NBC News is being mocked for an article reporting on the federal investigation into Hunter Biden in which the sub-headline refers to the accusations, dating back to the 2020 presidential campaign, as “unfounded and baseless.”
NBC’s headline reads: “Hunter Biden, president-elect’s son, says federal prosecutors probing his taxes.” The sub-headline adds: “The probe was revealed weeks after an election in which President Donald Trump and his allies made unfounded and baseless claims of corruption regarding Hunter Biden and his father.”
The accusations were not “unfounded and baseless.” They were partly based on questions that the mainstream media itself raised — briefly — in 2014, when Hunter Biden was first appointed to the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company.
For one day, at least, journalists asked the-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki whether Hunter Biden’s appointment created a conflict of interest for then-Vice President Joe Biden, who was leading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.
They both dodged the question. (Psaki has since been named to lead communications in the Biden White House.)
Other officials also raised the alarm, notably George Kent and Amos Hochstein at the State Department. But Joe Biden did nothing to resolve the conflicts of interest, and later lied about them, claiming that nobody had raised the issue. “There has been no indication of conflict of interest in Ukraine or anywhere else, period,” he said in 2019, telling reporters to focus on President Donald Trump instead.
In October 2014, the New York Post revealed that it had obtained a laptop computer that apparently belonged to Hunter Biden. Emails on the laptop suggested that Hunter Biden had arranged a meeting for a Burisma official with his father, and that the Biden family had sought a joint venture with a Chinese company after Biden left office. A separate set of emails, revealed by Breitbart News, showed that Hunter Biden’s associates arranged White House meetings for Chinese bigwigs.
These stories were based on hard, physical evidence and verified electronic communications. They were corroborated, too, through statements by Tony Bobulinski, who had been Hunter Biden’s former partner in the Chinese joint venture.
They were not “baseless and unfounded” accusations. NBC News, however, sought to discredit them with its own “baseless” reporting, including a report that suggested the Hunter Biden accusations were “linked to a foreign intel operation,” and another that claimed the accusations were the result of a “fake persona” and a 64-page document that few had ever seen.
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 Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. 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.