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JOE BIDEN (SORT OF) ADDRESSES HUNTER BIDEN ACCUSATION. The Democratic presidential nominee isn’t campaigning in person this week — an odd choice in the final days of a hard-fought campaign. But Joe Biden did do a video interview Wednesday with a Wisconsin television station, WISN in Milwaukee.
It was brief, but Biden managed to discuss the coronavirus pandemic and also plans for tonight’s final debate with President Trump. And then, as a Biden press aide tried to end the interview, WISN anchor Adrienne Pedersen got in one final question: “So Wisconsin’s Republican Sen. Ron Johnson put out a statement on Homeland Security letterhead saying Hunter Biden, together with other Biden family members, profited off the Biden name,” Pedersen said. “Is there any legitimacy to Sen. Johnson’s claims?”
“None whatsoever,” Biden said. “This is the same garbage Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s henchman, it’s the last ditch effort in this desperate campaign to smear me and my family. Even the man who served with him on that committee, the former nominee for the Republican Party, said there’s no basis to this and you know and all and the vast majority of the intelligence people have come out and said there’s no basis at all. Ron should be ashamed of himself.”
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It doesn’t take an expert to see that Biden — again — did not address the substance of any of the issues raised by the leaked contents of his son Hunter’s laptop. Instead, Biden gave a three-part answer. The first was to claim that the role of Rudy Giuliani discredited the evidence. The second was to dismiss it all as an attempt to smear Biden. And the third was to appeal to authority.
The “former nominee for the Republican Party” Biden referred to is Sen. Mitt Romney, who has criticized Johnson’s investigation of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, saying the probe has “the earmarks of a political exercise.” That has given Biden something to hold on — bipartisan criticism! — as he tries to ignore the questions raised by material on the laptop.
Biden’s second authority was the “vast majority of the intelligence people” who Biden says have declared that there is “no basis at all” to the laptop matter. That’s a reference to a letter this week from more than 50 former intelligence officials — including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Directors Michael Hayden, John Brennan, and Leon Panetta — who wrote that the laptop story has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
But fewer people are quoting the former officials’ admission that they don’t know anything. Nothing. “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement,” the officials said. Instead, they claimed that their experience “makes us deeply suspicious” of a possible Russian role.
Of course, the current Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, says there is “no intelligence that supports” the notion that the laptop is part of a Russian operation. The heads of the nation’s law enforcement agencies concur.
And now, the New York Post is reporting that one of the recipients of an important May 2017 email outlining Hunter Biden’s and, allegedly, Joe Biden’s, involvement in a business project in China has confirmed the email’s authenticity. “I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker,” the man, Tony Bobulinski, wrote. “That email is genuine.”
So evidence is accumulating that the accusations outlined in the emails are accurate. Joe Biden is ignoring it, and when he can’t ignore it, he is stonewalling it. Many media outlets are all but ignoring it. Social media is trying to suppress it. But the story will come out in the end. Maybe before the election, and maybe not. But it will come out in the end.
