Cal Thomas: Can Joe Biden be trusted? Hunter Biden scandal begs the question

It was President Richard Nixon who said in the midst of the enveloping Watergate scandal: "People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I earned everything I've got."

That standard should be applied to Joe Biden before the election. He should be pressed to explain his son Hunter's financial dealings in Ukraine and Beijing.

In a rare moment when a reporter is able to ask Biden a substantive question, Bo Erickson of CBS News wanted to know the candidate's response to a New York Post story that alleges a Hunter Biden laptop discovered at a repair shop in Delaware contains damning evidence of the Biden family profiting from Hunter's relationship with the Ukraine gas company Burisma and sharing some of the money with his father, reportedly referred to in a Hunter Biden email as "the big guy."

Joe Biden didn't deny the story, but claimed to Erickson, "it's another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask."

Not exactly. The media have almost universally been in the tank for Biden and his running mate, the equally invisible and inaccessible, Sen. Kamala Harris. Over the weekend, Biden campaign surrogate Jenna Arnold repeatedly refused to deny the authenticity of the alleged Hunter Biden emails. When asked by Fox News' Leland Vittert if they were genuine, Arnold responded, "I don't think anybody is saying they are inauthentic."

If true, Biden's influence and positions in government were used by himself and his family for profit. People who have not yet voted deserve to know whether a man who might be elected president is a crook, or not, or at a minimum if he traded his influence for cash, even if it was technically legal. There is, after all, the matter of propriety and setting a good example for others, two assertions by Biden as to why he is a better choice than President Trump.