If you're interested in the Biden angle

Sarah Chayes, author of Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens National Security, offers a devastating look at a troubling phenomenon highlighted by the corruption scandal that has sparked an impeachment inquiry regarding the sitting President.

The whistle-blower scandal that has prompted the fourth presidential impeachment process in American history has put a spectacle from earlier this decade back on display: the jaw-smacking feast of scavengers who circled around Ukraine as Viktor Yanukovych, a Moscow-linked kleptocrat, was driven from power. Ukraine’s crisis was the latest to energize a club whose culture has come to be treated as normal—a culture in which top-tier lawyers, former U.S. public officials, and policy experts (and their progeny) cash in by trading on their connections and their access to insider policy information—usually by providing services to kleptocrats like Yanukovych.

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In April 2014, he became a director of Burisma, the largest natural-gas producer in Ukraine. He had no prior experience in the gas industry, nor with Ukrainian regulatory affairs, his ostensible purview at Burisma. He did have one priceless qualification: his unique position as the son of the vice president of the United States, newborn Ukraine’s most crucial ally. Weeks before Biden came on, Ukraine’s government had collapsed amid a popular revolution, giving its gas a newly strategic importance as an alternative to Russia’s, housed in a potentially democratic country.

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There are no indications that Hunter’s activities swayed any decision his father made as vice president. Joe Biden did pressure Ukraine’s fledgling post-Yanukovych president to remove a public prosecutor—as part of concerted U.S. policy. So did every other Western government and dozens of Ukrainian and international pro-democracy activists. The problem was not that the prosecutor was too aggressive with corrupt businessman-politicians like Hunter Biden’s boss; it was that he was too lenient.

—The Atlantic, “Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption”

So, the “scandal” that Trump and his enablers are peddling is a nothing-burger. The prosecutor would have been fired without Joe Biden’s lobbying and, if anything, that lobbying worked against his son’s interests. The real scandal, as they say, is what’s legal. And it’s a system that’s exploited on a bipartisan basis.

George W. Bush’s CIA counterterrorism chief. The Republican operative and future Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort worked for Yanukovych. So did Obama White House Counsel Gregory Craig.

  Outside the Beltway 

I don't think we have time or space to list all the vermin.

Scratch into the bios of many former U.S. officials who were in charge of foreign or security policy in administrations of either party, and you will find “consulting” firms and hedge-fund gigs monetizing their names and connections.

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Biden was one of the most vocal champions of anticorruption efforts in the Obama administration. So when this same Biden takes his son with him to China aboard Air Force Two, and within days Hunter joins the board of an investment advisory firm with stakes in China, it does not matter what father and son discussed. Joe Biden has enabled this brand of practice, made it bipartisan orthodoxy. And the ethical standard in these cases—people’s basic understanding of right and wrong—becomes whatever federal law allows. Which is a lot.

If anything, the sheer prominence of the imagery makes it incredibly unlikely either Biden thought anything untoward was going on.

Indeed. Like Trump can't understand why anyone thinks the shit he does is wrong.

The appearance of impropriety here is genuine. But it’s not obvious how one would go about regulating it. While we can demand that those in public service file financial disclosures and divest themselves of various entanglements, there’s only so much we can do for their grown children.

More troubling than the Biden saga is the proliferation of “consulting” firms headed up by former secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, national security advisors, four-star generals and admirals, and other extremely senior people. While they’re entitled to make a living and cash in on their careers of service, they’re often being paid for access and influence. They have networks of people who used to work for and still feel beholden to them.

And it will ever be thus.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.