The press hates Donald Trump. That's not a newsflash. The bias the press shows toward most Republicans turns to outright hostility when it comes to Trump. Once you've convinced yourself your opponent is an evil racist, it's not hard to justify doing anything you can to stop him. Many in the press corps have admitted this. Most haven't, but it's definitely the prevalent attitude in the dominant liberal media. How can we have a fair election in this environment? That question is coming to a head now with regard to Joe Biden and his son's alleged corruption.
The Biden campaign has decided that their best strategy for handling allegations of corruption is to shame the press out of covering it. They have labeled any such allegations against Biden as Trump-inspired conspiracy theories and pushed newsrooms in an unprecedented way to ignore them. So far, it's largely working.
But based on the agreed facts known to date, it's clear there's something worthy of investigation when it comes to Hunter Biden's shady foreign business dealings. Here's what we know: Hunter Biden received massive payments from shady foreign companies. Nobody denies this. He has had a turbulent and troubled professional career. From admitted substance abuse to an involuntary military discharge for drug use to failed companies, it hasn't been a good run for him. The Bidens' claims that Hunter was hired for corporate governance expertise don't pass the laugh test. He has absolutely zero track record of any such expertise.
Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, paid both Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer a total sum allegedly in the millions of dollars over a number of years. Chinese private equity firm BHR reportedly sold Hunter Biden's company a 10% stake for $420,000. This seems like a remarkable discount for a firm managing over $2 billion in assets and therefore likely raking in tens of millions of dollars in fees every single year.
Barring some other explanation -- not offered to date -- it sure seems that the only reason these deals took place was to curry favor from or influence over Joe Biden or other top government officials around him. To be clear, the fact that foreign firms wanted to hire his son to influence Joe Biden does not mean that Joe Biden was himself corrupt at all. It could be that these firms went into these deals in hopes of influencing Joe and that Joe, in the end, never did anything wrong.
There's only one thing to date that we're pretty certain Joe did wrong, and even that is likely not illegal. Joe Biden flew his son Hunter to China in December 2013 on Air Force Two. On that trip, Joe met with the founder of BHR. Weeks later, BHR apparently closed on a deal for a $1.5 billion investment from Chinese state-backed investors. This all happened while Joe Biden was the Obama administration's point man on China. Allowing Hunter to tag along with him to China on an official visit, where all this went down, at a minimum showed very bad judgement on Vice President Biden's part.
Was there anything more than bad judgment to these shady-looking Biden business dealings? Nothing more has been proven to date. The question at this stage isn't whether corruption has been proven but whether it's worth investigating. A functioning press corps would be all over this story. Maybe there's nothing more to it. But until someone thoroughly investigates, we won't know.
A massive number of Americans do not trust the media. The best way to counteract that is for the media to do its job.
But today, we have a very different situation. The entire establishment press corps, under direct pressure from the Biden campaign, has concluded that these clearly dubious business dealings are not worthy of investigation at all. Conclusory statements that there's no "proof" of corruption have been copy-pasted into every Biden article in The New York Times and The Washington Post since this story first broke. That's not enough. It's time for the press to do its job and get to the bottom of why in the world these foreign companies paid Hunter Biden millions of dollars. Did they get anything back for their investment? It'd be nice to know.