Hunter Biden’s defenders are shameless — and desperate

Chutzpah, thy name is Biden — or, more precisely, the Biden family’s defenders.

The latest is Hunter Biden’s complaint that pressure from Republicans may push him off the drugs-and-booze wagon, with the first son grandiosely telling Axios that “the future of democracy” could be at stake if he begins abusing again.

Yeesh.

Sorry: Addiction didn’t cause Hunter to accept that high-paying board seat at Burisma, nor force him to use his father’s name as leverage in deals with foreign firms.

And it’s irrelevant to what’s undeniably established in the public record: Hunter, his partners and his uncle James Biden brought in millions by at least pretending to foreign actors that they could influence Joe’s official actions as senator and vice president.

And now-President Joe Biden played along, regularly meeting, breaking bread and getting on the phone with Hunter’s clients and potential clients.

Yet now the Biden family’s defenders are trying to pretend it’s all Russian disinformation, because the (Biden) Justice Department now charges that Alexander Smirnov lied to the FBI in 2020 about $5 million Burisma bribes to Hunter and Joe.

Oddly, Justice apparently considered Smirnov trustworthy enough to use as an paid informant for more than a decade; interesting that it woke up now.

But somehow this supposed to completely discredit House investigators who paid heed to the bribe allegation. Former CIA Director John Brennan told MSNBC: “The fact that [Rep. James] Comer and [Rep. Jim] Jordan and others willingly accept these things, and they don’t care whether it’s true or not as long as it’s salacious, as long as it’s something they can use . . . This is something that the Russians recognize is ready for their exploitation.”

Brennan, mind you, spent years breathlessly peddling the Russiagate conspiracy theory, which was based entirely on disinformation from the thoroughly discredited Steele dossier.

When it comes to eagerly accepting “salacious” untrue info “as long as it’s something they can use,” that beats the Republicans investigating Hunter and Joe.

Of course, the media is happy to overlook Brennan’s shoddy track record if he’s willing to keep defending Biden and smearing the House investigation.

Heck, this isn’t even the first round of crying “Russia” to protect the Bidens. Brennan joins others of the 51 “intel experts” who signed onto the 2020 letter baselessly claiming The Post’s reporting off Hunter’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” are now pointing to the charges against Smirnov as proof that their disinfo campaign then was somehow valid.

No: Smirnov’s bribe claims had nothing to do with the evidence on the laptop — a damning goldmine of emails on Hunter’s sleazy business dealings plus embarrassing documentation of his proclivity for drugs, partying and prostitutes.

Nor does it change the fact that Veep Joe pushed for the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was well-liked by the rest of the Obama administration, after Shokin’s office began looking into Burisma, which asked Hunter to get Joe to intervene.

All the flimsy excuses shouldn’t stop House investigators from getting to the bottom of Hunter’s dirty dealing and his dad’s role in it.