ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos failed to ask former Vice President Joe Biden at a town hall Thursday night about new email evidence that his son, Hunter Biden, arranged a meeting with him for an adviser to the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2015.
As Breitbart News noted Wednesday, the New York Post unveiled emails which the paper reports were obtained from an abandoned laptop containing Hunter Biden’s correspondence with a senior Burisma official.
The Post broke the story:
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 a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.
The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.
An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.
The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.
The mainstream media attempted to ignore the story, and social media companies suppressed or blocked it, provoking complaints about censorship and leading Republicans to announce that they would subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
That led the Wall Street Journal‘s James Freeman to write earlier Thursday:
Many Trump voters who tune in to ABC tonight will be fully expecting the anchor to invite “undecided voters” to ask the former vice president if he thinks the President is being mean to the Biden family. Mr. Stephanopoulos could also dodge the issue by inviting Mr. Biden to share his opinion of the New York Post.
On the other hand, tonight also represents an opportunity for ABC to set itself apart from the raft of media companies, new and old, that have dedicated the last 36 hours to suppressing a damning report about their favorite candidate. Regardless of the particulars of the Post reporting, Hunter Biden’s overseas windfalls have been clear for a while. ABC should hold the former vice president to account for the abuse of his office.
Despite having 90 minutes in which to ask Biden the question, Stephanopoulos never did so, nor did anyone in the audience.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.