CNN’s moderators must ask Biden the tough Hunter question

The upcoming June 27 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the first of its kind — a former president debating a current president, with a massive list of subjects to animate the discourse. But there is one topic in particular that moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash must bring up if this debate is to have any respectability from the voters: they must confront Joe Biden about his lies in the 2020 debates.

These lies have been acknowledged publicly by Tapper at least, and by Bash to a lesser degree. Namely: that Biden — in the context of leaning on the letter signed by intelligence figures who claimed the Hunter Biden laptop bore the “hallmarks of foreign disinformation” (three and a half years on, there is no evidence of foreign interference with Hunter’s laptop) — said his son had made no money from China or other American adversaries. 

Trump, at the time, called out the obvious lies — which have since become undeniable. But President Biden has never answered for his lies in that context. He falsely claimed to the American people that there was no truth to these claims, even while knowing that Hunter had in fact profited greatly from business relationships in all these countries. The question is simple: why did you lie then, and how can we trust that you’re telling the truth now?

Perhaps Joe Biden will claim that he just didn’t know about Hunter’s profit-seeking, even though he was literally doing it on trips where he flew on Air Force Two. Perhaps he will just be in denial about the facts in front of our faces. But it’s a question that we all deserve to have answered — and answered clearly. If the Biden White House is going to maintain this fiction that Hunter did not sell the family name for profit around the globe, they are going to end up in a very isolated position not just in politics but in their own party, which has been loathe to defend the human scum-bucket that Hunter has become.

This is a touchy subject for the president, obviously. He responds constantly via statements that he is proud of his son. But in the very short list of friendly interviews the president has given, he has not once been confronted about his false claims on the debate stage in 2020 — and what he believes and thinks now about the lies he told us. The American people deserve an explanation — and it’s incumbent on Tapper and Bash to raise the question and demand an answer.