Media outlets disparaged oversight investigations conducted by U.S. senators while ignoring evidence about the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asserted on Thursday.
Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has been investigating the Biden family’s financial dealings for over a year with help from Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
“We found that they engaged in potential criminal financial deals across the globe, including China, which created counterintelligence concerns. We showed our work and we made our findings very public, but the liberal media and [Democrats] chose to dismiss our work. [They] even falsely claimed our work was Russian disinformation … in order to protect leaders of the other party,” Grassley said on the Senate floor in Washington.
“Those same liberal outlets that disparaged our investigation now report that Hunter Biden’s financial deals in China raised counterintelligence concerns,” he added.
Hunter Biden, 50, Joe Biden’s lone surviving son, is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware. The probe reportedly dates back to 2018.
After the contents of a laptop computer appearing to belong to the younger Biden was made public in October, a slew of outlets, including Politico and NPR, claimed the effort to release the contents could be headed by Russians. Top intelligence officials rebutted that narrative, saying it lacked evidence.
NPR in particular faced backlash for dismissing reports on the computer. NPR managing editor Terence Samuel said, in part, “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.”
NPR didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In addition, Twitter and Facebook took action to block or slow the spread of reports about the Biden laptop. Many outlets also downplayed or ignored Tony Bobulinski, a former Hunter Biden business partner who shared insight about the Bidens dealings in China, or other evidence that emerged, such as texts that showed Hunter Biden’s close relationship with an energy tycoon with extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at The Federalist, a conservative website, said on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Thursday that “nobody meddled in the 2020 election like a big media and Big Tech, and both of those things you saw with the Hunter Biden story.”
Nearly 10 percent of respondents to a survey last month said they wouldn’t have voted for Biden if they were aware of his son’s dealings with officials and firms in China, Ukraine, and Russia.
Grassley on Thursday called it “outrageous that the Fourth Estate would choose to ignore facts when they are uncovered by Republicans.”
“I don’t do oversight for the fun of it. It’s serious business. It shouldn’t take subpoenas and confirmation from Hunter Biden himself to get the rest of the press to pay attention,” he added.
Johnson told The Epoch Times in a previous interview that the senators began by conducting oversight of the Obama administration, and that later led them to probe the Bidens.
“At some point in time, we combined our investigatory efforts along that whole front and during the impeachment process, it came to light that Hunter Biden was a board member of Burisma [Holdings]. Joe Biden himself bragged to the council foreign relations that he’s the one that forced [Viktor] Shokin, [former prosecutor general of Ukraine], to be fired—otherwise, he threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee,” Johnson said.
Some of the evidence uncovered by the lawmakers show that Joe Biden “lied to the American public when he said that he never spoke to Hunter Biden about his overseas business dealings,” he added.
In a statement this week, Hunter Biden said he’s “confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors.”
Joe Biden “is deeply proud of his son, who has fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger,” his team added in a statement.
Jan Jekielek contributed to this report.
