• Compiled from news reports
Atlas of the Hunter Biden scandal
• What this means for Biden
The former national security adviser Denis McDonough faced questions as to why the former head of the transition team hired Hunter Biden as an assistant. Biden is the son of the former vice-president, Joe Biden.
• The new look of President Biden
He now says: “He was not involved in the president’s direction of the transition nor the actions of the transition. But you know, for me, as the senator from Delaware, a family is a tight circle. His name will be looked back on as such and as such. But he worked as an employee on the transition team, as will many other people. He has been an honest, hard worker and a good employee on the transition team. That has been the truth of the matter.”
Holder as Holder: the former attorney general given a chance to explain his actions Read more
• This resignation is ‘a memorial to the way politics works’
Hunter Biden’s decision to resign shows “the way politics works in this country” – as one Democrat put it. They suggested that Joe Biden’s son had to resign because this was “about optics of his dad’s presidential ambitions”.
Some commentators have also suggested that the pressure was mounting after a visit to Moscow in January where Biden met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
• Evidence of the Democratic character assassin culture
“Instead of somebody coming up behind you and dishing out this mud, now someone is coming up and splattering this in your face,” said Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations. She was making a reference to the tussle between Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein, a Green party candidate.
• Resignation will not tarnish the Joe Biden Democratic presidential ticket
It is a safe bet to assume that Joe Biden will not be running in 2020. There is a perception that Hunter Biden will be a very weak surrogate.
• The scandal won’t break away from the Beltway elite
Hunter Biden’s resignation exposes another thread in the swamp. Biden will be taken to task because of his relationship with McDonough, who was once serving as Barack Obama’s chief of staff. Some consider McDonough “pro-Biden”. Some speculate that Biden knew he was running into trouble and simply decided to resign now.
• What will happen to the website Democrats poured so much money into – Purple Hearts Journal?
The website first drew notice in November 2015, when it published a short story titled “Noncoding DNA and Structural Pathways” that was written by Todd Bauer, a fellow at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (which draws funding from federally funded research agencies) with limited understanding of DNA itself.