As evidence mounts that President Joe Biden took millions in bribe money from Ukrainian oligarchs when he was vice president as part of an elaborate influence-peddling scheme headed up by his son, Hunter Biden, let’s check in on how the corporate press is handling what looks like the biggest political scandal in American history.
Nothing to see here, apparently. The New York Times has carried no coverage of the shocking allegations contained in an unclassified FBI document Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released last week. The document, called an FD-1023, details the reporting of a highly credible FBI informant who says the top executive of Ukrainian oil and gas firm Burisma told him he paid Joe and Hunter Biden $5 million each to protect the company from a corruption investigation (that’s in addition to the millions it paid Hunter to sit on its board).
Instead, the “paper of record” ran an article attacking a group called Empower Oversight for helping a pair of IRS whistleblowers at the heart of the Hunter Biden tax fraud investigation who say the FBI and Justice Department hid the informant’s reporting from them, as well as relevant material on Hunter’s laptop. The Times wasn’t interested in the substance of what these whistleblowers had to say, but rather focused on the fact that Empower Oversight helped them follow the proper procedures and whistleblower statutes for bringing their claims to Congress.
Over at The Washington Post, there was likewise zero coverage of the FBI informant’s reporting, even after portions of it were corroborated this week as reported by Margot Cleveland in these pages. Nor was there any mention of Tuesday’s news that Hunter’s former business partner and fellow Burisma board member, Devon Archer, will testify before Congress that Hunter would regularly call his father and put him on speakerphone with overseas business associates when Joe Biden was vice president.
None of that seems to interest the editors at the Post. The only mention of any of this comes from media columnist Philip Bump, who devoted an entire column Monday to a tortured explanation of why we should ignore it all. Just because a trusted FBI informant is credible, writes Bump, doesn’t mean that what the informant was told is true: “I trust my wife, but if she tells me that our 6-year-old claims to have seen a dragon on the roof, I don’t suddenly believe that there was a dragon on the roof.”
Indeed not. But what Bump seems to be suggesting is that if his wife ran up to him terrified that there’s a dragon on the roof because his 6-year-old claims to have seen one, he would just shrug it off until further evidence emerged. And maybe he actually would. After all, this is the same guy who once seemed terribly confused about where babies come from.
But of course Bump, like the rest of the corporate press, is faking it. A normal person, confronted by his hysterical wife claiming the boy saw a dragon on the roof, would take a second to step outside and look at the roof. Bump and his colleagues refuse to do even this, insisting rather that this is all just political theater, the GOP desperately grasping at straws to damage Biden.
In a healthy society with a functioning free press, the Biden corruption scandal — and the rank obstruction of the DOJ and FBI on Biden’s behalf — would dominate the headlines. Instead of merely reporting that the Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy yesterday floated the prospect of impeachment proceedings against Biden, the press would be reporting on the mounting evidence underlying the drive for impeachment.
But no. Instead the corporate media are twisting themselves into pretzels to explain away every new development in this story. As David Marcus noted on Twitter, “We are precipitously close to, ‘Maybe Joe Biden did take money from Burisma, but here’s why that’s actually a good thing.’”
Or as one Twitter account put it:
We can see the goalposts shifting in real time. Asked Monday about the corruption allegations and the claims that Hunter put his father on speakerphone with foreign business associates when Biden was vice president, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden “was never in business with his son.”
That’s a far cry from Biden’s past statements that he has “never spoken” to Hunter about his overseas business dealings. (Never mind the hundreds of meetings Biden has reportedly had with Hunter’s business partners.) But at this rate the laughable White House line will become the media’s fallback position: Biden wasn’t in business with his son! He was just collecting “dividends,” not bribe money!
The upshot of all this is simple: no matter what evidence emerges, no matter how damning, the corporate media will not cover it. To the extent they mention the story at all, it will be in the context of bashing Republican lawmakers for trying to “dig up dirt” on Biden. If the GOP-controlled House opens an impeachment proceeding, which is the only way we’re ever going to get to the bottom of the Biden corruption scheme, the coverage will be about how Republican lawmakers are conducting a “witch hunt” to get back at Democrats for impeaching Trump.
Everywhere, we’ll hear the same line that CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan tossed to Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie recently, in reference to the outrageous plea deal offered to Hunter Biden for a couple of tax charges: “I wonder after this plea happens if you would advise your party to move on?”
Of course, the whole point of the plea deal was to give the corporate media this line in hopes that the American people would “move on” and forget about the scandal.
But no one, it seems, is “moving on” except Democrats and their courtesans in the press. The rest of us are going to take a second to step outside and see if there’s really a dragon on the roof. We’ll make sure to let Philip Bump know.
