On Thursday night, the Justice Department unsealed nine new tax-charges against Hunter Biden. The new charges come as the president’s much-maligned son finds himself at the center of countless right-wing conspiracies, GOP-led investigations into his foreign business dealings, and a DOJ special counsel probe Biden doesn’t sit down for many interviews, but he did recently talk to his long-time friend and confidant: musician and activist Moby.
The first part of the lengthy two-part installment of the “Moby Pod” was recorded before the DOJ’s new charges, and released on Friday. Biden and Moby — who met while in recovery from addiction — spoke candidly about the near-constant stream of harassment and intimidation against himself and his family.
Tabloid newspapers have repeatedly written pieces detailing the location of Biden’s residence, no matter how many times he moves. According to Biden, when his wife Melissa was seven or eight months pregnant in 2020, one such article resulted in “half a dozen to a dozen people, mostly men, in MAGA hats, with bullhorns literally pounding at the front door.”
“So then we moved, in the middle of the night, literally left,” Biden added. “We left at midnight the next night, packed the entire house in a van and a friend of ours found us another place to stay. And we were able to hide out there for a period of time.”
According to Biden, the home they fled to would later be featured in articles by the New York Post and Daily Mail, and within days a “super right-wing filmmaker,” along with a crew of individuals rented canoes and harassed the family from the canal by their home for “a week straight.” In another incident, protesters with loudspeakers and bullhorns parked a truck displaying photographs outside of his home. Biden said that for days the noisy disturbances made it impossible to even put his son down for a nap.
“We became prisoners by virtue of that,” Biden said, “it was impossible to walk on the canal and look at the ducks and, you know, take the stroller to the beach when the sun was going down.”
For years the younger Biden had kept a low profile regarding the many investigations, conspiracies, and outright lies leveled against him, often under the advice of lawyers. In his view, fading into the background did virtually nothing to stem the tide of conservative ire. Recently, Biden has begun taking a more offensive role in his public defense, suing various individuals, including former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and the IRS over alleged criminal violations of his privacy.
Biden told Moby that the many conspiracies regarding his relationship with his father are reminiscent of the antics orchestrated by former President Nixon’s “dirty tricks” campaign, particularly given the overlapping involvement of characters like Roger Stone.
“The times have changed but the players have not,” Biden said. “I think that they took that lesson to heart and they decided that the one way in which they would be able to certainly undermine my dad’s confidence and ability to continue to campaign and move forward — particularly after the death of my brother [Beau Biden] — [would be] to [make him] think that he could lose his son who he’d just regained” from the throws of addiction. “And so they just began to attack, and attack, and attack.”
“What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to kill me, knowing that it will be a pain greater than my father could be able to handle, and so therefore destroying a presidency in that way,” he later explained.
But as Biden sees it, the vitriol and harassment leveled against him by former President Trump’s supporters is — in a way — understandable, given the extent to which unproven lies and fantastical claims about him have been amplified by right-wing media. “If you have been fed all of these lies, from that I am a pedophile and a sex trafficking maniac, then wouldn’t it be incumbent on you to have a deep hatred of me?” Biden asked. “Wouldn’t it be incumbent on you if you saw me at a restaurant, or with my two-year-old on my shoulders with his little Chewbacca outfit on Halloween to come running up to me and scream in my face?”
“I realized that it’s not about me,” he told Moby. “I realized that these people are just sad, very, very sick people that have most likely just faced traumas in their lives …. They’ve decided that they are going to turn [to an] evil that they decide that they’re going to inflict on the rest of the world.”
Hunter Biden’s finances have been under investigation for nearly five years. Three separate congressional committees are currently investigating him in the hopes of proving allegations of corruption against the president. Last month, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee rejected an offer from Biden to testify publicly before Congress regarding the unproven allegations of corruption the committee has made against him. On Wednesday, Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, (R-Ohio), threatened to hold Biden in contempt of Congress if he did not agree to a closed-door deposition.
“There is no ‘choice’ for Mr. Biden to make; the subpoenas compel him to appear for a deposition on December 13. If Mr. Biden does not appear for his deposition on December 13, 2023, the Committees will initiate contempt of Congress proceedings,” the chairmen wrote in a letter to Biden’s attorneys.
House Republicans are also attempting to move forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, which would place his son at the center of allegations of impropriety against the current president. But it seems that so far every supposed bombshell uncovered by the GOP has been unable to hold water. Most recently, claims by Comer of evidence linking Hunter Biden’s dealings with Chinese companies to an “influence peddling scheme” with the president turned out to be three payments made by Biden to his father to reimburse him for a car loan.
Source link: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/hunter-biden-right-wing-harassment-moby-1234921062/