I can’t resist a good list: 7 Cooking Hacks That Save Time; 9 Perfect Desert Island Books; 47 Times Walt Disney Said Something Racist —irresistible. But I especially like lists with a schadenfreude chaser (I know, it’s not healthy). But what the hell: Presenting 15 Media Personalities Who Have Permanently Damaged Their Reputation by Peddling the Lie That the Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was the Work of Russian Propagandists:
MSNBC’s executive producer Kyle Griffin; Publisher of the Ink Anand Giridharadas; Daily Beast reporter Wajahat Ali; Managing editor of Truthorfiction.com Brooke Binkowski; NBC News correspondent Heidi Przybyla; Writer Chip Franklin; MSNBC contributor Ben Rhodes; Washington Post opinion columnist Max Boot; MSNBC’s Naveed Jamali; Mother Jones Publication; CNN anchor and Humpty Dumpty cosplayer Brian Stelter; CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer; NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian; MSNBC Morning Joe’s regular contributor Dave Aronberg; and CNN anchor Jim Sciutto.
Congratulations to you —dark marks all around! For a little fun, we’ll have to run this list against the list of folks who insisted Trump colluded with Russia (that’s for another time).
So now we have this New York Times article acting like it’s reporting brand new information and not just parroting New York Post talking points and research Peter Schweizer doggedly chased down for years. Not surprisingly, neither are mentioned in the article. But there is this:
“Mr. Biden’s taxes are just one element of the broader investigation stemming from work he did around the world. Hunter Biden is a Yale-educated lawyer; his professional life has intersected with his father’s public service, including working as a registered lobbyist for domestic interests and, while his father was vice president, pursuing deals and clients in Asia and Europe.”
And this:
“Over the last two years, federal prosecutors in Delaware have issued scores of subpoenas for documents related to Hunter Biden’s foreign work and for bank accounts linked to him and his associates, including two formerly close business partners, Eric Schwerin and Devon Archer, according to people familiar with the investigation.”
Incredible, NYT — this is brand. new. information. No wait, this has 2019/2020 Schweizer written all over it. NYT is just a cover band, poorly doing Schweizer’s greatest hits.
Why, here’s Peter just last year, explaining how Hunter and Joe’s dealings were “intertwined.”
“If you go through the Hunter Biden emails, as I have been doing with the team for close to a year…What you find out very quickly is that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s finances are intertwined. They are not separate entities. There are numerous examples of Hunter Biden paying bills for his father. Which, by the way, is not legal. Politicians can get occasional gifts from family members, but you cannot subsidize the lifestyle of a politician.”
Then there are the links to Russia as reported by Peter Schweizer and The Drill Down…
“An email from Hunter’s laptop shows that on March 20, 2015, Hunter contacted his longtime business partner, Devon Archer, informing Archer that Elena Baturina and her husband, the former mayor of Moscow, had seats at Biden and Archer’s private dinner table. Hunter sent Archer the full guest list, which included other unnamed individuals, informing him the dinner would be on April 16, 2015.”
And, of course, to China…
“In 2018, Government Accountability President and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer uncovered Hunter Biden’s involvement with Chinese investment fund Bohai Harvest RST. Hunter’s stake in Bohai was estimated at close to $20 million dollars by Professor Steven Kaplan at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.”
All of these points are surfacing in both the mainstream media and federal investigations. But we’re not holding our breath for Peter or the Government Accountability Institute to get any recognition for their contributions to one of the biggest corruption cases of this century.
I don’t want to end on a bitter note, so let’s end on a laugh.
“The 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winner in National Reporting goes to the Staffs at the New York Times and the Washington Post For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
See? Now we’re all laughing again.