Hunter Biden Probe Finally Grabs Mainstream-Media Attention

Hunter Biden gets into a vehicle after disembarking from Air Force One with President Joe Biden at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y., February 4, 2023. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we take a look at the turning tide on the Biden family’s scandals, recap an absurd pair of CNN articles on gender ideology, and cover more media misses.

Hunter’s Failed Plea Deal: An Inflection Point

With the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal and the appointment of a special counsel to continue the investigation into the president’s son, the wrongdoings of the younger Biden have become harder for the mainstream media to ignore.

Last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced he would appoint U.S. attorney David Weiss as a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. Garland’s announcement allows Weiss to continue his investigation into the president’s son free from the conventional DOJ oversight.

CNN legal analyst Shan Wu called the special-counsel appointment a “debacle for the Justice Department.”

“They’ve had years to investigate this case and . . . things go wrong in the courtroom, it shouldn’t have gone wrong in this case. I mean, the defense had an interest in keeping it a little ambiguous. . . . The prosecution had no interest in keeping it ambiguous. They should have made this very clear, at least for themselves, what the plan was,” Wu said.

He said Garland “should have had better control over this to begin” with and said the appointment “obviously implies” that “the conflict that’s coming up now is, maybe it extends to the president. Because the president’s son, there is no conflict. Relatives of presidents have been looked at before. You don’t need a special counsel or independent counsel.”

NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd suggested the Hunter Biden investigation could do serious damage to the president in the lead up to the 2024 election.

“President Biden’s handling of the case has raised questions at a time when voters already have doubts about his age and political standing. Biden brought his son to a state dinner just two days after the plea deal that has since collapsed was announced, and he has repeatedly defended him, denying wrongdoing altogether even though Hunter Biden himself has pled guilty,” Todd said.

NBC political analyst Brendan Buck suggested the White House and President Biden’s reelection campaign should take Hunter’s legal situation “more seriously than what they’re doing.”

“It was very easy for a long time for Democrats to just say, well that’s stuff on the crazy right . . . and now if it’s going to be in trial, it’s going to be in front-page news everywhere. I think they can appreciate that this could damage him pretty seriously,” he said.

Amid the new revelations, CNN’s Jake Tapper questioned whether President Biden should stop saying Hunter has done nothing wrong.

“I understand this is a dad talking about his son,” Tapper said during an interview with Representative Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.), who has repeatedly come to Biden’s defense. “But it’s also the President of the United States talking about a potential defendant in a case that his Justice Department is prosecuting. Also, he was about to plead guilty to some of the things he did wrong. Does the president need to stop publicly saying his son did nothing wrong?”

Goldman insisted there is nothing connecting Biden with his son’s business dealings and accused House Republicans of carrying out a “fishing expedition” to create a link that isn’t there.

Tapper pointed to recent closed-door testimony from Hunter’s former business associate Devon Archer, who said then-vice president Joe Biden joined his son’s business meetings in person or via speakerphone at least 20 times.

“Shouldn’t President Biden have realized what Hunter was doing here getting on the phone, talking on speakerphone with his business associates? Didn’t it, at the very least, show a major lapse in judgment and a blind spot with his son and how he handled this?” Tapper pushed back.

Nonetheless, Goldman doubled down in his defense of Archer, claiming the younger Biden was “trying to promote an illusion of access to his father for his own reasons.”

Tapper offered a different stance during a recent interview with House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer, saying that while the Bidens’ business dealings may be “sleazy,” there does not appear to be any evidence of a crime having occurred.

“Well, you definitely have made a case that the people who are around President Biden in terms of the lobbyists and his son Hunter have trafficked on that connection to the then-vice president now president, but I haven’t yet seen any evidence that the president did anything wrong,” Tapper told Comer.

“Again, just looking for evidence because we’re talking about impeachment here, I don’t see any evidence of any crime. And, frankly, that is how the world works in Washington, D.C.” Tapper said. “And if you guys are gonna launch an effort to try to reform Washington so people who are powerful can’t have their wives and children and husbands and others traffic on that relationship, you know, I’ll be first in line to help you out. But it doesn’t seem like you’re trying to do that. It seems like you’re trying to just go after President Biden.”

Comer said Republicans on the committee are pursuing a “legislative fix” to thwart influence peddling.

“Certainly there’s sleaze, there’s sleaze there. I’m saying what did the president do wrong?” Tapper said.

One day later, Tapper struck a different tone when he said concerns about the investigation into Hunter Biden “have merit.”

“I think there are some legitimate questions about this whole situation,” Tapper said. “First of all, I do think it’s fair to question why would U.S. Attorney Weiss be appointed to special counsel. Usually, a special counsel is an outside attorney. Now, it has happened before. Durham came from inside, and the attorney general has the right to do that, but it is odd.”

Tapper questioned why the DOJ would appoint Weiss after he was responsible for the “colossal failure” of Hunter’s plea deal.

“The Justice Department and Weiss denied what the whistleblowers were saying, but this move makes it seem as though, well, maybe the whistleblowers were right. Maybe what they were alleging is true, and he didn’t have the ability to charge whatever he wanted to charge, and now he does. So I do have a lot of questions about that, and I do think some of the political questions being raised by Republicans have merit,” Tapper said.

The Washington Post’s editorial board published an essay on Saturday that endorsed the appointment of a special counsel in the case and suggested Hunter “shouldn’t get special treatment.”

The appointment should “encourage Americans that the process will be independent and transparent and, therefore, that it is more likely to be fair,” the paper’s editorial board wrote, noting that the public needs this reassurance after the collapse of Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal.

“Initially appearing reasonable, the deal turned out to include peculiar details suggesting critics might have been justified to suspect that Mr. Biden was being given special treatment,” the editorial board wrote.

“Special counsels should not be appointed lightly. They have tended to overspend and overreach. One temptation in the Hunter Biden case might be to investigate the president himself, as many of his critics wish,” the board added. “So far, the record suggests President Biden’s behavior was not spotless — but also not criminal.”

Yet CNN anchor Dana Bash jumped to the defense of Hunter Biden’s “humanity.”

“David Weiss has been working on this for five years, five years,” Bash said. “I’m not a lawyer but I’ve sort of covered enough of this to know that five years is a really long time.”

“And you know, God forbid we bring humanity into this but to be, you know, sort of stringing along and to be having a person’s life in limbo — and we’re talking about Hunter Biden, and we’re talking about his family and, you know, frankly, the president’s family,” she added. “Taking politics aside, if you change the name from Hunter Biden to Joe Smith, you would say, ‘You know what, that’s not really fair.'”

Headline Fail of the Week

CNN made no efforts to hide its role in pushing the gender-ideology agenda last week, publishing a pair of stories that offered “A guide to neopronouns, from ae to ze,” and peddled a “small study” that found “transgender and nonbinary patients have no regrets about top surgery.”

Transgender and nonbinary patients have no regrets about top surgery, small study finds https://t.co/epzu1F1v1T

— CNN (@CNN) August 10, 2023

“Per the LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, neopronouns are a ‘step towards a society where people can more fully express all parts of themselves,’” the report on pronouns reads.

Neopronouns included in the piece include leaf, sun, and star. The outlet goes so far as to include a helpful example: “For someone who uses the nounself pronoun “leaf,” that may look like: “I hope leaf knows how proud we are that leaf is getting to know leafself better!” or “Leaf arrived at the coffee shop before me; I was mortified to have been late to meet leaf.”

Media Misses

Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett, who was the original source of the false allegations that Border Patrol agents were “whipping” Haitian migrants, is now spreading more misinformation about the border:

Greg Abbott is already responsible for a child dying in his razor wire buoy stunt. Now another child has died in his stunt to abduct and ship migrants out of state.

He has blood on his hands. He shouldn’t be sued, he should be prosecuted. https://t.co/EVPHcPhaJI

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) August 12, 2023

A community note added to Hackett’s post on X reads: “One person drowned upstream from the barrier and floated into the buoys. A 2nd body was found nearby, not caught in the buoys. At the time of this post no one had been killed by the buoys. Deaths were tragically common, even before the buoys were installed.”

Politico shared a post on X, which it later deleted: “GOP House Oversight Chair James Comer rolled out a new memo identifying over $20 million in payments from entities or individuals in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan to Biden family members. But the memo doesn’t show a direct payment to Joe Biden.” The post that replaced it said only: “House Oversight Chair James Comer rolled out a new memo detailing foreign payments to Biden family members as part of a sprawling investigation.” The outlet explained, “For the record: This replaces a deleted tweet that contained incorrect information about payments detailed in the memo.”
Props to Politifact for finally offering a solid fact-check on a member of the Biden administration. The fact-checker took aim at Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that she has “great approval ratings.” “Public polling results do not support her assertion,” Politifact writes.”At the time the ABC News interview aired, FiveThirtyEight’s average was 39.7% approving of Harris’ performance and 52.3% disapproving, for a net of 12.6 percentage points ‘underwater.’”