“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
Former Vice President Joe Biden has had a terrible few months, but a new allegation of fleecing the federal government for his own financial benefit is only making things worse.
Not that things aren’t bad enough for Biden as it is. The 2020 Democratic primaries were supposed to be his to lose, according to the media. As recently as three weeks ago, national polls had Biden leading his closest competitor, Senator Bernie Sanders, I-V.T., by seven points—not an invincible lead, but comfortably outside the margin of error.
His campaign performance had been shaky, but so the person the media called his most serious threat, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-M.A., had begun her own collapse after video emerged tangling her up in a series of lies and misrepresentations.
The pundits, experts, and TV personalities thought Biden would pick up the slack and ride the new momentum to the nomination.
Then the voters weighed in.
The Iowa caucuses put Biden in fourth place, something Biden said felt like “a gut punch.” That turned into a one-two combination when he left New Hampshire in fifth place on Monday night, without winning a single delegate.
Now, as Biden promises he’ll ride a wave of African-American support into the nomination in South Carolina, Nevada, and Super Tuesday, the last thing he needs is yet another financial scandal — but that’s exactly what he got this week.
One of the perks of being vice president is having armed protection for yourself and your family, 24/7.
The Secret Service’s state of the art defense techniques beat the best alarm system available to the richest Americans.
But getting that benefit 24 hours a day, for free, wasn’t enough for the Bidens. The vice president found a way to make money on the deal.
When Secret Service agents decided the best way to keep him safe was to stay in a cottage on his property, Joe Biden charged them rent.
Joe Biden actually made his taxpayer-funded bodyguards pay him for the privilege of defending his life.
The federal database of government spending, USASpending.gov, shows that the U.S. government paid $92,400 to “Joseph R. Biden Jr.” of Wilmington, Delaware.
Between May 2014 and April 2017, Biden charged the Department of Homeland Security “rental payments” that were paid between $13,200 to $26,400 in allotments.
The payment was first discovered by conservative journalist Timothy P. Carney of The Washington Examiner.
“Being president or vice president shouldn’t give you an easy way to make money while you’re in office,” Carney wrote.
Biden’s rental fees are small potatoes compared to Washington’s enormous pork barrel spending—but it’s still a record-breaking kind of corruption.
“Other presidents, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, did not charge the Secret Service, even though they could have,” Carney’s column stated.
Crossing that ethical line makes people queasy, he said.
“If there’s a gray area on whether you’re financially benefiting from your government job, you ought to err on the side of not benefiting,” wrote Carney. “That’s part of being a public servant.”
The scandal doesn’t involve the millions that Hunter Biden managed to rake in as part of his sweetheart deal as part of Burisma’s deals with Ukraine, or the $1.5 billion Hunter pried out of a deal with China while his father was vice president.
It isn’t as ethically compromised as Joe Biden’s brother, Frank, who bragged, on video, that he used his brother’s connections as a paid lobbyist. Or as corrupt as his other brother, Jimmy, who admitted people paid him because they “want to invest in Joe Biden” through a back-door intermediary.
It’s not much money by D.C. standards and, Carney notes, Donald Trump has continued the practice.
But it’s still wrong. It says that Joe Biden basically believes the American people should pay him just for being alive. That’s an elite mentality unfit for a public servant.
With his family’s history of grifting, it makes Joe Biden look like the kind of man who’ll do anything he can to make a buck at taxpayer’s expense (something not true of Donald Trump, who doesn’t even collect a salary as president).
The former Democratic presidential frontrunner looks like a con man. That’s bad, but it’s not the real scandal.
The most outrageous part of this entire fiasco is that Biden, whose gun control policy has been described by National Review as “a constitutional disaster,” would not give law-abiding Americans the right to protect themselves and their families the way they had to pay the Secret Service to protect his.
Unlike the other scandals, this one doesn’t go away if—or when—Biden loses the primaries (again). Every single Democrat running for president has the same policy, or worse. Taxpayers should hand over their paychecks to protect the politicians’ families, and hand over their guns so they can’t protect their own.
American voters are sick of the hypocrisy of politicians preying on them. That doesn’t sit well for Biden, or any Democrat running in 2020.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”