While Democrats fret that President Biden's domestic agenda could implode, a book by POLITICO reporter Ben Schreckinger could be the catalyst for reassessing the relationship between the elder Biden, his son Hunter and powerful, monied interests.
POLITICO outlined some of the evidence in Schreckinger's book “The Bidens: Inside the First Family's Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” which hits shelves today.
A person who had independent access to Hunter Biden's emails confirmed he did receive a 2015 email from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden. The same goes for a 2017 email in which a proposed equity breakdown of a venture with Chinese energy executives includes the line, “10 held by H for the big guy?” (This person recalled seeing both emails, but was not in a position to compare the leaked emails word-for-word to the originals.)
While there was no widespread fraud to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, fears about online misinformation kept mainstream media outlets from covering the Hunter Biden laptop mystery before the election. That same panic was also the impetus for Facebook and Twitter to create algorithms that censored the few articles written about the laptop's hard drive.
Was the lack of coverage enough to affect the outcome of the presidential election? Not the popular vote, which Biden won by more than seven million votes—but perhaps it was enough to make the difference in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. Trump lost those three states combined by fewer than 43,000 votes.
Alas, we'll never know, just as historians can only speculate how the world today would look if the Spanish Armada had vanquished the British in Dover Straight or if the Wehrmacht repulsed the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy.
Hot Air's Ed Morrissey further reports on the context and repercussions of this story:
In fairness, Schreckinger had been among the few journalists to cast a critical eye on the Bidens and their fortunes, literal and figurative. I believe he coined the term “Biden Inc” to describe the cashing-in strategies of Hunter and his uncles on connections made by Joe Biden in his political capacities. That began in earnest two months before the Post's stories about Hunter's laptop, although Schreckinger had begun this thread in March with James Biden's Americore health-industry cash-in.
National media outlets had plenty of context regarding corruption issues within Biden Inc before the NY Post revealed the contents of Hunter's laptop. Had they bothered to pay a fraction of the attention Schreckinger did to those corruption issues, the laptop story would have made much more sense. (As it did to those of us who had paid attention to Biden Inc.) Instead, they practically broke their figurative ankles in a rush to bury the story, perhaps out of political bias, or perhaps out of embarrassment for having been caught napping on the story. Maybe it was a blend of both.
And now we find out, thanks to Schreckinger again, that the details in the core laptop story could have been confirmed if anyone had bothered to ask. That prompts the question I just asked — why didn't national news outlets bother to ask? The answer, one presumes, is that they preferred a corrupt Biden to a cantankerous Trump. That's a legitimate choice for voters, but it's an unconscionable ethical violation for a free press.
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