by Jonathan Turley at Jonathan Turley
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1890 story, The Sign of the Four, there is a scene in which Sherlock Holmes prepares to give himself an injection of cocaine in front of a curious Dr. Watson. Holmes explained: “It is cocaine, a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?” Watson wisely demurred — but the 7% solution has not lost its appeal to others as a diversion.
Last year, I wrote a column suggesting that there was a notable shift among Biden associates and some media figures in addressing the Hunter Biden scandal. In the wake of the release of new evidence of Hunter Biden’s alleged influence-peddling efforts, the Biden team has fully retreated to what I called the “Seven-Percent Solution” to the scandal.
In 2022, I wrote:
“The president and the press have been shifting to a new defense. As the father recently insisted of his son, ‘He fought an addiction problem. He overcame it. He wrote about it.’
“The family and the media have been cultivating the angle for months as they anticipated possible criminal charges. … With possible criminal conduct exposed, all that’s left is the addiction defense.”
One of the most vocal with this recent rollout was former U.S. senator Claire McCaskill (D.-Mo.), who became irate on MSNBC and declared that “Everybody needs to back off!” because Hunter was an addict and “suffering from these diseases.” Of course, such suffering did not prevent him from allegedly shaking down foreign figures for millions of dollars in exchange for access to his father.
The Biden defense team invoked much the same explanation when confronted with a story about a WhatsApp message that purportedly showed Hunter threatening a Chinese businessman with ties to China’s Communist Party if he did not send Biden millions of dollars. He repeatedly referenced the fact that his father was sitting next to him, and suggested his father would be involved in the threatened response if the money was not transferred.
According to testimony made public last week,…
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