The press isn’t going to wait forever for Democrats to formulate a coherent, up-to-date rejoinder to the GOP’s increasingly specific claims.
For months, the American Right has complained about the media “blackout” around the scandalous revelations involving Hunter Biden’s nefarious dealings, which increasingly appear to have involved his father in ways the president and his allies have long denied. It isn’t as though the press has wholly ignored these revelations. Rather, what the Right’s media watchers have noticed is the conspicuous lack of saturation coverage and analysis around these revelations, similar to what we might expect if a Republican president (or, for that matter, a Republican lawmaker) were accused of similar misdeeds. But media professionals are taking their cues from Democratic officials, and Democrats don’t have a coherent counternarrative to the one Republicans are weaving.
At the end of June, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee claimed that they had uncovered evidence thoroughly rebutting what were at the time still vague accusations of corruption involving the whole Biden family. At the time, Representative Jamie Raskin announced that Mykola Zlochevsky, the co-founder of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, asserted in a 2019 questionnaire that he had no contact with Joe Biden when the president served in the Obama administration. Moreover, Zlochevsky insisted that he received no assistance from the then-vice president’s staff in his dealings with Hunter Biden.
“Mr. Zlochevsky’s statements are just one of the many that have debunked the corruption allegations against President Biden,” Raskin asserted. Case closed. But it turns out that Zlochevsky had something else to say to closer associates about his relationship with the Bidens.
Andy McCarthy summarized the details on Monday:
Zlochevsky told the FBI informant that he had not only spoken directly with both Joe and Hunter Biden, but had also paid them $5 million each in bribes in order to pressure the Ukrainian government to back off from prosecuting him. Zlochevsky told the informant that the payments to the Bidens were made through a complex array of companies and bank accounts, such that it would take investigators “ten years” to trace the money from him to Joe Biden.
So, how has the Democratic effort to defend Joe Biden evolved following this explosive revelation? It hasn’t. The case remains closed.
Last week, IRS special agent Joseph Ziegler told the House investigators that the Biden family earned as much as $17 million from foreign sources in recent years, including those in which Biden served as vice president. The revelation follows details provided to Republican-led House committees by IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, who outlined, in detail, how Biden-appointed officials and the president’s justice department slow-walked the investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial affairs.
What was the Democratic response to these developments? To judge by Nancy Pelosi’s comments on CNN over the weekend, they don’t have one. She twice called the hearings a “clown show” and, while trying to balance her “respect for whistleblowers” against the partisan political imperatives here, impugned the witnesses’ credibility. “No, I’m not confident about what the whistleblower said,” Pelosi said. For his part, Raskin revived the defunct claims he issued in June. The committee’s Republicans were engaged in a “transparently desperate attempt by Committee Republicans to revive the aging and debunked [Rudy] Giuliani-framed conspiracy theories,” he said in a statement, “to distract from their continuing failure to produce any actual evidence of wrongdoing by the President.”
These exercises in misdirection were still more competent than the performance White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre turned in on Monday. Asked to confirm or deny Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s claim to have evidence the president communicated directly with Hunter Biden’s foreign associates, Jean-Pierre provided an unsatisfying non-answer. “I’ve been asked this question a million times. The answer is not going to change. The answer remains the same,” she insisted. “The president was never in business with his son.”
As legal commentator Jonathan Turley observed, the White House’s answer had changed. Where once the White House maintained that Joe Biden had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings abroad, now the president can only claim to have never been a party himself to those dealings. The change in tone follows reporting via the New York Post’s Miranda Devine alleging that the president joined his son on telephone calls with his overseas business partners.
Democratic lawmakers have been uncharacteristically tight-lipped as the allegations against the Bidens accumulate. In what the Huffington Post describes as a strategy House Democrats and the Biden Justice Department view as a way to “regain control of the narrative” – the implication therein being that Democrats at present are not in control of this news cycle – the White House and its allies hope to compel U.S. Attorney David Weiss to testify publicly about his decision to settle the charges against the president’s son with a plea bargain. But there is no uniform message discipline to be found from the president’s Democratic defenders against these mounting claims because there is no message.
Republicans have the initiative. They are advancing this story, rapidly uncovering new details, and promising more. Democrats have responded to their unfortunate circumstances by maintaining that there is nothing substantive to the Right’s allegations. But the press isn’t going to wait forever for Democrats to formulate a coherent, up-to-date rejoinder to the GOP’s increasingly specific claims. The aggressive tone of the reporting around this brewing scandal and the big names in the business who are publicly revealing their interest in the story are suggestive of the Fourth Estate’s waning patience.