But the Hunter Biden laptop—and the cries of "Russian disinformation” that followed—raise a timely question: Given the Bidens’ Ukraine-related activities, what additional information does Moscow have on the first family?

Hunter Biden’s problems with substance abuse, prostitutes, and money would have made the vice president’s son an ideal target for foreign intelligence services. Worse, Joe Biden seems to have eagerly promoted his son’s shakedown efforts, even boasting publicly about using his office to interfere in Ukraine’s political and judicial systems, in ways that directly benefited his son’s employer. There is surely no shortage of oligarchs, Ukrainian and Russian, who are eager to share information about their dealings with the Bidens in order to gain influence with Putin and undo rival billionaires. One can assume that all of that information has made its way by now to Putin’s table.

The likelihood that Russia is sitting on a wealth of compromising Ukraine-related material on Joe Biden and his family may come as a shock to media that pushed the Trump-Russia collusion narrative for four years. But the Biden-Russia kompromat story may be more than a political funhouse mirror. It may explain the president’s curious passivity toward Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline and why, almost as soon as Biden took office, Putin seized the opportunity to move more than 100,000 troops to Ukraine’s border.

What’s more, it may also provide new insight into the Russiagate conspiracy theory that poisoned America’s public sphere and made people lose their collective minds.

Given the amount of genuinely compromising material tying Joe Biden and his son to shady dealings involving Ukraine and Russia, including a $3.5 million payment Hunter received from the widow of the former mayor of Moscow in 2014, it’s worth asking if the 46th president of the United States was the initial target of the Hillary Clinton-funded Russia dossier? In fact, allegations about the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine, sourced in part, it seems, to the Clinton campaign, made their way intoThe New York Times in 2015, encouraging Biden to dispel second thoughts about reentering the 2016 race.

The Steele dossier has long since been revealed as nothing but utter nonsense, but with the Bidens as a target rather than Trump, it’s at least easier to make sense of its contents, especially the notorious "pee tape.” Trump is a well-known germaphobe; it was always hard to imagine him agreeing to being micturated upon by hookers on a hotel bed in Moscow. Nor would Republican primary voters likely care about ladies of the night soiling a bed that Barack Obama once slept in. But Democrats would think it sacrilegious. And by his own admission, Hunter Biden seems to have spent plenty of nights in hotel rooms with prostitutes. If it seems hard to imagine Donald Trump walking into a hotel in Moscow and asking for the Obama suite, a scenario in which Hunter Biden demanded such lodgings doesn’t take much imagination at all.

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