Maybe a bit of paranoia is justified

Is Joe Biden clamoring for a probe of the laptop story to clear his and his son’s name?

You’d think he would be. Especially now that he’s on the verge of taking office as President.

But he isn’t.

Then what about the news media? Are they clamoring for such a probe?

Nope.

Which is exceedingly odd. After all, didn’t the media from the day Donald Trump took office hyperventilate over allegations — since thoroughly debunked — that Trump and the Kremlin connived to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency?

And wasn’t it Joe Biden himself who insisted the recent laptop stories involving his son Hunter were a disinformation scheme pulled off by Russian agents?

If true, that would be — to quote words Biden himself once used in a different context — “a big f—-ing deal,” would it not?

In the eleventh hour of the recent presidential campaign, 50 former Deep State bureaucrats — including former top-level bosses — issued a statement suggesting the laptop/email uproar was orchestrated by those diabolical Russians. Again.

Joe Biden leapt on the statement as proof that he and his son Hunter had been exonerated of any impropriety in the shady pursuit of easy riches overseas during the Biden vice presidency.

“The vast majority of the intelligence community has come out and said there’s no basis” for questioning Joe and Hunter

Biden’s foreign business adventures, declared Joe Biden.

He dismissed the matter as “smears,” nothing more. “Garbage,” he said.

“No basis whatsoever.” Actually, the 50 former Deep State bureaucrats didn’t quite say what Biden claimed they said. What they actually said was this: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails...are genuine or not, and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement....”

The former Deep State apparatchiks conceded that their statement was based entirely on suspicion, not facts.

“Our experience makes us suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” they added.

Well then, even in the absence of facts, isn’t high-level intel “suspicion” of a “significant” Russian role grounds enough for an all-out probe to get to the bottom of the laptop matter? You’d surely think so. Especially considering that the statement was signed by former CIA chiefs John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden, plus former National Intelligence Director James Clapper.

If Russians were suspected of planting the laptop and fabricating the thousands of emails on it, as has been suggested, wouldn’t that be a national security matter of utmost, urgent priority?

Will Joe Biden appoint a special prosecutor if Trump doesn’t?

Seems highly unlikely. Keep in mind, it was not Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or the “alt-right” who raised the suspicion of Kremlin involvement in the laptop contretemps. It was

Joe Biden himself and 50 former intelligence apparatchiks who did so. Shouldn’t we find out, then, what the facts actually are regarding the Hunter Biden laptop and emails? If Vladimir Putin was indeed involved, shouldn’t we want to find out how so? And to what extent?

Aren’t these questions worthy of relentless investigative pursuit, until answers are found?

On the face of it, planting a laptop and falsely passing it off as Hunter Biden’s — plus convincingly fabricating thousands upon thousands of emails on it — would seem to be a feat of deceit beyond even the skullduggery of a former KGB man like Putin.

Interestingly, so far, neither Joe Biden nor son Hunter has actually asserted, specifically, that the laptop was a plant and that the emails are phonies. They have only evasively implied it without saying so outright.

Several other people involved in the email exchanges, however, have verified the authenticity of the emails as far as their own participation in them is concerned.

A key email witness is an investor named Tony Bobulinski. He was a business partner with Hunter Biden in a Chinese energy company deal, arranged when Joe Biden was vice president and acting as President Obama’s diplomatic point man in China.

An email attributed to Hunter Biden urges the Chinese to set aside 10 percent of the multimillion-dollar proceeds of the deal for a party cryptically identified as “the big guy.”

Tony Bobulinski says “the big guy” was none other than Joe Biden himself.

Shouldn’t somebody — maybe the news media if nobody else — seek out Hunter Biden and ask him about this email? Is it a Russian fake?

If not, who was Hunter Biden alluding to when he proposed that a 10 percent piece of the action go the “big guy”? Who does HE say “the big guy” is?

Hunter Biden could easily answer these questions himself. If all was on the up and up, shouldn’t he indeed be eager to do so?

In another email, Hunter Biden complains to his children of having had to share half his earnings with his father. This seems to suggest that Joe Biden was in on his son’s dodgy foreign business dealings. And maybe even the coordinator of them.

Are these emails Russian-concocted fakes? Or are they authentic?

Hunter Biden could easily address these questions too. But for whatever reasons, he hasn’t. He keeps a low, practically invisible profile, even as his father prepares to take the oath as President.

If Hunter Biden gave a sworn statement that the emails are fraudulent and that the laptop was not his, that would surely jump-start an investigation and get it rolling along. The same goes if he acknowledged the authenticity of the laptop and emails.

Surely whether the emails are authentic or fakes is an issue of monumental significance. If the emails were in fact faked by Russia, surely that’s a national security issue of utmost urgency.

Surely these issues merit being addressed at the highest investigative levels. Surely these are matters that need to be looked into and either confirmed or debunked.

Bobulinski says he decided to speak out after his business role afforded him a view of goings-on “behind the Biden curtain.” He says that over time he became increasingly concerned with what he saw.

In response to his revelations, a phlegmatic media declared — with a ho-hum shrug — that they have been unable to confirm Bobulinski’s account. But what the media left unsaid is that they have been unable to refute his account, too.

Is there something in Bobulinski’s character or background that casts doubt on his veracity? If so, there’s been no mention of it in the media.

Bobulinski’s past political activity seems to have been confined to donations made exclusively to Democrats, 100 percent, zero donations to Trump or any other Republicans.

A businessman with no reported law enforcement inquiries tainting his record, Bobulinski served as a Navy officer with a top-level security clearance in the super-sensitive Navy Nuclear Training Command.

Heightening the drama of the laptop controversy is a taped phone call Bobulinski released from, he says, a Biden family confidante named Rob Walker.

Walker, according to the recording, pleaded with Bobulinski to keep quiet. “Ah, Tony,” the recording has him saying, “you’re just going to bury us all, man.”

Shouldn’t this recorded phone call also be looked into? Is it, too, like the laptop emails, just another example of Kremlin subterfuge? Or is it in fact authentic?

If a fake, wouldn’t that be yet more evidence of the frightening extent of Kremlin meddling in U.S. affairs?

If authentic, on the other hand, wouldn’t the recorded phone call be, as a legal matter, a highly significant revelation in its own right, worthy of investigative

pursuit?

Maybe somebody — hey, maybe the news media! — should ask this Walker guy about the recorded phone call.

Real?

Or Kremlin fake? Walker could even address these questions on his own, without being asked.

If that’s really his voice on the recording, if he really did say those words — “bury us all” — what exactly was he talking about?

What was the revelation he feared was “going to bury us all, man”?

And who are “us all”? You’d think, if Russians are indeed involved, that others besides Joe Biden would be loudly demanding an all-out investigation of the Hunter Biden laptop and emails. The news media especially.

To the contrary, however, the media have been more or less lockstep in shunning the story. Go figure.

Weren’t the media previously keenly interested in — obsessed with, even — Russian disinformation activities and meddling in U.S. affairs?

Didn’t the media run story after story after story on the now-discredited “dossier” purporting to show that Russia intervened in the 2016 election, on Trump’s side, with Trump’s “collusion”?

There was certainly no shunning that story, even

though it was totally unverified in every major particular and far-fetched on its face.

The media ran with the story anyway. Daily. Story after story after story. Stories based largely on anonymous sources. Story after story that excitedly parroted baseless, McCarthyite claims of “treason” by wildeyed Congressman Adam Schiff and other Capitol Hill demagogues.

Today, in the manner of

sycophantic courtiers, the media seem instead to be in hot pursuit of such stories as Joe Biden’s favorite ice cream flavors and the Biden family pets.

The Hunter Biden laptop interlude raises a troubling thought: If that story can be nonchalantly shunted aside, what other stories can be?

Or are being?

As often noted, sometimes it’s crazy not to be just a little bit paranoid.