If a U.S. political giant falls in Washington, D.C. but nobody is around to hear it, did Russia do it? Judging by the way the Democrats have been overplaying the anti-Russia card for the past four years, we already know the answer to that question.
Last week, the New York Post fired off a bombshell story that exposed emails allegedly belonging to U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. The messages – discovered on a laptop that the younger Biden had reportedly dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 – point to a level of corruption and nepotism that is shocking even by modern standards.
The NY Post article has new info. It has a copy of the email from Vadym Pozharskyi, adviser to the board of Burisma, thanking Hunter Biden for giving him the “opportunity to meet your father.” Joe Biden has denied knowledge of his son’s dealings with Burisma. pic.twitter.com/4KytWTcB0F
— Jorge Salcedo (@j_salcedo) October 14, 2020
To briefly summarize the revelations, via the Post exclusive: “Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing…Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee during a December 2015 trip to Kiev.”
That’s an awful lot of potential political malfeasance in one paragraph, and even more so when it is remembered that Donald Trump was impeached by the Democrats for merely requesting that Kiev look into Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine while serving in the Obama administration.
But as predictable as vodka flowing during Russian New Years, the usual social media suspects played brilliant defense for the Bidens, blocking not only U.S. government agencies from retweeting the Post story, but blocking the Post from doing so as well. While happy to accommodate the New York Times’ unsubstantiated story on Donald Trump’s tax status just a month earlier, suddenly the virtual house that Jack built was adamant about protecting its users from “hacked material.” This blithering nonsense had the unfortunate effect of placing the question of Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act, which grants social media immunity from legal action with regards to third-party postings on their platforms, front and center while the Post story languished.
Twitter censors @JudiciaryGOP. But not the Ayatollah or the Chinese Communist Party?
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) October 15, 2020
The Streisand Effect quickly kicked in for Republicans, however, as they screamed in one voice that they had found the elusive smoking gun, even as William Barr has gone missing in action. The Democrats, on the other hand, who enjoy almost total support from the media industrial complex, were content to see the news distorted or ignored altogether.
In fact, reading The Washington Post’s report on the story, the Bidens were just innocent bystanders caught up in an act of violence orchestrated by none other than Trump ally Rudy Giuliani and, yes, the Kremlin.
Top-heavy with totally believable “former officials familiar with the matter,” the Bezos-owned publication opened with this bang: “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence…”
The Hunter Biden emails were fabricated by the same Russian operative who beat up Jussie Smollett, wrote homophobic slurs on Joy Reid’s blog, and hacked Steve Scully.
— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) October 17, 2020
The article continued, saying Giuliani was “interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence” in the course of a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was said to be collecting evidence to “expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.”
Now before reading the next paragraph, ask yourself where were the famous Silicon Valley fact-checkers when this pulp fiction was being served up hot and spicy to an unsuspecting public? “The warnings to the White House, which have not previously been reported, led national security adviser Robert O’Brien to caution Trump in a private conversation that any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia, one of the former officials said.”
So according to the Post, a phantom figure inside of the White House was somehow privy to a “private conversation” between Trump and O’Brien. In the course of this reputed discussion, which can neither be proved or disproved, O’Brien thought it would be a great idea, at a time when Russiagate had already been dismissed as a grand hoax, to warn his boss that veteran lawyer Giuliani had been hoodwinked by the Russkis. Somehow that all sounds very strange.
The Post article continues: “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine,” this person said. Officials wanted ‘to protect the president from coming out and saying something stupid,’ particularly since he was facing impeachment over his own efforts to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into investigating the Bidens.”
“But O’Brien emerged from the meeting uncertain whether he had gotten through to the president,” the article continued. “Trump had ‘shrugged his shoulders’ at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, ‘That’s Rudy.’”
Reading that delightful nonsense makes it easier to understand why so many people today accuse the mainstream media of peddling in ‘fake news’ and misinformation. The Post effectively diverted the attention of millions of readers away from the elephant in the room – which was, of course, the devastating Biden emails – as it accused Trump and Giuliani of being led astray once again by those rascally Russians. Will they never learn?
Meanwhile, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff described the Hunter Biden emails as part of a smear campaign coming “from the Kremlin.”
“We know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin,” Schiff told CNN in an interview. “That’s been clear for well over a year now that they’ve been pushing this false narrative about this vice president and his son.”
The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, corrected the record, stating in an op-ed piece that “Americans expect that politicians will lie, but sometimes the examples are so brazen that they deserve special notice.” The article went on to show that Schiff “spread falsehoods shamelessly about Russia and Donald Trump for three years even as his own committee gathered contrary evidence.”
Russia keeps its cool
It should be mentioned that the Russians are greatly amused by the never-ending charges, which have provided the fuel for an entire cottage industry of jokes. Vladimir Putin himself could not resist a bit of tongue-in cheek commentary this month when he was asked who he favored more in the U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump or Joe Biden. The answer may have shocked the Democrats, portraying as they do Trump as some sort of compromised Kremlin puppet.
After emphasizing for the umpteenth time that Russians “do not interfere” in the internal affairs of foreign countries, Putin went on to say that “the Democratic Party is traditionally closer to the so-called liberal values, closer to Social Democratic ideas, if compared to Europe. And it was from the Social Democratic environment that the Communist Party evolved.”
Here the Russian leader seems to have been alluding to the radical progressive wing of the Democratic Party – driven in no small part by freshman House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – which has enjoyed a surge of popularity following the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
Putin continued: “After all, I was a member of the Soviet Communist Party for nearly 20 years, or more precisely 18 years. I was a rank-and-file member, but it can be said that I believed in the party’s ideas. I still like many of these left-wing values. Equality and fraternity. What is bad about them? In fact, they are akin to Christian values. Yes, they are difficult to implement, but they are very attractive, nevertheless. In other words, this can be seen as an ideological basis for developing contacts with the Democratic representative.”
The Russian leader then made what appeared to be a subtle allusion to the Black Lives Matter movement, which gained considerable influence, not to mention hard cash following the tragic death of George Floyd during his arrest by a white police officer: “It is a fact that African Americans constitute a stable electorate, one of the electorates of the Democratic Party. It is a well-known fact, and there is nothing new about this. The Soviet Union also supported the African Americans’ movement for their legitimate rights. Back in the 1930s, Communist International leaders wrote that both black and white workers had a common enemy – imperialism and capitalism. They also wrote that these people could become the most effective group in the future revolutionary battle.”
“So, this is something that can be seen, to a degree, as common values, if not a unifying agent for us,” Putin concluded. “I am not afraid to say so. This is true.”
The world should be grateful that Russia, a nuclear-armed nation and former arch-enemy of the United States, continues to maintain its sense of humor and dignity as a large segment of Washington, D.C. suffers yet another bout of Russophobia. How long the Russian bear will continue to accept such fake news with coolness and composure remains to be seen.
