Republicans in Washington who want to investigate the Bidens for corruption ought to investigate the Hutchinsons of Arkansas as well. It's all the same.
Let me hasten to explain what I mean by "all the same."
It's that both the sons, Hunter Biden and Asa Hutchinson III, have invited suspicions of cashing in on the high political positions of their dads, former Vice President Joe Biden and Governor Asa Hutchinson.
Both sons are entitled to make whatever money they can make within the law, and both these cases are fully within the law. It's hard to hamstring one's private economic opportunities on the basis of a relative's public trust.
Neither father did anything remotely corrupt, though both can be rightfully blamed for not drawing clear ethical lines between themselves and their sons' activities.
Vice presidents and governors ought to steer diligently clear of appearances that would raise reasonable suspicion. You can love your son while keeping your public duties wholly divorced from his private ones.
Republicans in Washington are wildly overstating Joe Biden's wrongdoing, while Asa Hutchinson has been gliding along without even much mention of strikingly similar circumstances in Arkansas.
The Arkansas Times blog made the first mention of Asa Hutchinson III's law firm getting work from Chinese firms locating in Arkansas with tax incentives granted by Hutchinson's administration. The Times reported that Asa III trailed his dad's official trade mission to China last month.
Talk Business and Politics, collaborating with KATV, Channel 7, interviewed the governor and his son for a substantive takeout Tuesday.
That's been the extent of news-coverage inconvenience for the Hutchinsons, even as the Biden-Hutchinson parallels are remarkable.
Hunter Biden has a paternity controversy in his background. Asa Hutchinson III has DWI charges in his.
When Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden took a lucrative position on the board of a gas company in Ukraine and accompanied his dad on a trip to China where he had landed an investment deal.
While Asa Hutchinson has been governor, Asa III has landed legal work--visa work, mostly--for three Chinese firms choosing during his dad's governorship to locate in Arkansas. Then when dad took the recent trade mission to China, Asa III paid his own way to call on clients and tag along with, though not as a part of, the official party.
In China, Asa III got his picture taken with his dad and several Chinese officials and posted the photograph on his Facebook page. His law firm's website displays a picture of the governor beside photographs of active attorneys in the firm and identifies the governor as the founder of the firm.
Joe Biden says that all he ever said to Hunter about his Ukrainian business activities was that he hoped his son knew what he was doing.
Asa Hutchinson told Talk Business that his son's law firm did respected work in the visa field; that the work was strictly federal, not state; that it was not his place as governor to tell any law firm it couldn't take business; that he never remotely said or even implied that the Chinese firms he was working with on economic development projects might get legal services performed by his son, and that his son made the trade trip at the request of a client in China.
Joe Biden, as vice president, accepted then-President Obama's assignment to engage in special emissary work in Ukraine. In the course of that assignment, Biden publicly told Ukrainian leaders of the broadly held official and bipartisan American position that a certain prosecutor was corrupt and had to be ousted before aid would be forthcoming.
Biden instead should have said, "Barack, I can't take that assignment because Hunter is over there in Ukraine on some kind of gas company deal and it would look bad if I carried that message. Send me somewhere else--anywhere else, except, well, China. Hunter's mixed up over there, too. That boy's a hard one to keep under the porch."
Hutchinson should have told Asa III that it was his business if he wanted to pay his own way to China at the same time as the official trade mission, but that he would have to understand that there could be no overlap, or even the hint thereof.
I emailed the governor's office to ask whether the governor now thought the better part of ethical valor would have been to exclude his son from any meetings or receptions in China and whether he might consider having his photograph removed from his son's law firm website.
He responded that law firms typically tout their founders and that his son shouldn't be excluded from a meeting on account of being his son any more than he should be included on that account.
So, that's that, other than that maybe you could keep these identical cases in mind when Republicans in Washington go off on Joe Biden.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/05/2019