by Margot Cleveland at The Federalist
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.
There is much more to be gleaned from the Times’s article, though, including these four takeaways.
1. If the Laptop Is Legit, So Are the Scandals the Laptop Exposed
The first key takeaway from The New York Times article concerns what it means for the scandals spawned by the October 2020 release of the emails and text messages contained on Hunter Biden’s MacBook. The supposed standard-bearers of journalism 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 at The Federalist here, there are eight Joe Biden scandals that deserve investigation.
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 the president’s son is about to break. Here, it is helpful to 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.
Another sure give-away is the Times’s burying of the lede. That is an understatement of what the Old Grey Lady did when it titled its coverage of the investigation into Hunter Biden as “Hunter Biden Paid Tax Bill, but Broad Federal Investigation Continues.” The article then opened with:
In the year after he disclosed a federal investigation into his ‘tax affairs’ in late 2020, President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, paid off a significant tax liability, even as a grand jury continued to gather evidence in a wide-ranging examination of his international business dealings, according to people familiar with the case.
With a proper title, such as, “Prosecutors Find Evidence Hunter Profited by Selling Access to Vice-President Father,” serious reporting would open by alerting the audience to damning evidence accumulated by federal prosecutors that suggests Hunter Biden criminally profited from his dad’s position as Barack Obama’s vice president.
The Times’s tactic of preemptively providing defenses to hypothetical criminal charges should also alert readers to the inevitability of an indictment against Hunter. For more on the preemptive defense of Hunter see point 4 below.