery substance in the arm rest of the vehicle.”
It was a year of highs and lows for Hunter, clearly.
There’s no public record of what took place in those meetings. Given the cast of characters, though, starting with the disgraceful Hunter Biden, it’s a good bet that they weren’t entirely devoted to the well-being of the United States of America.
But they’re definitely an example of why Washington — a city of connections of power and money — is almost universally known as “the swamp.” No matter what the issue making headlines is, there’s more going on under the surface, invisible to all but a tiny, tiny fraction of Americans.
And this time, amid the swirling eddies of hidden agendas, the miasma of dishonesty that hangs over the White House like a rancid fog, there is the festering presence of Hunter Biden.
Does anyone else think something stinks?
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
