Four Big Takeaways From The New York Times’s Attempt To Control The Hunter Biden Narrative

Last Wednesday, The New York Times reported on the continuing criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, and in doing so finally acknowledged the emails recovered from the laptop abandoned at a Delaware repair shop were authentic.

Since then, much of the media’s coverage has focused on the corrupt press’ burying of the laptop scandal The New York Post broke shortly before the 2020 election.

This from thefederalist.com.

There is much more to be gleaned from the Times’s article, though, including these four takeaways:

The first key takeaway from The New York Times article concerns what it means about the scandals revealed the October 2020 release of the emails and text messages contained on Hunter Biden’s MacBook. Those who would be called journalists ignored those scandals for the last year-and-a-half by framing the material “Russian disinformation.”

Now that the Times has acknowledged that the Biden-related emails and other documents recovered from the abandoned laptop are authentic, that means the scandals they exposed are also legitimate.

As summarized by The Federalist HERE, there are eight Joe Biden scandals inside Hunter Biden’s MacBook, that corporate media just admitted is legit, and deserve investigation:

(1.) Pay-to-Play in Ukraine

The influence profiteering Joe Biden apparently participated in during his eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president, with Ukraine featuring heavily in the pay-to-play scheme.

(2.) China Gets in the Game

Ukraine is but a patch on the influence-peddling undertaken by Hunter on behalf of “the big guy,” as the younger Biden referred to his dad. China also played a large role in the family enterprise, as demonstrated by, again, passing coverage in November 2021. Then, the Times reported, in brief, that Hunter Biden’s joint global equity firm, the Bohai Harvest Equity Investment Fund, had helped coordinate the purchase by a Chinese mining company of the world’s largest cobalt source in the Congo.

(3.) Moscow, Kazakhstan, and More

While Ukraine and China likely hold the most significant revelations, once those threads are pulled, investigators should move on to Moscow, which according to a Senate report, holds another possible scandal. That report documents that Hunter also received a combined $3.5 million from the wife of the former Moscow mayor, a Kazakhstan investor, and several other individuals. After all, there is no reason to think that a person willing to let his son sell access to the vice president of the United States would close the money train to just a few countries.

(4.) Ukraine’s Firing of the Prosecutor Investigating Burisma

With the elite media now deigning coverage of Hunter’s laptop appropriate, the public knows the Burisma scandal was real and threatened to be spectacularly devastating to the elder Biden. That makes questions concerning then-Vice President Joe Biden’s demands that Ukraine fire the state prosecutor who was reportedly investigating Burisma ripe to revisit.

That prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was fired, according to statements Joe Biden made during a 2018 event, after Biden threatened to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee if the Ukrainian government refused to ax Shokin.

(5.) Obama-Biden Administration Ignoring Conflicts of Interest

Biden also needs to answer questions about his decision to ignore the clear conflicts of interest involved with him negotiating with the same countries Hunter was shaking down. Of course, since “the big guy” was in on the scam, bowing out over conflicts of interest is the lesser of the evils, but it is still worth investigating to assess how Biden handled the concerns raised by the Obama administration’s State Department.

(6.) The Intelligence Community’s Briefing of Biden

Another scandal reaching President Biden concerns his interactions with the intelligence community after the FBI, and presumably the CIA and other such agencies, learned in December of 2019, that Hunter Biden believed Russians had stolen Hunter’s laptop, rendering the Bidens susceptible to blackmail.

Here, it is important to understand that there are two separate Hunter Biden laptops at issue. The most-discussed laptop was actually the second laptop. That laptop was the one Hunter had abandoned at the Delaware repair shop. Then, after the repair shop owner discovered concerning material on the MacBook, the store owner handed it to the FBI in December of 2019. The owner of the repair shop, however, had first made a copy of the hard drive, which resulted in The New York Post’s coverage in October 2020.

But there was another laptop—one Hunter believed Russians had stolen from him when he was binging on drugs with prostitutes in the summer of 2018 in Las Vegas. While the public did not learn about the existence of this earlier laptop until August of 2021, the FBI knew about it as early as December 2019, when they took possession of the second laptop Hunter had left at the repair store.

(7.) Possible Collusion to Interfere in the 2020 Election

An honest press should also investigate whether now-President Biden or anyone connected to his then-presidential campaign pressured reporters, media outlets, or companies such as Twitter and Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden story. And what about the “fifty former intelligence officials” who publicly declared the laptop resembled a Russian disinformation campaign—something clearly untrue? Did Biden or his campaign coordinate with those individuals, several of whom had endorsed the Democratic candidate, in the release of the letter?

(8.) Joe Biden Is a ‘Lying Dog-Faced Pony Soldier’

The final Joe Biden scandal the press should push President Biden to answer concerns his lies to the American public. While there are too many to count, two merit further questioning.

First, the media should demand Biden answer for lying to the country when he seethed, “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period.” The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Biden not only knew of the family business deals but was part of them.

The second bold-faced fabrication from Biden came during his pre-election debate with Trump, when Trump raised “the laptop from hell.” When Trump asked Biden if he was saying the “laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax?” the then-Democratic candidate replied, “That’s exactly what [I] was told.”

2. The Times’s Record of ‘Getting Ahead of the Story’ Suggests More Developments Are Coming

Beyond what Wednesday’s article on Hunter Biden means more broadly related to the scandals exposed by the abandoned MacBook, the substance of the Times’s coverage suggests a huge story about Hunter is about to break. Remember that the Times is the newspaper of record for stories needed to soften the landing for democrats embroiled in scandal. In this case, the tells are all there that the Times is offering an assist to the Bidens by getting ahead of the story to come.

Just as Press Secretary Jen Psaki smooths her copper coif before dropping a doozy, the Times alerts observant readers to the real story when it identifies its source for information harmful to a Democrat as a “person familiar with the investigation.” The Times used that technique ten times in its coverage of the Hunter Biden case.

It is impossible to know for sure unless and until an indictment drops, but it is inconceivable that the Times would air the Biden family’s dirty laundry unless the reporters believed the entire household hamper was soon to be dumped in the middle of town.

A second charge floated by the Times concerns violations of “the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires disclosure to the Justice Department of lobbying or public relations assistance on behalf of foreign clients.” Here, the Times’ efforts to frame Hunter’s potential violations of FARA as unintentional — and thus not criminal — suggests the Delaware U.S. attorney has a solid FARA case in the works.

The Times’s coverage, however, indicates federal prosecutors are looking at much more serious charges related to payments Hunter Biden received from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, as well his financial interests in Kazakhstan and China.

In last week’s article, the Times reveals that prosecutors have accumulated significantly more evidence suggesting Hunter profited from these relationships, with prosecutors allegedly investigating “payments and gifts Mr. Biden or his associates had received from foreign interests, including a vehicle paid for using funds from a company associated with a Kazakh oligarch and a diamond from a Chinese energy tycoon.”

The Times further revealed that federal prosecutors have “issued scores of subpoenas,” related to “Hunter Biden’s foreign work and for bank accounts linked to him and his associates.”

Hunter Biden’s team likely gave the Times the heads-up to the case being crafted against the president’s son to allow the liberal mainstay to massage a narrative before any potential charges became public. Given the details shared with the Times by people familiar with the investigation, then regurgitated by the Times for the public, it seems some pretty serious charges may be in store for Hunter.

4. Downplay the Charges, Build the Narrative, and Beta-Test the Defenses

As noted above, the Times’ preemptive countering of several hypothetical criminal charges indicates the leftist paper’s coverage of the Hunter Biden case seeks not to inform the public but to form a gentle narrative on which the Hunter can land when the expected indictment drops. Here it is not merely the many defenses the Times lays out, but the entirety of the article that also downplays the potential charges and paints the most sympathetic scenario possible for Hunter Biden.

Consider, for instance, the Times’s framing of Hunter Biden and his apparent pay-to-play scheme. “Hunter Biden is a Yale-educated lawyer,” the article notes early on, claiming that the “broader investigation” stems “from work he did around the world” that “intersected with his father’s public service.”

Until the Delaware U.S. attorney announces charges, if any, against Hunter Biden, it is impossible to know the criminal jeopardy Hunter may face. But, given that when the Times reports on stories harmful to democrat interests it proves prescient, odds are good that some serious charges are in the works.

Further, we can only trust that someone is taking a serious look at Joe-Joe Biden as well. The recent lawsuit filed in Florida by President Trump will certainly shine more like on Joe Biden.