AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
It’s been one week since House Republicans released a shocking report that sheds new light on the extent of the Biden family’s lucrative business dealings with foreign entities. Yet despite witnessing what could become one of the greatest scandals in American political history, liberal media outlets are running the same playbook they used three years ago with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal – either denying the legitimacy of the story or ignoring it altogether.
It’s a full-scale media blackout.
The House Oversight Committee’s report identified nine members of the Biden family who received a combined $10 million from foreign companies during and after Biden’s time as vice president. Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, received $1,000,000 from a Romanian official known for corrupt business practices while Joe Biden was vice president, according to the report. An additional $2 million from the same official went to a company controlled by Hunter Biden’s business partner.
Bank records show few details as to what services were exchanged for these payments. A summary of the report alleges clear evidence of “a scheme to peddle influence from 2015 to 2017.”
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said in a press conference that his committee’s report proves that “while Vice President Biden was lecturing Romania on anti-corruption policy, in reality he was a walking billboard for his son and family to collect money.”
“We’ve never seen a presidential family receive these sums of money from adversaries around the world,” he said, adding, ”We’re just talking about a couple of countries today.”
In response to the explosive allegations, the White House and Biden family lawyers have vigorously denied any impropriety. Hunter Biden’s attorney dismissed the House report entirely as “repackaged misstatements of perfectly proper meetings and business by private citizens.” Missing from his statement was any explanation of what valuable services Hunter Biden, a known drug addict, was providing to honestly earn millions of dollars from corrupt foreign businesses.
The Biden family’s blanket denials have by and large been good enough for the media, however, which has launched an all-out effort to erase the story from the national conversation as quickly as possible. On the day the report was released, the New York Times incredibly ran the headline “House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden.”
20 paragraphs in, after engaging in a dizzying game of semantics to downplay the significance of the House report, the Times admits that Joe Biden “falsely denied his son had ties to Chinese businesses.” In other words, Biden lied.
In the last few paragraphs of the story, the Times also concedes that “officials allied with Mr. Biden played a role in wrongly discrediting Hunter Biden’s laptop” (a shameful cover-up in which the Times itself played a major role) while simultaneously trying to distract from the issue at hand by claiming that “presidents’ families have long made money off the family name.”
Politico followed a similar playbook, reporting, “Comer releases Biden family probe update without showing link to president.” Like the Times, Politico implied that because the House report did not provide a “smoking gun” explicitly linking the president to criminal activity, the extremely suspicious business activities the report uncovers should simply be ignored. The Hill ran a virtually identical headline: “House GOP digs in on Biden family dealings without directly connecting president.” Axios dismissed the report as just “another swing at the Biden family.”
This complete lack of journalistic curiosity should be whiplash-inducing for anyone who lived through the Russia Hoax, in which the same media that is now demanding forensic proof of a crime before covering the story spent years insisting there was evidence of “collusion” where in fact none existed.
Other liberal newsrooms have tried to shift the focus of the corruption scandal away from Biden and instead target House Republicans for daring to investigate the president’s family. An NBC News article last week declared, “House Republicans escalate attacks on Biden family, alleging business with foreign nationals,” portraying the First Family as innocent victims of the big bad GOP. NPR similarly reported, “House Republicans ramp up claims Biden family received money from foreign contacts,” attempting to subtly undermine the legitimacy of the report through the framing of the story.
Some news outlets have, to their credit, given the story the attention it is due. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, for instance, noted, “There may not be a smoking gun, but there’s plenty of suspicious smoke worth investigating.” The New York Post also kept the focus on the Biden family’s shady dealings in its coverage.
However, it appears that the same people responsible for covering up the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in 2020 are now heading down a strikingly similar path.
After all, censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the 2020 election very likely helped install Joe Biden in the White House. Maybe, they think, they can pull it off again.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.
