My first article ever in The American Spectator appeared Aug. 18, 2017. In those days, my column was entitled “Dov Is All You Need.” Thing is, “Dov” rhymes with “stove,” not “love,” so we eventually renamed the column to play on my triple identities as columnist, law professor, and rav (Orthodox rabbi). As an opinion contributor, I write “consecutive sentences,” and that also is a legal term of art (as in what hopefully awaits Bidens, if not Clintons), and many Orthodox Jews all over the world study an identical folio of the Babylonian Talmud every day. (Today is Kiddushin 39.) I now am in my eighth year writing for my favorite American news-commentary outlet, The American Spectator.
I have had previous roles and careers, a quirky but interesting life. And, as Columbus assumed when he traveled west to India — er, Bharat — it’s one big sphere, and what comes around goes around (or is it the other way around?). Hence, my extraordinary discovery 38 years ago — before (almost) anyone else knew it — that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., “son of a British coal miner,” is a deceitful villain who masks his sources of income and plays shoddy with the truth now is relevant. If the eternal question asked of people from Dover is “What did Delaware?” the answer in his case is not “a New Jersey.” Rather, the senator now is laid bare. Specifics:
I was 32 at the time, a rising presence in American Zionist circles listed in Who’s Who in American Jewry — 1985 and four years since rabbinical ordination. I sat on the executive committee of the American Zionist Federation and regularly attended meetings of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in my capacity as national executive director (a title now known as executive vice president) of the Herut Zionists of America (HZA).
Rabbi Dov Fischer with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, 1985 (Dov Fischer)
In Israel, there are countless political parties, of which approximately a dozen succeed in garnering enough votes to win seats in Parliament (the “Knesset”). Smaller successful parties negotiate and horse-trade with like-minded larger parties and form coalitions to establish a government that commands a majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats. On the left, that coalition was dominated by the Marxist socialist Labor Party for more than half a century, and that leftist coalition governed uninterrupted for 30 years from 1948–1977. These Marxist socialists were darlings of America’s perennially left-wing mass media and the Democrats. They included all the Marxist socialist Israelis the mass media and movies taught you to love: including Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, David Ben-Gurion, and Abba Eban.
On the other side of the aisle, the leading liberal-center-conservative party was the Herut (Freedom) party. In a country dominated through its first 30 years by Marxist socialists, it was — and still is — regarded as “right-wing” to be just-plain classical liberal. Herut was liberal-centrist in that it stood for ideas comfortably consonant with mainstream traditional American values: capitalism, free speech, equal opportunity for all, and respect for religious values. In time, Herut merged with a smaller party, the Liberal Party, which focused more on capitalism as its primary concern. Later, they both consolidated with a few other splinters to form a newly named party that remains the leading political force among the center-right, the “Likud” (literally, the “Consolidation”).
Zionists in America often express their Zionism — whether capitalist, socialist, theologically heterodox, Orthodox, ethnically Sephardic, and so on — by associating with a Zionist organization promoting a viewpoint consonant with one of the Israeli parties closest to their own views. The Herut Zionists of America later were renamed “Likud-USA” and “Likud North America” as the Likud Party’s name “stuck.” I was HZA’s chief professional officer based in the national headquarters in New York. My role included traveling the country with Israel’s Herut/Likud leaders of that time, like Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, and future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. I made speeches and oversaw the development, growth and expansion of regional chapters, while also assuring our programs for teenagers and on-campus college chapters were robust. I fundraised and oversaw finances. And I produced public events offering media-focused public forums for political figures to announce they shared our perspective that Jews are entitled to permanent sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. We often hosted rising Herut/Likud stars like Israel’s then-new U.N. ambassador, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rabbi Dov Fischer with Benjamin Netanyahu, then-Israeli ambassador to U.N., 1985 (Dov Fischer)
As 1985 approached, it devolved on me to produce the organization’s largest-ever national convention. I reserved the hotel Pierre, hired the most exquisite kosher caterer in New York, assured we would have strong national representation in attendance, and lined up speakers like Israeli ambassador to America, Meir Rosenne, and my big coup: the charismatic Ariel Sharon, thanks to our personal friendship going back a few years. Next, my biggest task of all: get one Republican U.S. senator and one Democrat U.S. senator, each with impeccable pro-Israel credentials. The person assigned to get the Republican (my boss) flaked on me. I personally got the Democrat: the junior senator from Delaware, newly reelected to a second term, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
In those mid-1980s days, as I recall, a reasonable speaking honorarium included paying $5,000 plus airfare, a top-flight hotel, and all kinds of related living accoutrements. When I sealed the deal with Sen. Biden’s office, I was, frankly, relieved: I had secured a big name, up-coming star to speak at our convention. This reinforced HZA as a major player with Jewish newsmedia and in American Zionism.
And then I got a phone call from a Biden staffer in D.C. I do not remember his name. The quotes that follow are not precisely verbatim after 38 years, but I remember the gist incredibly well. I skip the phatic language and cut to the chase:
Staffer: The senator is looking forward to speaking to your group.
Me: Wonderful.
Staffer: I am calling about the senator’s $5,000 honorarium.
Me: Yes?
Staffer: The senator has a practice that he prefers not leaving a footprint or record of certain groups he has spoken for.
Me: I’m sorry. What does that mean?
Staffer: We are wondering: Many of the Zionist organizations have young people’s groups that are schooled in the groups’ ideologies and viewpoints. Do you have any?
Me: Yes, we have a teens group called Betar and a new college group called Tagar.
Staffer: OK. That college group: Do they have chapters on college campuses?
Me: I have just been launching the thing. We have a few so far.
Staffer: Do you have any of that college group’s chapters at a campus near the Pierre hotel where the senator will be speaking for your group?
Me: I think we may have one, maybe at NYU or a bit farther away at Brooklyn College.
Staffer: The senator would like to have his $5,000 honorarium paid by that college group of yours for a speech at the college chapter nearest the Pierre hotel.
Me: I don’t understand. Are you saying Sen. Biden would like to speak to our college group, too?
Staffer: No, the senator cannot fit that college group in his plans while he is in New York. He just wants the honorarium to be made to appear as though he spoke to them, not to Herut Zionists of America.
Me: Again, I apologize. I am new at all this. Are you asking me to falsify the source of payment for Sen. Biden’s honorarium?
Staffer: You are not falsifying anything. You are getting the speech you want by the senator you want for the price you agreed on. The senator is getting the $5,000 you agreed to pay him. It’s just a bookkeeping matter, to make it look like the college students are paying him for speaking at their campus instead of him speaking at the Pierre to your group. But, don’t worry, it will be your group that he speaks to.
It was a terrible lie. It was a young rabbi’s sharpest introduction to the world of lies and deceit that is Washington, D.C.
I did not know quite what to do. We already had mass-mailed publicity all over the country that a U.S. senator — Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware — would be speaking at the convention. The cost-benefit ratio left me virtually no choice. I could not cancel this liar now. Well, I could have, but I did not. That’s on me. I told my chapter chairman of that Tagar chapter that he needed to give me a Tagar-account check payable to “Sen. Joseph Biden” (or whatever the designated payee was) for $5,000, and our national office reciprocally would give the chapter an HZA reimbursement check for $5,000. He asked why. I did not say.
I never discussed this with my wife nor revealed this to anyone else until today. Since you have been reading me the past seven-plus years in this publication, ever since publisher Melissa Mackenzie “discovered” me and R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., flattered me into remaining loyal to The American Spectator, you decide for yourself whether I now would fabricate such a thing 38 years after the fact, given my life résumé since.
Rabbi Dov Fischer with Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.), 1985 (Dov Fischer)
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is a crook. He is a liar. For nearly half a century, I have known first-hand he plays games with money: how he gets it, who gives it to him, how its source is disguised, how it later can be re-characterized if it is uncovered. If he finagled with me, how many other speaking honoraria has he camouflaged these past 38 years? And what else? Biden’s is a lifelong pattern of deceit. It is sleight of hand: scoop in the cash, but don’t leave crumbs, cover the tracks, let the curious and suspicious exhaust themselves on wild goose chases trying to find out how the money got from Point A to Point B to Point C to its ultimate destination at Point JRB (Jr.). It is part felony, part magic show. Nothing up his sleeve.
Fire a prosecutor investigating Burisma. The laptop a Russian ploy. Never talked to Hunter about his businesses. Buy a Hunter Biden painting.
This from a charlatan who tells Jewish audiences that “I … was raised in … synagogues. You think I’m kidding, I’m not.” (And tells Puerto Ricans, “I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community.”)
If Joe Biden would go to that much trouble to cover-up and hide a purely legitimate every-day honorarium — reasonably priced for a U.S. senator at $5,000, paid by a significant organization that often hosted Israeli prime ministers and a distinguished constituent of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and negotiated with a rabbi then already somewhat prominent and listed in Who’s Who in American Jewry — to what lengths would he go to cover up tens of millions obtained wrongfully from sources in China, Ukraine, Russia, and G-d knows where else while leveraging his power as vice president of the United States, enriching his family while possibly compromising American national interests?
We may never know where the Biden family money is, or how they got it, or who remitted it, who cashed it, who transferred it, where it went, where it next went, where it went after that, where it is now, where it will be after this article is published — but Xi and Zelensky and Putin know “too much.” To what degree is Biden’s present foreign policy dictated by his consuming fear they will reveal what House investigators and bogus special counsel David Weiss cannot — or deliberately will not — unearth? Has Biden sent Ukraine more than $110 billion because that is in our national interest or as “hush money” to keep Zelensky quiet? Do we nevertheless send Ukraine significantly less than needed to beat Russia outright or to drive her back, assuring a never-ending faucet leak of tens of billions, because Biden needs to keep Putin quiet, too? And is our weak foreign policy toward China dictated by Biden’s need to keep Xi quiet?
He is a crook. He has mastered financial three-card monte. But has he mastered high crimes and misdemeanors?