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HUNTER BIDEN CONTROVERSY GROWS. Many Republicans are outraged to discover that Attorney General William Barr has known for months about federal investigations into Hunter Biden’s conduct and “worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The situation recalls the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. Remember that just 11 days before election day, then-FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress informing them that the bureau had re-opened its investigation into the Hillary Clinton email affair. The news immediately leaked, and the campaign exploded. Clinton has long believed, and many Democrats agree with her, that it contributed to her loss.
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Whatever the ultimate effect, many lawyers were appalled by Comey’s action. That includes lawyers who were on the Trump team, who felt the episode showed Comey was a “loose cannon.” Comey’s disclosure was, in fact, one of the reasons some top Trump advisors recommended that the incoming president fire the FBI director immediately upon taking office on January 20, 2017. (I described the scene in OBSESSION, available here.) Trump did not follow their advice, to his later regret.
So now comes the Hunter Biden case. What was Attorney General Barr supposed to do? Announce the investigations, which had not, and still have not, resulted in charges? The answer is clearly no.
What makes that so frustrating for Republicans is that regardless of Barr’s actions, in the last weeks of the campaign there was plenty of public evidence pointing toward Hunter Biden wrongdoing, in the form of the laptop revelations published by the New York Post. And what did major media organizations do? Some of them claimed, without any basis, that the story was “Russian disinformation.” Some ignored it. Some attacked the New York Post. Some did all three.
Then there were the social media giants, Facebook and Twitter. Facebook announced that it was “reducing the distribution” of the New York Post story, making it harder for people to find. Facebook said it was referring the story to its “third-party fact checking partners” for review. But the factchecking seemed to disappear down the memory hole. In any event, even if Facebook’s review is still going on, it might be changed by the news of the Justice Department investigations. For its part, Twitter froze the New York Post account for more than two weeks in the critical pre-election period. Twitter would not let the paper post anything on its account as punishment for publishing the Biden story.
Now, after all that suppression and self-censorship, we finally have word that federal authorities are indeed investigating Hunter Biden. It’s too late to help President Trump in the election, but it is not too late for the media to try to find out what happened. Perhaps they could take another look at Hunter Biden. Perhaps they could take another look at the laptop issue. Perhaps they could regain a sense of curiosity about the younger Biden’s dealings with foreign governments, both during and after his father’s terms as vice president. It’s never too late to start.
