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Old 10-02-2019, 08:01 AM   #10
Pete F.
Canceled
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: vt
Posts: 13,429
I guess you guys will have to vote for someone for President outside the Political class and not a Russian Puppet.

Some Republicans argue that Hunter Biden’s job might be legal but still doesn’t look right — because he appeared to be trading on his connection to his father.

They have a point. Hunter Biden is only the latest in a long line of relatives of elected leaders who appear to have used their names to open doors. In recent decades, Presidents Nixon, Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush all had troublesome family members.

Which brings us to three other children: Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump.

Donald Jr. and Eric run the Trump Organization, which their father still owns. They have promised to seek no new foreign deals while he is president, but they are still building real estate projects that were announced before his inauguration, and they say they will resume making deals after he leaves office.

Those self-imposed rules come with loopholes: Donald Jr. has met with wealthy prospective buyers in Indonesia, India and other countries since Trump took office.

Ivanka Trump, officially an advisor to the president, operated her fashion company for a year and a half after entering the White House. She closed it in 2018, saying it had become a distraction.

Meanwhile, she collected dozens of trademark grants in China under applications she filed before her father’s inauguration. In 2017, she received three trademarks on the same day she and her father dined with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago.

Anything illegal there? Not at all. But would she have been able to chat up the leader of the world’s second-largest economy if her father wasn’t president? Not a chance.

Just as with Hunter Biden, foreign governments and others see opportunities to curry favor by doing financial favors for a high official’s family.

On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin explained what he thought was wrong about the Biden case.

“What I do find inappropriate is the fact that Vice President Biden’s son did very significant business dealings in Ukraine,” he said.

Wouldn’t that restriction cover Trump’s children?

Mnuchin fumbled. “I don’t want to get into more of the details,” he said, then insisted that the Trump deals “pre-dated his presidency.”

Nonsense. If Trump’s kids get a pass for cashing in while their dad sits in the Oval Office, Hunter Biden does too.

But let’s give Mnuchin credit for proposing, if only inadvertently, a very sensible “Mnuchin Rule”: relatives of the president and vice president should not engage in “significant business dealings” abroad. Sorry, kids. That means you too, Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr.

Critics of President Trump accused him of nepotism during the early days of his presidency when his daughter and her husband ended up with government jobs. However, a brief glance at American history shows many incidents of high-up government positions given to presidents' family members. It is hardly a rare occurrence in Washington, nor is it a particularly new phenomenon.

https://www.ranker.com/list/us-presi.../sarah-blumert

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