Hunter Biden now has a date with Congress. The president's son is scheduled to appear on December 13 to answer questions on his role in the alleged Biden corruption scandal. It is a long-awaited moment for the House Oversight Committee, which has assembled a damning array of evidence from shakedown messages to millions of dollars in transfers from shady foreign sources.
The only question now is which Hunter will appear. He has been reinvented by his lawyers and public relations team so many times, he now seems like a Sybil witness with carefully constructed alternative personalities.
Played by Sally Field in the 1976 movie, "Sybil" was believed to have had dissociative identity disorder with over a 100 separate personalities. In reality, the real Sybil (Shirley Mason) admitted that the different personalities were fake.
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We will have to wait for the public hearing to see which Hunter will appear. Here are some of the options from the Hunter Biden repertoire:
First, there is the gifted attorney and expert on issues ranging from trains to energy. For years, Joe Biden arranged for high-ranking positions like his appointment to the Amtrak Board of Directors –an appointment that even his nominating senator seemed to mock.
Second, there is Hunter, the sophisticated international businessman whose fame for financial acumen was sought globally by Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese and other companies. While admitting that his father's name helped him, Hunter insisted that his resume justified the foreign companies clamoring for his expertise, even instructing a reporter to "say it nicer" when pressed on such questions.
As the corruption scandal mounted, the Biden team and the media sought to portray Hunter as lacking responsibility for his action due to his addiction to drugs and alcohol. Of course, the 7% solution contradicts the earlier images and only begged the question of why these foreign figures would be clamoring for the services of a man who claimed that he was blacked out between trysts with high-priced prostitutes … for years.
Most recently, the "Dark Biden" emerged as his legal team pledged to attack witnesses and critics against him. Now Hunter was to be the insulted and angry son of a president who had enough of investigations. That image resonates in the letter from his counsel attacking all of these investigations as utterly baseless.
In reality, the hearing is likely to be a Sybil performance with each personality emerging when useful. Hunter will likely claim a lack of memory of many of the most embarrassing discoveries as the hopeless addict.
He will then fall back on his resume to claim that his appeal to foreign companies was his insights and experience. Angry Hunter will then appear at critical moments to express disgust with the committee and portray questions as attacking recovered addicts everywhere.
The one personality that is unlikely to manifest itself during the hearing is the one that has yet to appear in public: the honest Hunter. Even the mainstream media has largely abandoned its denial of the corruption in these contracts. Reporters now admit that this was raw influence peddling but insist that there is no evidence that President Biden personally benefited from the schemes, a view that I have previously contested.
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Yet, it will be difficult for Hunter to go before the committee and admit that he was selling access to the highest bidders … but he was really scamming them. It is easier to claim that he was a hopeless blacked-out junkie who was somehow able to maintain a global system of dozens of accounts and shell companies to transfer millions of dollars.
The risks of a moment of clarity and honesty may be too great for Hunter. If he recalls these events and messages, he will not only contradict prior denials but face potential criminal charges for any factual misrepresentations. The Justice Department has allowed felonies to lapse against Hunter, but these would be new potential charges with new statutes of limitation.
In the case of Sybil, her psychiatrist, Dr. Connie Wilbur, allegedly was told by his patient that she was making up these personalities but already had a book contract based on her original diagnosis. She went ahead with the book, which became a celebrated movie. It turned out that the existence of the personalities was simply a better story than the reality.
The media is in the same position with Hunter. After spending years suppressing the corruption scandal, they are left with an array of carefully constructed personalities that will all likely be on display in December. They and the public will then be able to see a performance that could put Sally Fields to shame as the various Hunters are called before Congress at the same time.
Like the movie, it might be hard to keep track and, like one of Sybil's personalities, you are left asking "Who dat?" The answer is that they are all Hunter and none of them have much to say about corruption.
