The New York Post story alleging additional nefarious doings among the Biden family and Ukrainian entities put nearly as great an onus on the establishment media as it does on the Bidens.
Yes, let’s stipulate that the involvement of President Trump’s political henchman Rudy Giuliani in the provenance of the Post’s story makes the anti-Biden report immediately suspect. Still, the simple reality is that there’s ample reason, both internal to the alleged emails in question and regarding other things we know about the Bidens’ practices, that make the story plausible.
Because of that plausibility, every major media outlet in the country should now rush to follow up on the story with neutral, open minds and no agenda pro or con, so as to shed more light on its level of accuracy. The actions of leftist social-media giants Facebook and Twitter to spike the story make it more imperative that real news outlets do even more reporting for the public’s benefit. It would be reporting about an important, broader subject about which, with very few exceptions and almost none since Biden won the Democratic nomination, the establishment media has been woefully and willfully derelict.
It is undeniable, as U.S. diplomats have publicly testified, that Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine compromised U.S. diplomacy. It is undeniable that Joe Biden met with Hunter’s corrupt business partner Devon Archer two days before Hunter joined the board of the Ukraine-centered Burisma, a board on which Archer already sat. Archer sat there against the advice of Secretary of State John Kerry’s step-son, Chris Heinz, a sometime partner of Archer and Hunter Biden, who (to quote the Washington Post) “was concerned about reports of corruption in Ukraine, geopolitical risks and general questions about appearance.” The same newspaper reported that at least one adviser mentioned these concerns to Joe Biden himself.
The former vice president’s story about when he knew what about these matters hasn’t been entirely consistent. Undeniably, he was acting as the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine when he already knew his son sat on the board of the controversial company. Still, Joe Biden refused to recuse himself from the Ukraine portfolio.
Every bit of that already-known history makes the New York Post’s new report plausible. The alleged emails use language strikingly like one would expect from foreign favor-seekers, with stilted references to various Ukrainian ministries, misspellings, and use of initials and acronyms unfamiliar to most Americans. Their internal timelines appear to fit timelines of known developments regarding Burisma’s troubles. And the inclusion of Archer on the email chains seems to track well with what’s known of Archer’s participation.
More importantly, the emails provide plentiful facts that can be checked and cross-referenced — the basic stuff of journalism usually done by news outlets with significant resources. Were Archer and the Biden son together in Doha, Qatar, in May of 2014? Were there actually contacts between Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi and the U.S. embassy in Kiev in late September of 2014? And so on.
The emails allegedly come from a hard drive that also contains private photos of Hunter Biden (some of them compromising) and at least one of his father. If the hard drive containing the alleged emails was not that of a Biden, then how did those photos get there?
Let’s repeat that, because it so obviously argues in favor of the story’s legitimacy. If the emails are fake, where did the photos come from?
Every haughty media maven loudly dismissing this story just because it came from Giuliani is ignoring that simple question. If the story turns out to be true, they will look even more like the conscious public-relations agents for the Left that we already suspect them to be.
Yet even an extremely belated attention to the ramifications of the Biden-Ukraine story — or renewed attention for the few outlets that followed the story last year, but then dropped it when it became inconvenient for the purposes of Trump’s impeachment trial — pales in comparison with the even more important, almost entirely ignored questions about the interplay between Joe and Hunter Biden’s dealings with Communist China. Unlike the one semi-degree of separation between father and son regarding Burisma, the father directly abetted the son’s business dealings in China by ferrying Hunter there on Air Force Two.
Hunter’s dealings in China have been somewhat extensive, and plenty of Joe Biden’s critics say the former vice president has a long career of being soft on China. There’s some truth to that assessment. To what extent, even subconsciously, would the son’s dealings with the Chinese Communists affect the father’s existing bent toward softness?
All those reasons argue for major journalistic examination of Biden, Inc. and all its tentacles. Pathetically late journalistic integrity is better than none at all.
