He's come a long way from his nutty-uncle gaffe-a-thon persona, and with a slew of medals and honors from President Obama, he presents the very picture of the respectable modern statesman. He showed up at a lot of foreign funerals for heads of state. He milked the sympathy factor over his son's death from cancer. He wore a suit. He projected gravitas. Yet he also manages to have a hard-hat appeal and a mainstream-Democratic-ideological image, which seems to be the right formula for Democrats winning in most of their races these days.

No surprise, he's the Democratic frontrunner in polls among Democrats with a seven-point lead, campaigning even now with fire to burn, because he's convinced he made a mistake in not running back in 2016.

Except there's some dirty laundry now that's getting some airing.

Biden, it turns out, is loaded with dirty deals spread out the "legal" way, among his family members, which has made his tribe immensely rich. What's more, he's doing it the swamp way, which keeps the long arm of the law out of the picture, based on deftly navigating the political loopholes, and a sharkily deft capacity to use advantages. According to the indefatigable investigative reporter Peter Schweizer, who's written a book about this:

"One of the best ways to make friends in Washington is to do deals with family members," he continued. "Joe Biden every year as vice president, he has to disclose his income, assuming those disclosures are honest. He can't have a big, fat check from the Chinese government in that disclosure form, but his adult son, Hunter Biden, he doesn't have to disclose anything."

Schweizer reported a lot of this stuff back in March when his book about swamp corruption came out. He has since unearthed ugly new self-dealing from the Democratic frontrunner. According to PJ Media, quoting from Schweizer, who told Fox News:

A bank account that Hunter Biden drew a lot of money from and that a lot of foreign entities put a lot of money into," the author noted. "Just to give you an idea, over a 14-month period, from 2014 through early 2016, while Joe Biden is vice president of the United States, a Ukrainian company called Burisma – it's controlled by a very corrupt oligarch – sends three million dollars into this account. A Chinese government entity called Bohai Harvest – which is run by the Bank of China – sends $650,000 into this account," Schweizer added. "There's $1.2 million that comes from an LLC with a small boutique Swiss bank. We don't know who's behind the LLC. The bank itself has been charged in six countries for money laundering, so that makes it kind of sketchy.

This all stands out, and it shows how dirty and underhanded the Biden-led swamp's power games are. Not only is the swamp-left determined to unseat President Trump, but it seems to be obsessed with self-dealing, and in ways that are unavailable to ordinary Americans. Joe Biden can keep going as he presents himself as the candidate of the little guy, but these billion-dollar political-connection deals tell a different story.

It's unknown how well the Trump campaign can fight back against them, given that the left has flung similar charges of self-dealing. But if Joe means to run as the anti-Trump, the exposure of his financial dealings is not going to help him. And without a Mister Clean image, what does he have? Higher taxes? Economic stagnation? His platform is a failure in comparison to Trump's.

Spread the news of this swampy self-dealing far and wide, because Biden's laundry is stinky, indeed.

Image credit: Doug Jones for Senate Committee via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.