New York Times smears Republican committee, plays defense for Biden
Quin Hillyer
Sometimes the left-wing media makes it amazingly easy to criticize their outlandish double standards.
Consider, naturally, the “news” pages of the New York Times.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT; FOREIGN NATIONALS PAID BIDEN FAMILY $10 MILLION
Consider that in January, the Times oh-so-seriously reported “Ethics Questions Over A Spouse’s Business Ties.” The report was about how Chief Justice John Roberts’ wife, Jane, has “been paid millions of dollars in commissions for placing lawyers at firms — some of which have business before the Supreme Court.”
Okay, fine: Maybe there are legitimate questions at stake. The story in itself isn’t remarkable.
But note: Here we have the Times spending a large amount of newsprint on a story about a wife several degrees removed from any direct conflict of interest.
Top law firms tend to be big law firms. Jane Roberts recruited lawyers to work at the firms. She herself was not a member of the firms, so she had no ongoing salary from them. Somebody else in a few of the firms handles cases before the high court. There’s no indication that the lawyers she recruited worked on cases before her husband, much less whether her husband ruled in favor of the clients represented by the law firms that hired the lawyers she recruited.
That’s a lot of purely hypothetical links between Jane Roberts and any sort of ethical problems for her husband. Yet the Times treated it as a very significant news story, and certainly did not belittle the accusation of an ethical problem.
By contrast, consider Item how the same New York Times this week handled a report from a House committee detailing how numerous members of the Biden family received $10 million in payments from foreign interests, all funneled through more than 20 different companies, some of them appearing to be set up as shell corporations of the sort often used to make it harder to trace financial transactions.
Among the Biden family members receiving the payments was Hallie Biden, the widow of the then-vice president’s late son Beau. Hallie Biden, at the time, was romantically involved with the vice president’s other son, Hunter, who was still married to his first wife. Hallie Biden had no background in international finance or business consulting. Instead, she is a school counselor. When a school counselor received money that apparently originated from a Chinese energy company, after what looks like laundering it (in the vernacular, not strictly legal sense) through another company, there’s good reason to smell a rat.
And when it’s part of a pattern of foreign transactions going to the Bidens, all while Hunter’s business associates are holding meetings with the vice president and top State Department officials, as Joe Biden is conducting diplomacy with those foreign nations, well, there certainly seem to be a lot of rat trails to follow.
The only thing missing is a direct payment to Vice President Biden himself. Naturally, that’s what the Times focused on. After the committee released the report detailing the $10 million in payments through highly suspicious means, the Times reported not in a neutral way about the new revelations, but instead as if the newspaper is a defense attorney for now-President Biden.
The Times’ headline was this: “House Republicans Find No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden.” The first paragraph of the “news” report completely ignores the vast wealth of new material unearthed by the House committee. Instead, it reads as follows:
“After four months of investigation, House Republicans who promised to use their new majority to unearth evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that they had yet to uncover incriminating material about him, despite their frequent insinuations that he and his family have been involved in criminal conduct and corruption.”
Note the immediate, overwhelming effort to exonerate Joe Biden himself.
A few paragraphs later, the story again frames the House findings as a failed witch hunt: “Instead, their presentation underscored how little headway top G.O.P. lawmakers have made in finding clear evidence of questionable transactions they can tie to Mr. Biden, their chief political rival. It has not stopped them from accusing the president of serious misconduct.”
So let’s get this straight: According to the Times, when hard evidence emerges of a president’s family trading extremely lucratively on the president’s name when he was vice president, without much or any known qualifications for the jobs, the only important fact is that it hasn’t yet shown direct payment to the vice president — and those raising the questions are to be belittled.
But when a chief justice’s wife, long established as a top lawyer herself performs a job for which she is eminently qualified, without establishing shell corporations to hide her earnings, for lawyers with several degrees of separation from anything having to do with the chief justice himself, well, by gosh, the Times leads with the allegation of impropriety.
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And it doesn’t even come close to sneering at the person who filed the complaint against her. And only in the ninth paragraph does it mention in passing that the complainer had a personal ax to grind with Jane Roberts because he was fired by a law firm while she was not.
The Times needs to make up its mind about when it’s news that a relative of a top official actually makes money, and for what. Right now, the standard seems to be that if the official is a Republican, it’s big news and potentially a sign of bad ethics, but if the official is a Democrat, then the only news is that Republicans have the mean-spirited audacity to ask about it.