On Wednesday October 14, the New York Post broke a story of political scandal that might have come straight out of Hollywood.
In April 2019, an unidentified man, perhaps Hunter Biden, delivered a water-damaged computer to a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in hopes of having it restored. He left without paying for this service. Once the computer and hard drive were repaired, the shop’s owner repeatedly tried to contact the customer without success. Curious because the computer bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, founded to honor the untimely death of presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, the owner took a look at the computer’s hard drive.
That search revealed “a massive trove of data,” including emails revealing the connection between Hunter Biden and Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that hired the vice president’s son, not for any skills he possessed, but for his political connections. The hard drive also contained a 12-minute video of Hunter Biden smoking crack and engaging in sex with an unidentified woman.
When the owner notified the federal government of this bombshell, in December of 2019 the FBI seized both the computer and the hard drive.
Since then, silence.
But there’s a twist. The owner made a copy of the hard drive, which he turned over to Robert Costello, Rudy Giuliani’s attorney. In late September, Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Trump, reported the existence of this hard drive to the New York Post, and on Sunday, October 11, Giuliani gave a copy of it to that paper.
If real, these documents are damning. They reveal that Burisma hired Hunter Biden when his father was vice president in hopes the younger Biden’s influence might protect the corporation from prosecution for corruption, as well as for Hunter Biden’s other connections. Moreover, they seem to reveal that Joe Biden lied when claiming he knew nothing of his son’s shady business dealings.
In the 24 hours following the Post’s release of this story some telling events took place, reactions to these revelations that speak volumes about the slanted viewpoints and corruption in our mainstream press and social media.
An example: In “Why Trump’s desperate ‘Bidengate’ Hail Marys keep backfiring,” Hayes Brown of MSNBC launches an attack on Giuliani, claiming the former mayor of New York is desperate to destroy the Bidens and so is once again being conned by those around him. The writer shows little interest in the emails and data themselves, preferring instead to focus on the failings of Giuliani and Trump.
The lightning swift censorship of the Post’s story by Twitter and Facebook also reveal the prejudices in big-tech companies. After White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany shared the Post’s story, for example, Twitter locked her account, demanding she delete that tweet. Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee condemned Twitter’s action and showed their support for McEnany by posting the article on their own accounts.
That’s how the game is played these days.
Assuming the documents on that hard drive are real and factual, and having gotten an early glimpse of the media’s reaction to them, here are some items for consideration.
If the FBI has possessed that computer and hard drive for nine months without taking any action, Congress should order an immediate investigation into why that law enforcement body sought to conceal the emails and if they were right to do so.
If Rudy Giuliani has also held this information for months, he should explain why he is only now releasing it.
Many of our politicians – not just the Bidens – are taking the rest of us for a ride. How else can we explain how they leave office with fortunes worthy of a king? Unfortunately for the country, the Biden scandal will further sink our trust in our politicians as well as in the media.
Odds are that the mainstream news media will either barely touch the story, or will ignore what may well be one of the great political scandals of our time.
If they chose that path, the consequences for the MSM could be dire. Over the last four years, these reporters, journalists, and commentators have already lost the trust of the great majority of the American people through their deceptions or silence. Should they turn away from the Burisma-Biden scandal, they reveal themselves fully as being shills for the Democrats. They will bury what little trust is left in them.
Without some pushback or outside regulation, Twitter and Facebook will continue to act as demigods dictating freedom of speech and the distribution of information with the intention of shaping American politics.
And so the New York Post’s story reveals much more than the possibly corrupt practices of the Biden family. It lifts another stone from our culture and politics and reveals the creeping things that live beneath that stone.
Is America becoming the Rome of Nero and Caligula?
If so, it’s high time for a change.
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By Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick lives in Front Royal, Virginia, and may be found online at jeffminick.com. He is the author of two novels, Amanda Bell and Dust on Their Wings, and two works of non-fiction, Learning as I Go and Movies Make the Man.
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