Fox News host Tucker Carlson dropped the Hunter Biden story from his top-rated show in the final days before the 2020 election.
A special Sunday edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight and a regularly scheduled episode on Monday evening made no mention of the 50-year-old son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Election Day is on Tuesday.
The sudden absence of coverage appears to be the final nail in the coffin for an October surprise that had President Trump and his allies arguing the Democratic candidate faced troubling corruption and national security issues.
Carlson spent much of last week contributing to the story that started with the emergence of a laptop and hard drive found in a Delaware computer shop that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden and contained emails, photos, and other information about his foreign business affairs as well as his personal life. The computer materials were first reported by the New York Post, prompting a social media crackdown and debate over whether Russian disinformation was involved.
The host interviewed Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden who claims Joe Biden was aware of his son’s foreign business dealings. The elder Biden denies this is true, and there is no smoking gun evidence to show he was aware or involved in any way. Carlson spent the second half of the week regaling his audience with the caper about a “flash drive containing documents that were damaging to the Biden family” that was briefly lost by UPS.
Carlson signaled an end on Thursday, saying there were documents about Hunter Biden’s personal life that he refused to show. He added that “to the extent those documents pertain to his dad, of course,” they’re fair game.
He briefly touched on the story on Friday, noting the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s report about there being an active criminal investigation into Hunter Biden and his associates that is focused on allegations of money-laundering and interviewing New York Post columnist Miranda Devine about their belief that the media and Big Tech are working to “suppress and discredit the Joe and Hunter Biden story.”
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a personal lawyer to Trump who has been sharing the alleged Hunter Biden laptop materials with the media, was still hitting the airwaves on Monday to talk about the story, but for the most part, the coverage, which mainly stayed in right-leaning media circles, has dried up except for one last report published late in the evening.
The Daily Caller News Foundation, which got a cybersecurity expert to confirm the authenticity of an email sent to Hunter Biden about a purported meeting between Joe Biden and a top official at Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company where the younger Biden held a lucrative position on the board, published a follow-up report with more details about the hard drive.
