RUTHFULLY YOURS

Late Wednesday afternoon, Hunter Biden announced that he is under investigation by the U.S. Attorney in Delaware. “They are investigating my tax affairs,” Biden wrote, adding that he is confident a “professional and objective” investigation will clear him. For his part, Biden’s father, President-elect Joe Biden, released a statement through his transition office decrying the “vicious personal attacks” on his son in recent years.

Several hours later, Politico reported that the investigation “has been more extensive than a statement from Hunter Biden indicates,” to include “potential money laundering and Hunter Biden’s foreign ties.” The New York Times reported that the money laundering part “failed to gain traction after FBI agents were unable to gather enough evidence for a prosecution.”

The investigation apparently began in 2018 and remained a secret until this week. Besides raising questions about Hunter Biden’s conduct — it’s not surprising that taxes are an issue for a person who has gotten large sums of foreign money under suspicious circumstances — it also raises questions about the politics and media coverage of the president-elect’s son.

The investigation was going on in 2019 when House Democrats were racing to impeach President Trump. Those Democrats insisted there was no evidence that Hunter Biden had done anything wrong and that Republicans seeking to defend Trump should not drag the younger Biden into it. In the media, there were repeated, almost daily denials that there was any evidence of potential wrongdoing by Biden. And at that very moment, we now know, prosecutors were delving into some of Biden’s obviously fishy business affairs.

To take a few examples from one network, CNN: “There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that either Biden did anything improper,” former FBI number-two Andrew McCabe said on CNN on September 20, 2019, as the impeachment battle began. “There is absolutely no evidence any of these allegations are true,” said CNN correspondent Jessica Dean the next day, September 21, 2019. “We need to state here explicitly, there is absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe Biden or his son Hunter Biden,” said CNN anchor Victor Blackwell a day later, on September 22, 2019. The talk went on through September, October, November and beyond. “There absolutely no evidence that either did anything wrong,” said CNN anchor Don Lemon on November 6, 2019.

Those confident statements that there was “absolutely no evidence” of Hunter Biden wrongdoing were made without having actually investigated Biden’s conduct. Indeed, they were made to argue that there should not be such an investigation as part of the impeachment process.

Impeachment came and went. Then, in the last weeks of the presidential campaign, came the Hunter Biden laptop. Reports in the New York Post, based on the contents of Biden’s computer, suggested that Biden repeatedly used his father’s status in his efforts to make hundreds of thousands of dollars from foreign sources.

The media reaction was to suppress the story and attack the New York Post. In some media circles, the laptop story became The Thing That Cannot Be Said. Facebook limited access to it. Twitter froze the New York Post’s account. Many top media organizations simply buried the story. Now, we know that law enforcement examined the laptop, although it is not clear whether its contents have contributed to the current investigation. But the fact that investigators inspected the laptop is part of the story.

The bottom line is that all the time the public was being told that there was “absolutely no evidence” to support any accusation of Hunter Biden misconduct, prosecutors were in fact looking at evidence to support an accusation of Hunter Biden misconduct. All those reports were wrong, wrong, wrong.