Questions About Biden Are Real Even if Trump Asks Them
The Washington Post engages in weak jiu-jitsu to change the subject from Hunter’s influence racket.
WSJ Opinion
A decade ago the Washington Post ended the practice of employing an ombudsman, who in the name of honest reporting would police the paper’s own pages. That decision by then-editor Marty Baron saved the asterisk key from wear and tear in response to Friday’s front-page story about Donald Trump’s typically unconstrained, free-association approach to exploiting the Hunter Biden scandal.
A reader didn’t have to progress far to discover that President Biden “has denied any involvement in his son’s affairs, and no evidence has emerged proving otherwise.”
The only word in this sentence not needing an asterisk is “and.” The first asterisk necessarily bridges both clauses, since one piece of evidence against Mr. Biden is precisely that, without explanation, his denials have changed, from the White House denying Mr. Biden discussed Hunter’s business with his son to denying that Mr. Biden was “in business” with his son.
And when the paper speaks of “proving,” does it mean to a journalistic standard, a civil-court standard, or a criminal-case standard? A business partner of Hunter’s, Devon Archer, testified that Joe Biden knowingly was “the brand” that Hunter was selling “access” or the “illusion of access” to.
Another partner, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed for the press the gist of an email showing Hunter sought a 10% stake in one of his proposed deals for his father.
Joe Biden’s campaign lied when it said he never attended a dinner with a representative of his son’s Ukrainian employer, as the Post’s own gullible fact checker was forced to acknowledge in a follow-up piece. Mr. Biden lied to voters, the New York Times further adjudicated, when he claimed in a 2020 presidential debate that his family had received no money from China and Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
There are many other suggestive bits you’re probably tired of reading about. An FBI confidential source, apparently credible to the agency, with known ties to Hunter’s Ukrainian employer, reported on multiple occasions that the company’s owner claimed to have paid money to both Hunter and Joe.
Mr. Trump, in typical Trump fashion, levels accusations the evidence doesn’t support or doesn’t yet support. But his assertions at least are consistent with evidence that exists and that he didn’t fabricate, unlike Hillary Clinton’s Russia-collusion narrative.
One Trump criticism, that Mr. Biden is a “dumb SOB,” is a matter of opinion only. In my view, if Mr. Biden allowed himself to be seen dirtying his hands in Hunter’s racket, the epithet fits but I find it hard to believe Mr. Biden would be so dumb.
And yet here we are again. In getting to the bottom of the collusion hoax, the FBI’s strange behavior in the Hillary Clinton email case, and now the various Hunter Biden leads, we’ve had to rely on partisan or nonpartisan government officials, including the Justice Department’s nonpartisan inspector general. The mainstream press would rather belittle and distract from the sidelines than learn a truth that doesn’t fit its desired narrative.
Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf and his editors could afford to lift their game intellectually, to phrase the matter with non-Trumpian gentility. If the Washington Post can’t understand that Mr. Trump might recklessly exaggerate the evidence in the Hunter Biden matter and yet there can also be evidence, the Post can’t do any job worth doing.
This category of dumbness even has a clinical name—“splitting,” or a psychological reliance on black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking to evade the ambivalences the world forces on us. Example: We may not like Donald Trump but there are also things not to like about his enemies.
What is merely neurotic in the individual, alas, is now a media business model. Once-reputable news outlets have become lifestyle brands, serving up emotional comfort to their target demographic. This is pernicious for our democracy, pushing out real but mundane issues in favor of grand canards of various kinds, such as collusion, “stop the steal,” the white supremacist under every bed, our impending climate doom.
Mr. Trump’s exaggerations of the Hunter Biden scandal may be regrettable but, hearteningly, are less atypical of pre-Trumpian politics than the Post pretends. At least they are exaggerated renditions of real questions that need answers. It’s hard not to see the Post engaged in a kind of jiu-jitsu to make the questions go away by focusing on Mr. Trump’s abuse of them.
Which is the real problem: Both political parties would find their strategy of peddling tall tales impossible—the circle of suggestion would be impossible to close—if mainstream journalism wasn’t so full of cowardly conformists, who ask not what is true but how to advance the desired narrative, and therefore have no credibility with the public.