March 28, 2009A friend of the daughter of Vice President Joseph Biden is attempting to hawk a videotape that he claims shows Ashley Biden snorting cocaine at a house party this month in Delaware.
An anonymous male "friend" of Biden took the video, said Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer representing the seller. Dunlap and another man claiming to be a lawyer showed The Post about 90 seconds of 43-minute tape, saying it was legally obtained and that Biden was aware she was being filmed. The Post refused to pay for the video.
The video shows a 20-something woman with light skin and long brown hair taking a red straw from her mouth and bending over a desk, inserting the straw into her nostril and snorting from lines of white powder.
She then stands up and begins talking with other people in the room. A young man looks on from behind her, facing the camera. The lawyers said he was Biden's boyfriend of some years.
The camera follows the woman from a few feet away, focusing on her as she moves around the room. It appears not to be concealed. At one point she shouts, "Shut the f--- up!"
The woman appears to resemble the 27-year-old Biden, a social worker who was a visible presence during her father's campaign for the White House.
The dialogue is difficult to discern, but the woman makes repeated references to the drugs, said the lawyers, who said they viewed the tape about 15 times.
"At one point she pretty much complains that the line isn't big enough," said the second lawyer, who declined to identify himself. "And she talks about her dad."
Vice President Biden has been an outspoken crusader against drugs, coining the term "Drug Czar" while campaigning for a more forceful "war on drugs" in 1982.
Even if one might think this karma for Joe Biden after his decades of drug warmongering and the human devastation it has caused, his daughter Ashley had nothing to do with it.
Obviously the motive here is the most debased : personal enrichment at very personal expense to Ashley Biden. If all this is true and the purported video becomes public Ms. Biden will have learned a very hard and fast lesson about how little she may be able to trust her privacy even to those she believed to be her "friends", now that her father is vice-president.
Anyone of the ilk to purposefully record private, unguarded, intimate, or perhaps even compromising moments of someone's personal life and then seek profit or benefit by making (or threatening to make) public sensation of them is fundamentally twisted.
As an attorney admitted to both the Delaware and California bars I am appalled that such predatory opportunism is advanced by purported "lawyers". No ethical attorney would participate in such a mercenary invasion of privacy.
The party in interest is alleging Ashley Biden committed criminal offenses of which he, and now his lawyers, possess video recorded evidence. Do they think Ms. Biden is somehow immune from drug law enforcement?
I don't care if it's all nice and legal. It is wrong.
ADDENDUM - Agitator Radley Balko takes a bit of a snarky view :
Can’t wait for Biden’s press conference on Monday, where he’ll call for all of the draconian laws he has sponsored over the years to be fully enforced against his kid, including the forfeiture of all of her property, and the use of the videotape as probable cause for a Byrne Grant-funded multi-jurisdictional SWAT team to raid her home in the middle of the night. At that point, Biden will call for the local cops to turn her case over to the feds, who, per Biden’s own favored policies over the years, will then liberally apply RICO and conspiracy statutes to find some way, any way, to rope her in on federal drug-related charges so she can then get hit with the applicable federal mandatory minimum prison sentence.Chickens. Home. Roosting. All that.
Kidding, of course. Drug Czar Joe will probably just issue a press statement declaring that this is a “family” or “private” matter, and that he has no further comment. And his daughter will get preferential treatment. Just like all the other drug warriors who have had family caught breaking their precious drug laws.
Comments
In our recent state election one of the papers published embarrassing photos of one of the more controversial female candidates. She categorically denied they were of her and sued.
The seller then started back peddling and 'recalled' that the photos were of someone called Pauline but he could not recall her last name.
The paper issued an apology the day after the election was over.
Obviously this wasnt her first "blow"!
I hope it is not her because of her social worker status. If, they try to pin it on her I hope her well connected family would have her weedle out of it, however, I would hope she would have learned a very scary and costly lesson.
Maybe the V.P. will talk to Obama about the 'drug situation/solution'.
I thought the same think about Palin's daughter and Bush's daughter. But I imagine the rules are different in those cases, aren't they?