Spin jobs don’t get much more nausea inducing than “Hunter Biden’s Tangled Tale Comes Front and Center,” The New York Times’ exhausting chronicle of Hunter’s influence peddling.
The Times is writing this now only because Republicans took the House, and Joe Biden needs a pre-emptive defense. Investigations loom and must be discredited, and possible charges against Hunter Biden from the US attorney for Delaware need soft pedaling (he’s “closing in on a decision,” the story claims, something that has been promised for two years).
The upshot: Yes, drug addict Hunter profited off his father’s name and made deals in places the vice president had influence, like China and Ukraine. But Joe knew nothing about it! Trust us, we asked him. And if you can’t trust a Biden . . .
“The real Hunter Biden story is complex and very different in important ways from the narrative promoted by Republicans — but troubling in its own way,” The Times writes in the most Timesian sentence we’ve read so far this year.
Actually, it’s not that complicated. In fact, The Times lays it out in the next paragraph: “Hunter . . . forged business relationships that brought him millions of dollars, raised questions about whether he was cashing in on his family name [and] set off alarms among government officials about potential conflicts of interest.”
Ah, “raises questions.” How circumspect.
What comes next will be familiar to anyone who read The Post in October 2020, when we published information from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. For this story, The Times says it used a “selection” of the emails “that The Times has verified as authentic, out of the thousands attributed to him that were disseminated by allies of Mr. Trump ahead of the 2020 election to try to undercut the Biden campaign.” The Post’s stories were based on the exact same emails The Times uses, as they are the ones related to Hunter’s business deals.
By Post Editorial Board
