Vice President Joe Biden speaks as he campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at Bucks County Community College in Bristol, Pa., Friday, Oct. 7, 2016. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has an extremely checkered history when it comes to business dealings and ethics. Not so much anything he did in those business dealings, but how he possibly got them. Namely, the implication based on serious evidence is that his father used his influence as Vice President to get Hunter some very lucrative positions in countries like Ukraine and China.

Until now, this has mostly been the domain of right-wing media. That was to be expected as anything that’s harmful to a Democrat is typically buried in the mainstream media.

We’ve now entered a different phase though, as the Democratic primary heats up and the debates start next week. Biden is not currently running against a Republican, he’s running against 20 (or so) other Democrats and those Democrats want to take him down. That means the media can’t just ignore what’s happening in unison anymore.

Case in point, this latest write-up by ABC News, which goes right at the heart of Joe Biden’s scandals involving influence peddling for his son.

In April of 2014, the then-vice president led a U.S. delegation to Kiev tasked with rooting out corruption and advocating for Ukraine to diminish its reliance on Russian oil. The Obama administration had pledged aid money to support a fledgling Ukrainian administration recovering from a revolution that ousted the country’s previous leader. “You have to fight the cancer of corruption that is endemic in your system right now,” Biden told the Ukrainian parliament during the first of several post-revolution visits to the country. “And with the right investments and the right choices, Ukraine can reduce its energy dependence and increase its energy security.” Within weeks of his visit, Ukraine’s largest energy producer, Burisma Energy, appointed Hunter Biden to a paid directorship on the firm’s board. Just months before, in December of 2013, there was a similar episode when the then-vice president led an Obama administration effort to tamp down tensions in the Far East. Hunter Biden disembarked from Air Force Two in Beijing alongside his father, ahead of a series of meetings between the vice president and several high-ranking members of China’s ruling party. Upon his departure, Joe Biden called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “good friend.” Within weeks of that visit, Hunter Biden was doing business there, as a participant in a firm called Bohai Harvest RST. The corporation formed a novel Chinese-American investment partnership that involved such Chinese state-owned firms as the Bank of China. Reports at the time said they sought to raise $1.5 billion.

The idea that all of that is just coincidence strains belief. The younger Biden was even on the trip to China. Two weeks later he’s getting a lucrative position with a Chinese investment firm that’s partnered with Chinese government owned banks. Come on.

Biden’s issues in Ukraine also go deeper than just his son getting a job out of nowhere. There’s also the admission by Biden that he threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine if they didn’t fire a prosecutor who just happened to be investigating the very firm Hunter Biden was working for.

Here’s the details.

Back in 2016, as The Daily Wire previously reported, Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to replace the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. Biden later bragged in 2018 that he was able to get Shokin removed by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. Shokin was fired. What Biden neglected to mention is that at the time he was working to get Shokin fired, the prosecutor was looking into Burisma Holdings, a company that employs Hunter Biden. Hunter’s American based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, also received monthly transfers of more than $166,000 from Burisma from 2014 to 2015. Shokin was investigating these payments, the Wire previously reported. With Shokin out of the picture, the investigation into Burisma and by extension, Hunter, ended. This kept the issue from affecting Democrats in 2016, specifically, Hillary Clinton’s election campaign. Clinton still lost.

We are again told by the Biden campaign that it’s all just happenstance.

But it’s not just foreign dealings haunting Joe Biden in relation to his son’s actions. This news broke today and could get messy in a hurry.

Just in: An Arkansas woman claims Hunter Biden is the father of her child — and she’s suing to prove it. https://t.co/6B9cWjUDXm — Connor Ryan (@connortryan) June 20, 2019

This stems from a women who gave birth to a child back in 2018. She’s not making this accusation idly or just in the media. She’s going to court and putting the weight of action behind what she’s saying. What the circumstances of the relationship were aren’t really known yet. Did Hunter Biden abandon the mother and child knowingly? Is it even his child? We’ll find out eventually but his past doesn’t do much to absolve him of the possibility. He was revealed as part of the Ashley Madison hack back in 2015, a pro-adultery website. After getting divorced, he dated his deceased brother’s widow and just recently married another woman last month.

If this were a general election, I’d dismiss all this as going nowhere. Noway would our stalwart media allow any of this to take down Biden in a race against Trump. But we aren’t in a general election and there are a lot of 2020 candidates gunning for him who have more liberal credibility with the Democratic primary base. That means the media will end up reporting this stuff and it’s going to get brought up, whether in interviews or in the debates.

Biden’s got a slog ahead of him and things are going to get ugly. Of course, if he makes it to the general election, you can expect all of this to go away very quickly.

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