Miranda Devine: The great Joe Biden cover-up as election heats up
No one is disputing the authenticity of the emails detailing potential corruption by the Biden family in China and Ukraine, but the press is doing their best to cover for Joe, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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As if the US election could get any more bizarre, now Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop is being accused of being an agent of Russian disinformation.
To sum up, last week the New York Post published a story about incriminating emails found on a MacBook of the troubled 46-year-old son of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
In the 20,000 emails, documents and photos on the laptop is new evidence that Biden’s family has been monetising his name from shady companies overseas, and that Joe participated in the cash-for-influence scheme when he was vice president.
Coming two weeks before the election, the Post’s stories demand answers, because Joe has spent years denying he knows anything about his son’s business dealings overseas.
You would think he would have called a press conference the day the bombshell appeared, either to declare his innocence or apologise for misleading the American people.
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Instead, he went into hiding.
It wasn’t until Friday night at Detroit airport, that Joe briefly stopped for questions and CBS reporter Bo Erickson asked about the damning emails on Hunter’s laptop, which was left at a Mac repair shop in Delaware last April.
“I have no response,” snapped Joe. “Another smear campaign. Right up your alley.”
A video of Joe’s vituperative remarks on Erickson’s Twitter account has been viewed more than six million times.
Joe has done his best to dodge reporters ever since.
Yesterday he called a “lid” on his campaign for four days. That means no public appearances.
It’s extraordinary for a presidential campaign, especially when President Donald Trump has sprung back from COVID-19 and is crisscrossing the country doing speeches and rallies. The past two days he has been to Las Vegas, Nevada, Newport Beach, California, Carson City, Nevada, Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.
He plans to continue the frenetic activity up to November 3 while Joe seems to believe he can coast to the finish line without being accountable to the voters.
He figures he can get away with it because the rest of the media will run cover for him. And he’s right.
He ventured out to get ice cream on Sunday and the big question was: “What flavour did you get?”
Neither Joe nor Hunter has disputed that the abandoned MacBook belongs to Hunter.
Nor have they denied that the documents and photos we have published are genuine.
The signature on the work order authorising the repair shop to fix the laptop matches Hunter’s signature on court papers in a paternity suit.
Fox News has verified the provenance of at least one message with a third party included in the email chain.
The computer repair man, John Paul Isaac, has told Giuliani’s lawyer Bob Costello that Hunter’s lawyer, George Mesires, phoned him last Tuesday night, hours before the Post went to print, and asked for the return of his client’s laptop and hard drive.
I have seen Mesires’ follow up email to Isaac at 7.28pm confirming his identity.
In summary, the Post has published emails showing Hunter charged $10 million for “introductions alone” to a Chinese businessman while his dad was VP and that he reserved a 10 per cent stake in another lucrative Chinese deal for “the Big Guy”.
Fox News since has confirmed with a recipient of one of the emails that “the Big Guy” refers to Joe.
In Ukraine, an email shows Hunter arranged a meeting in 2015 between his VP father and Vadym Pozharskyi, one of his senior colleagues at the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying the chronic drug addict up to $83,000 a month.
A separate email, dated November 2, 2015, from Pozharskyi to Hunter, outlines what is required of him: to organise powerful US policymakers to pressure the Ukrainian government to “close down for [sic] any cases/pursuits” against Burisma.
That’s bad enough. But there is also evidence American foreign policy was distorted as a result.
In China, Joe went easy on President Xi’s aggressive militarisation of islands in the South China Sea.
In Ukraine, he threatened to withhold $1 billion aid in December 2015 unless the government fired Viktor Shokin, the top prosecutor investigating Burisma for corruption.
By February Shokin was gone.
Smells like a quid pro quo.
But the Democratic party and Biden’s allies in the left-wing media are running protection for Joe.
Hours after the Post story appeared, Facebook throttled its distribution pending “fact-checking”.
For the past six days Twitter has locked the @nypost account because it decided our story was based on “hacked” material. It’s not. Hunter abandoned his laptop and after 90 days, per the form he signed, the computer became the property of the repair shop.
Now the old Russiagate playbook deployed against Trump is being re-run against the Post’s evidence-based news stories by the same shady characters.
House chairman Adam Schiff declared on Monday that the stories were a smear “from the Kremlin”.
Last night 50 of the same former spooks who pushed Russiagate signed a letter saying they suspect a Russian disinformation campaign, although they admit they “do not have evidence of Russian involvement [and] don’t know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not”.
In other words, it’s a pathological fantasy.
Meanwhile, new material has emerged which bolsters our stories.
A business partner of Hunter’s named Bevan Cooney — in jail for fraud — has turned over 20,000 emails to Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer at Breitbart. One email published yesterday indicates a delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials secured a private, off-the-books meeting with then-VP Biden.
Trump is not letting the scandal go to waste, telling reporters yesterday: “Joe Biden is, and always has been, a corrupt politician. You know that, and a lot of people knew it for a long time. But now you have the laptop, it’s all over.”
We’ll see at the last presidential debate on Thursday night if Trump has any luck putting Joe on the spot, or if the former VP manages to play for sympathy for his wayward son.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
Originally published as Miranda Devine: The great Joe Biden cover-up as election heats up