The Hunter Biden story isn’t going away

It’s the election equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘la-la-la-la’. Joe Biden keeps ignoring questions about his possible role in the business dealings of his shady son. He keeps losing his temper with reporters who dare to insist that he has an obligation to answer legitimate public concerns. Most of the Biden-supporting media insist that the New York Post’s big Hunter story is a dud, and so publish endless malicious snark about how shabby the paper’s standards are. Twitter and Facebook keep saying that they were obliged, according to their own codes of practice, to stop the story circulating online, even though we all know those codes are applied with ridiculous inconsistency.

But stories don’t just disappear because one political side can’t stomach them. The truth has a nasty habit of coming out, and the clamor around the Biden campaign won’t vanish just because the Biden campaign wants it to. No intelligent observer is all that surprised to learn that the sources for the New York Post story were Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. It is perhaps depressing that investigative journalism often relies on scoops delivered on a plate by political operatives with an agenda, but that’s the world we live in. Sources have motives, often malign ones. Who knew?

The problem for the Biden campaign is that most people probably don’t care too much about whether the story is ethically sourced. They care about whether it is true. Is the email allegedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop suggesting that Joe Biden met with a board member of Burisma, the dodgy Ukrainian mining company which was paying his son $50,000 a month, true? Or is it fake? What about the email suggesting the ‘big guy’ would get 10 percent of equity from a deal with a Chinese company? Is that invented? If not, who is Mr Big? Is it, as Fox News has alleged, dear old Joe? That seems like a story of public interest worth looking into, given that Biden is close to being elected the leader of the free world.

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It’s funny that the New York Times, Vanity Fair, CNN and others seem to have spent considerable resources attacking the New York Post over its reporting, which only heightens the sense of a cover up. They seem to have little appetite for disproving the story, which would actually make it go away. What Team Biden and all their media boosters can’t seem to grasp is that this information isn’t going to evaporate, no matter how many ‘intelligence officials’ claim that it was released as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. We’ve all learned the hard way not to believe everything intelligence officials tell us when it comes to Russia and US presidential elections.

Besides, there is still another side in the media war, Team Trump, and they aren’t shutting up. The hope in the Biden campaign is that most Democratic voters are so partisan these days that they just won’t be interested in a story that originated in Trumpworld. But there’s probably more on that laptop and the clamor to answer questions about its contents will not be silenced. The Hunter Biden story is not going away. It could end up giving Donald Trump four more years in the Oval Office.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.