Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson reminded viewers about the national media’s dismissive nature on the discussion of possible wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, back prior to the November 3 election.
Carlson’s remarks come on the heels of an announcement from the Biden campaign that the younger Hunter Biden was under investigation by the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s office for “tax affairs.”
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: October surprise. You’ve heard that term. It’s political slang for a damaging news story that appears in the final days of a campaign.
This year, we had one. One of the biggest October surprises ever. The New York Post — that’s the oldest daily newspaper in this country — published a trove of documents showing that members of Joe Biden’s family have been selling access to the former Vice President to a number of foreign governments including the communist government of China. Now that’s a blockbuster.
But the rest of the media decided to kill it before you could read it. Social media companies banned their users from sharing The New York Post’s reporting. Other news organizations simply ignored it.
On October 22, that was 11 days before the presidential election, National Public Radio, an organization that is literally state media, funded against your will by your tax dollars, issued the following statement through its public editor. NPR explained that they would not say anything negative about the Biden’s and here’s why, quote, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” End quote.
You’re probably thinking that is the single dumbest, most dishonest, high-handed infuriatingly, arrogant thing I have ever heard. But if you feel that way, obviously, you don’t watch CNN.
On that same day, October 22, an RNC spokeswoman called Liz Harrington made the mistake of submitting to an interview with Christiane Amanpour. Harrington hoped to talk about the Biden’s business deals.
Amanpour is, and we’re quoting here, “CNN’s chief international anchor.” Here’s how it went.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: As you know perfectly well, I’m a journalist and a reporter and I follow the facts.
LIZ HARRINGTON, RNC SPOKESWOMAN: Yes, we know that.
AMANPOUR: And there has never been any issues in terms of corruption. Now, let me ask you this. Yesterday, the F.B.I. —
HARRINGTON: Wait, wait. How do you know that?
AMANPOUR: I’m talking about reporting, and any evidence. I’m talking to you now to ask you a question about what the F.B.I.’s —
HARRINGTON: OK, I would love that you guys would start doing that digging and start doing that verification.
AMANPOUR: No, we are not going to do your work for you. I want to ask you a question. The F.B.I. —
HARRINGTON: That’s a journalist’s job.
AMANPOUR: Contrary —
HARRINGTON: That’s a journalist’s job.
AMANPOUR: Contrary to what President —
HARRINGTON: It’s a journalist’s job to find out if this is verified.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “As you know perfectly well, I am a journalist and a reporter,” says Christiane Amanpour, who of course, is neither of those things, and never has been.
Christiane Amanpour is a celebrity script reader, a halfwit whose self-esteem far outpaces her accomplishments. She is also it turns out the personal flack for the Biden family international finance corporation. That’s not in her Twitter bio, but it’s pretty obvious.
There have never been any issues of corruption with the Bidens, Amanpour announced, as if she hadn’t just been confronted with something. And so it went just like that across the entire American news media until the presidential election.
Now, six weeks later, it is finally safe to speak freely, and so the truth is coming out.
We now know The New York Post was right all along and so was poor Liz Harrington of the R.N.C. Yesterday, millions of Americans learned, some for the very first time that the Biden family has indeed been deeply enmeshed in a series of sleazy international business deals that undercut America’s core interests.
We learned that there’s an active Federal criminal investigation into Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, for that very reason. What’s interesting is how we found this out.
The media didn’t tell us, neither did the Justice Department. Hunter Biden has far better connections than say Roger Stone. Hunter Biden was allowed to tell his own story. He wasn’t rousted from bed at 5:00 a.m. by dozens of armed paramilitaries, his arrest in his boxer shorts carried live on CNN.
No, no, no. He is a prominent Democrat. So he is spared those humiliations.
Instead, the Biden-Harris transition team broke the news in the form of a bizarre press release that informed us with a straight face that Joe Biden was quote, “Deeply proud of his boy, Hunter,” who by the way may have had some minor tax trouble that he will clear up soon the minute his account returns from Cabo, but no big deal. Happy Holidays.
OKy, guys, thanks for the heads up.
But actually, and you may have guessed this part, it turns out there’s more. A report in POLITICO today reveals that Joe Biden’s younger brother, Jimmy, is involved, too. This was a family business, keep in mind.
Jimmy Biden is also under Federal criminal investigation for corruption in the hospital business. We don’t know more than that, and we should stress that fast Jimmy Biden is presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a court of law by a jury of his peers.
Jimmy is not a felon yet. We will keep you updated.
For the few who are able to follow the details of the Biden’s business deals back in October, who actually read “The New York Post” series or watched the show, none of this comes as a complete surprise. At the time, we talked to Tony Bobulinski about what he saw.
Bobulinski was a business partner of the Biden’s as they tried to wheedle money from companies connected to Communist China. Tony Bobulinski by contrast, was a legitimate international businessman. And at some point, he began to wonder what the hell is going on.
In our interview, Bobulinski described one of his meetings with fast Jimmy Biden. Bobulinski wanted to know why the Biden family was so brazen, so open about peddling Joe’s influence to oligarchs and enemies of the United States. That a risk? Here is how Jimmy Biden responded.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TONY BOBULINSKI, FORMER BUSINESS AFFILIATE OF HUNTER BIDEN: And I remember looking at Jim Biden and saying, “How are you guys getting away with this? Like, aren’t you concerned?” And he certainly looked at me and he laughed a little bit and said, “Plausible deniability.”
CARLSON: He said that out loud.
BOBULINSKI: Yes, he said it directly to me, one-on-one in a cabana at the Peninsula Hotel.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “Plausible deniability.” When your business partner tells you that your business strategy rests on plausible deniability, that’s not reassuring. And it certainly wasn’t reassuring to Tony Bobulinski. Why would it be?
An independent media wouldn’t be fooled by plausible deniability either. They demand answers. What exactly were you doing? Let’s see the documents. But they didn’t.
When The New York Post published the outlines of this story, the media raced to find its own plausible deniability, some reason, any reason not to report the story.
Any reporter who broke rank and decided to state the facts was quickly disciplined and brought to heel. POLITICO’s Jake Sherman, for example, apologized in public for the crime of discussing The New York Post story after Twitter suspended him for posting it, for posting facts, quote, “I tweeted a link to The New York Post story right after it dropped yesterday morning. I immediately reached out to the Biden Campaign to see if they had any answer. I wish I had given the story a closer read before I tweeted it.”
In other words, bless me, CNN for I have sinned.
Over at CBS News, a kid called Bo Erickson didn’t get the memo on the boundaries of this new journalism. So he tried to get Joe Biden himself to respond to the story and here’s how it went.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BO ERICKSON, CBS NEWS REPORTER: Mr. Biden, what is your response to The New York Post story about your son, sir?
JOE BIDEN: I know you’re that good. I have no response. It’s another smear campaign. It’s right up your alley. They are the questions you always ask.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, you’re a smear merchant, says Joe Biden to a guy he has never seen before and doesn’t recognize. Everyone looks the same to Joe Biden. It’s all kind of a blur.
But he attacked Bo Erickson of CBS News as a liar and a propagandist, and what’s so interesting is that none of Bo Erickson’s colleagues in the news media came to his defense.
In fact, several former flaks for Barack Obama mocked him on social media and again, his colleagues stayed silent. Now, we’re being told to pretend that none of this ever happened. It’s all down the memory hole.
In an article published today in The Daily Beast, probably the single worst example of bad journalism on the internet, we learned that, quote, “Evidence of the larger Hunter Biden probe was apparent in the markings on a series of documents that were made public, but went largely unnoticed in the days leading up to the November election.”
Largely unnoticed. Oh, of course, a middle of a presidential campaign, front-page story about one of the candidates doing business with our main global enemy, but somehow, nobody noticed. Just weird. Unaccountable. How did that happen?
One group who did notice were the professional liars in our so-called Intel community, the ones that work hand in glove with so-called journalists in our media.
Shortly after The New York Post story, ran a number of these people, all-star propagandists like Jim Clapper and John Brennan, people who have lied in public under oath and never been punished for it, they denounced The New York Post series as Soviet-style disinformation.
The stories they said had, quote, “All the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They didn’t explain what that meant, but they didn’t need to, the media class ate it up.
Like the seals they are, they clapped and barked in unison, Russia, Russia, Russia.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He is receiving and is now regurgitating, repeating and disseminating disinformation that he knows to be fabricated and supplied by a foreign intelligence service, and despite the warning, he is still doing it.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You have said this entire thing is so obviously a Russian plot. It is to me and I was never even an Ambassador to the Russian Federation. Tell me why it’s so obviously a Russian plot to you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Rudy basically functioning as a Russian asset by pushing Russian disinformation.
BRIAN STELTER, CNN CHIEF MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: CNN reported on Friday, the U.S. authorities are seeing if those e-mails we just talked about are connected to an ongoing Russian disinformation effort.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, it’s just obviously a Russian plot. Obviously. Obviously, none of these people should ever appear on television again, though, doubtless they will.
Some are saying tonight we need to go farther to find out what actually happened. There are calls tonight for a new special prosecutor to investigate what we have learned so far, about the Biden family’s business dealings abroad.
Now, let’s be honest, as much as we are anxious to find out the truth and we think it’s important, too, a special prosecutor is something that no one in this country should be eager to see, no matter what side you’re on.
We’ve seen over the past four years what a special prosecutor can due to the normal functioning of a government. Open-ended investigations of politicians are hallmarks of corrupt regimes and dictatorships. And most Americans are skeptical of those kinds of probes and rightly so.
But unless our media start doing its job and telling us what our politicians are up to, the Justice Department and Bill Barr may have no choice, and if they do move forward with a special prosecutor, they will have one unlikely supporter: Joe Biden himself.
Last year, Joe Biden went on the record confirming that he would not interfere with any Justice Department investigation.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: Look, I would not direct my Justice Department like this President does. I’d let them make their independent judgment. I would not dictate who should be prosecuted or who should be exonerated.
That’s not the role of the President of the United States.
Follow the law. Let the Justice Department make the judgment as to whether or not someone should be prosecuted. Period.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: We’ll see if he lives up to that. We should note, if the current President was, quote, “Directing the Justice Department for political ends,” he didn’t do a very effective job of it.
Robert Mueller spent millions of dollars spent years, ruined many lives, purely as a favor to people who could not believe that Donald Trump really beat Hillary Clinton. This country might not survive another investigation like that.
On the other hand, you’ve got to wonder how long a democracy can survive a leadership class like the one we have now.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor