Hunter Biden was quite the devoted little sproutling, following his dad around wherever he went.

According to this NBC News report:

In the final year of the Obama administration, an American lawyer traveled to Romania to meet with a businessman accused of orchestrating a corrupt land deal.

The businessman was Gabriel "Puiu" Popoviciu, a wealthy Romanian real estate tycoon. The lawyer brought in to advise him was Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Hunter Biden's work for Popoviciu in 2016 went unreported at the time, but Joe Biden's involvement in Romania was very much public. The vice president was among the leading voices pushing the government to crack down on corruption.

At Fox News, Sean Hannity called it a "pattern."  Hunter Biden followed his dad around — to China, Ukraine, and now Romania — and somehow always came away with big-dollar business deals.  Kind of the way then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton used Bill Clinton as her bagman to scarf up donations to the Clinton Foundation after Hillary made some foreign policy decision.  That's certainly the way it happened with the 2011 passage of the U.S.-Colombia free trade pact, according to Peter Schweizer in his book, Clinton Cash.

Hillary had her Bill.  Joe had his Hunter.  It's worth it to take this pattern where it goes, which is an emerging picture of modern bribery.

Imagine what it must have been like in the not-so-long-ago years when Joe Biden was vice president of the U.S. — big, powerful, full of demands to advance the Obama political agenda.

You're a scruffy post-Soviet regime or third-world country.  You need some kind of help from nearby predators, you want to avoid sanctions, or your country's just generally a hellhole.

In comes Biden, who just happens to be the guy assigned as "point man" to handle your case, with his cocaine-using son in tow.

In order to get what you want from Joe, you need to set up some kind of meeting with sonny boy — who's traveling with Joe, supposedly there to do "business deals."  Sonny boy doesn't know anything about business, or the industries he could be dropped into, or, for that matter, following the rules on cocaine use in the Navy.  He's unemployable.  But he's there with dad, waiting for his post-dad meetings, too.

And he walks off with big-dollar business deals, often from no-show jobs, nice big money streams, the flying dollar-bill wake of Joe Biden's tour.  After about the first or second one, you'd start to notice a pattern.  Joe blows in, and a payoff will be required.

The strange passage of Colombia's free trade pact in 2011, based on a sudden change in Democrat sentiment of being utterly against it to being at least grudgingly for it, was also reportedly enacted through a payoff.  The Clinton Foundation got a big $800,000 payment, with Hillary Clinton as sitting secretary of state, and voilà: Clinton was in favor of passage.  In a way, the House Biden setup paralleled the Clintons–Clinton Foundation setup.  It's now worth it to check if that, or any trade pact passed during the Obama years — and there were several — also could have involved Joe.

Because obviously, word would have gotten around.  You're a scruffy third-world country, your job is to watch the gringos closely, see how you can get them to help you, see what it takes.  You'd watch one, two, many international transactions with comparable countries.  You'd watch closely to see what it takes.

I know this, because I've spent a lot of time in such countries, speaking with their officials.  "What do we have to do?" is the most commonly asked question I've heard the world over.

As John Hinderaker at Powerline notes, the answer was bribery, an updated modern-day version of bribery that can't be pinned as bribery by the long arm of the law the way walking into a smoke-filled room with a black bag full of cash can.  He writes:

Joe Biden didn't do anything wrong? A time-honored method of taking bribes is having them paid to a family member, usually in exchange for nominal or nonexistent services. It is comical to watch "reporters" pretend not to understand this. 

They all know this, which is why this sort of thing happens.  For Biden, the first shakedown of the scruffy foreigners is the hardest.  But by the third or fourth, Biden doesn't have to say a thing.  He just jets in with his son in tow, and everyone knows what to do.

This is how hideous the House Biden operation got to be.  As Hannity noted, the cash that followed the visits was quite a pattern.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and make a forecast. With Ukraine, China and Romania being brought up, it's likely these aren't the only countries we are going to be hearing Joe and Hunter Biden's name attached to. They had a heckuva Pop-and-Junior tag-team racket.

Image credit: Acaben via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.