Hunter Biden: Real scandal or Russian dirty trick?

Here it is, right on cue—your “October surprise,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. In a lastditch effort to save President Trump’s campaign, the Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post last week published several “bombshell” reports based on emails, photos, and videos supposedly retrieved from a laptop that once belonged to Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The materials apparently depict the younger Biden smoking crack, having sex, and trading on his father’s name to land a $50,000-a-month job on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, when his father was heading up U.S. policy in Ukraine. The Post claimed it had a “smoking gun” email from a Burisma executive, thanking Hunter for introducing him to the then vice president. But the Biden campaign has denied the meeting ever took place, and 50 former intelligence officials this week signed a letter saying the supposedly abandoned Hunter Biden laptop reeks of a “Russian information operation” like the hacked-and-leaked Democratic emails in 2016. As it happens, the Post obtained the materials from Trump’s clownish lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has been openly soliciting Biden dirt from shady, pro-Kremlin characters in Ukraine for two years, including Andrii Derkach, whom Trump’s own Treasury Department has labeled an “active Russian agent.”

If the emails are Russian forgeries, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post, then Joe Biden should say so. Instead, the candidate is refusing all comment, beyond dismissing the story as “a smear campaign.” Don’t voters “deserve the whole truth” about the Biden family’s “dirty deals” in Ukraine? Another laptop email, from 2017, discusses a lucrative Chinese business partnership, with 10 percent of equity going to “the big guy,” presumably Joe Biden himself. The mainstream media is trying hard to bury this “explosive” story, said

Rich Lowry in NationalReview.com. Desperate to protect Biden, major news outlets simply declared the story “debunked, without doing any work to debunk it.”

There’s no scandal here, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Both Bidens have acknowledged the impropriety of Hunter working for Burisma, which clearly hired him hoping to influence U.S. policy. But two separate GOP-led Senate committees last month failed to find any wrongdoing by Biden Sr., who actually pushed Ukraine to crack down on corrupt companies like Burisma. He’s made his tax returns public, and they show no payments from Hunter, China, or Ukraine. Intelligence officials say it’s common practice for Russian hackers to mix in forged documents with real ones, and forensic experts have already flagged typographical “anomalies” in some emails “that suggest fakery.” It’s all so desperate, said Molly Jong-Fast in TheDailyBeast.com. The Post even stooped so low as to gloatingly publish texts in which Hunter berates himself for his drug addiction, and Joe calls him “my beautiful son” and counsels him, “Only focus is recovery. Nothing else.” Do the bottom-feeders in Trumpworld really think Americans will sour on Biden “for loving his addict son”?

With another “manufactured” email scandal, Trump is hoping to make this election “a close sequel to 2016,” said Jeet Heer in TheNation.com. But this time the “mudslinging” is “not sticking.” The media is viewing these dubious emails with appropriate skepticism; in fact, the veteran reporter who typed up this “pseudo scandal” for the New York Post was so suspicious about its provenance that he refused to attach his byline. Sorry, Mr. President, this is not Hillary’s emails 2.0. History doesn’t always repeat.