A Crisis for Every Month: The Worst Debacles, Disgraces, and (Literal) Train Wrecks of Biden’s Third Year
If you’re as overwhelmed by all the incompetence as Joe is by a set of stairs, here’s your refresher course for year No. 3.
By: Elle Purnell
January 26, 2024: Congratulations, America — you’ve survived your third year of being bossed around by Joe “Big Guy” Dementia Biden. You might be poorer, more depressed, and more likely to end up drafted for a foreign war than you were when he hobbled into the White House three years ago last Saturday, but you’ve finally made it to the year you get to vote him out, if you’re smart enough.
In January 2022, we brought you “A Scandal For Every Month: The Biggest Botches, Failures, And Mess-Ups Of Joe Biden’s First 12 Months In Office.” Last January, there was another year of disasters to catalog. If you’re like me, you’re probably losing track of all the scandals and which ones happened when. If it’s making your head spin, just think how confused poor Joe is!
If you’re as overwhelmed by all the incompetence as Joe is by a set of stairs, here’s your refresher course for year No. 3.
January: Classified Documents Scandal
It’s been a long year, but remember when classified documents were found in insecure locations everywhere from Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center to next to the Corvette in his garage?
The initial trove of documents from Biden’s time as vice president, including some reportedly “top secret” files, was found in November 2022. But in January of last year, the FBI found more “documents with classification markings and surrounding materials,” from his time as VP and senator, at Biden’s home (after cooperating nicely with the president). The scandal was quickly hushed up, despite the fact that Biden’s Justice Department had executed a dramatic raid on former President Trump’s home based on accusations of a similar documents snafu months earlier.
February: Biden Snubs East Palestine After Train Disaster
Joe Biden may not have been at fault for the derailment of a train traveling through East Palestine, Ohio, or the subsequent burning of toxic chemicals from it, but his administration went out of its way to react with incompetence and cruelty. As residents, plagued by severe health problems from toxic dust and smoke, were forced out of their homes, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg waited a week and a half before finally acknowledging the crisis. Eighteen days after the Feb. 3 disaster, Buttigieg responded to a reporter asking him to share a message with the “suffering” Ohioans by telling her he was too busy “taking some personal time.”
Buttigieg didn’t bother to go to East Palestine until Trump made a stop there in the weeks following the disaster to meet with residents and hand out clean water. Biden still hasn’t deigned to visit his East Palestine constituents. Instead, his Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) told Ohio’s leadership that East Palestine wouldn’t be receiving federal aid — until the Trump visit apparently embarrassed FEMA into reversing course.
Honorable mention: February also saw the Biden administration allow a Chinese spy balloon to float across the continental U.S. before attempting to blame the security failure on the Trump administration.
March: Biden Admin Sympathizes with Transgender School Shooter
After a transgender-identifying shooter killed six at a Tennessee Christian school in March, Joe Biden could be seen cracking jokes in conversations with reporters about the tragedy while his administration made clear that it saw the shooter as the real victim.
Biden opened his remarks about the shooting with a joke about ice cream, continuing to joke that since GOP Sen. Josh Hawley thought “Christians were targeted in the Nashville school shooting,” Biden “probably” didn’t.
“No, I’m joking,” he said with a grin.
Meanwhile, three days after the shooting, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration’s “hearts go out to the trans community, as they are under attack right now.”
“We should be lifting up our trans kids, our trans youth, and making sure that they feel seen,” she added.
Biden, who has visited with shooting victims when their deaths don’t get in the way of his agenda, snubbed the families of the students and staff killed at the Christian school. But his VP Kamala Harris found time to go down to Tennessee to rub elbows with Democrat state representatives whose unruly behavior got them expelled from the house chamber in the aftermath of the shooting.
April: Biden’s Secretary of State Revealed to Be Behind Infamous Laptop ‘Disinfo’ Letter
When news broke just before the 2020 election that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden contained not only compromising explicit photos of the younger Biden but also emails implicating him and his father in under-the-table deals, a coordinated campaign was immediately launched to shut the story down. Big Tech, in tandem with federal intelligence agencies and corporate media outlets, censored the story and worked to keep voters in the dark about the incriminating evidence. One of the major tactics used to mislead voters was a letter from 51 “former intelligence officials” who insisted the laptop looked like a Russian disinformation plot. Biden cited the letter in a presidential debate with Trump to shut down discussion of the story.
But in April 2023, former deputy director of the CIA Michael Morell, also a signatory of the letter, testified to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees that Antony Blinken, Biden’s former campaign adviser who was rewarded with a position as secretary of state, prompted the letter. According to Morell, Blinken “reached out to him to discuss the Hunter Biden laptop story,” which “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement.”
May: Biden Rejects His 4-Year-Old Grandchild
When Joe Biden’s deadbeat son Hunter had to show up in Arkansas court in May as part of a paternity case regarding his out-of-wedlock daughter with Lunden Roberts, the country realized it wasn’t just Hunter trying to shut 4-year-old Navy out of his life — the entire Biden family went out of their way to deny her existence. Reporters realized the Bidens had never even acknowledged their seventh grandchild, but when they asked the White House about it, Jean-Pierre refused to answer.
“It’s not lost on anybody that Jill Biden wrote a children’s book and [dedicated it] to her grandchildren. She could have kept it at that, but she named every child except Navy,” noted Roberts’ lawyer. “They hung stockings for the dog at Christmas but not for Navy.”
Joe Biden doubled down, telling the Louisiana State University women’s basketball team that he had “four granddaughters.” In April, Biden had told the country he had “six grandchildren, and I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day.” Later that summer, it was revealed that “White House aides have been told during strategy meetings that the president and first lady Jill Biden have six, not seven, grandchildren.”
It wasn’t until the end of July, after months of public pressure, that Biden acknowledged Navy for the first time in a statement to People magazine. The statement included no apology for ignoring his granddaughter for the first four years of her life.
June: Whistleblowers and FD-1023 Accuse Bidens of Influence-Peddling, Bribery
The Bidens may not have had any particularly good months this past year, but June was an especially bad one.
On June 22, the House Ways and Means Committee released testimony from IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler alleging that the Department of Justice had engaged in “interference in the form of delays, divulgences, and denials” to protect the Bidens throughout the IRS tax investigation into Hunter Biden. The whistleblowers’ testimony also included damning records such as an apparent WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Chinese businessman Henry Zhao, in which the younger Biden used threats of his father’s political power to extort unfulfilled “promises and assurances” from Zhao.
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” the message read in part.
June was also the mont Americans learned more details from the FBI FD-1023 form that documented a confidential human source’s reporting about the Bidens’ apparent bribery scheme involving the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. As The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland reported at the time, “Sen. Chuck Grassley revealed a foreign national — identified by individuals with knowledge of the matter as Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky — allegedly possessed 17 recordings implicating the Bidens in a pay-to-play scandal,” based on the CHS’s report in the FD-1023. The CHS also reported that Zlochevsky claimed to have been “coerced” into paying $5 million to Hunter Biden and $5 million to Joe Biden.
By July, Grassley released the FD-1023 to the public.
July: Cocaine in the White House
Just days into July, The Washington Post reported that officials had found a suspicious white powder in the West Wing, which “a preliminary field test indicated … was cocaine.” The president’s son Hunter, of course, had discussed his longstanding drug addiction in his memoir, had abandoned a laptop full of evidence of him doing drugs with prostitutes, and was suspected to be living at the White House at the time of the discovery. But for some reason, the security cameras, security checkpoints, and visitor logs were deemed useless, and the Secret Service told the country they’d just never be able to figure out the culprit in the cocaine caper. The investigation was concluded in less than two weeks.
Oh, and it totally wasn’t relevant at all, but Hunter Biden had just agreed to a plea deal that was contingent on him staying sober!
Honorable mention: Said plea deal fell apart after a judge’s questions revealed it to be an obvious attempt by Biden’s DOJ to give his son a slap on the wrist while quietly protecting both Bidens.
August: Biden Sunburns at the Beach After Maui’s Beaches Burn
After some 100 people died in a horrific fire that decimated the Hawaii town of Lahaina, Maui, and left 1,000 people missing, Biden offered the grieving community “no comment” from his beach chair at his Rehoboth, Delaware, home.
When Biden finally made it to Maui, he offered made-up stories, inappropriate snark, and self-centered anecdotes instead of comfort. As Greg Price summed it up on Twitter, Biden “joked about how hot the ground was, mispronounced the names of every Hawaii elected official, told a complete lie about how his house once almost burned down, joked about how he knows what they are feeling because he almost lost his corvette, fell asleep while meeting with Maui residents and is now going back on vacation.”
September: Biden’s Border Crisis Breaks New Record (Again)
Border agents reported apprehending 269,735 illegal aliens at the U.S.-Mexico border in September — the highest record for a single month ever. In total, more than 2.4 million apprehensions occurred in fiscal year 2023, with some 6.8 million illegal migrants apprehended at the southern border since Joe Biden took office in 2021. When factoring in “gotaways,” estimates jump to some 10 million illegal border crossers under Biden’s presidency.
October: Biden’s Party Shows Itself to Be Full of Antisemitic Terrorist Sympathizers
After Hamas launched a surprise terror attack on rural Israeli communities, killing some 1,200 people and injuring and kidnapping others, the Middle East devolved into chaos that, aside from the Biden administration’s disastrously executed withdrawal from Afghanistan, had not been seen since the Obama years. But even the Biden administration’s response — which was to lecture Israel about “democracy” and use the tragedy to ask for more money for Ukraine — was too kind for antisemitic members of his party like Rep. Rashida Tlaib and leftists who flashed swastikas in the streets and mobbed Jewish students on college campuses.
Honorable mention: Bidenomics continued to squeeze Americans’ wallets as the average mortgage rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage hit 8 percent, higher than homebuyers had seen it since 2000.
November: $40,000 Discovered from Communist China to Joe’s Bank Account
On Nov. 1, a report from the House Oversight Committee revealed that in 2017, $40,000 had been funneled from the Biden family’s CCP-linked business partners through a joint Biden-China venture, through entities of Hunter and James Biden, and finally from James and Sara Biden’s personal bank account into Joe’s.
“Following that money upstream reveals it originated from the Chinese ‘business’ partners Hunter Biden had threatened a little over a month earlier in a WhatsApp message,” The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland reported at the time.
December: Impeachment Inquiry Kicks Off
As more evidence of a Biden influence-peddling scandal continued to pour in — including revelations of dozens if not hundreds of emails Biden exchanged via aliases with Hunter’s business associate Eric Schwerin and “direct monthly payments to Joe Biden from Hunter Biden’s business entity” — the House of Representatives formally voted to start an impeachment inquiry into Biden.
Joe wasn’t the only Biden facing scrutiny on Capitol Hill last month, either. Hunter Biden, after flouting a congressional subpoena to appear for a closed-door deposition, still showed up outside the Capitol building to talk to reporters and portray himself as the victim. Worse, Joe Biden apparently knew about his son’s plans to defy a subpoena; Jean-Pierre told reporters, “The president was familiar with what Hunter was going to say today and, you know, look, he’s proud of his son.”
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women's Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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