By Ray McCoy
This past week CBS, NBC, Fox News and other outlets put out a sequence of reports relating to mishandling of classified information by then-Vice President Joe Biden. First it was revealed that a stash of classified documents was found by his lawyers at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. Then it was added that another set was found at his home’s garage in Wilmington, Delaware. More recently a third stash was discovered elsewhere on the Wilmington property. Then on January 14 it was announced that a fourth finding of five pages of classified documents had been made at the house.
Now Fox News is reporting that Hunter Biden, of laptop and NSFW upload fame, may have been involved in the arrangements surrounding the set-up of the Penn Center with then Penn President Amy Gutmann. The scandal has rocked Biden’s administration as it enters its third year next week, but all of it could have been avoided if the right questions had been asked in the Fall of 2020.
There were red flags all over the movement of the Biden papers to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, including $22 million in anonymous donations originating in a nation with a literal red flag . . . and five golden colored stars. Few journalists were covering the story of the think tank at the time, but you didn’t have to be an especially experienced sleuth to figure out that something wasn’t right there.
Pia Singh of the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, spelled it out in March 2020 when she dug into the claim that Biden (despite being compensated as such) was not truly a teaching professor at Penn which, of course, was true. The National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog, dug into the institution’s donor base and filed a complaint with the Department of Education according to Just The News.
Somehow, neither of these developments was enough to trigger the curiosity of our supposedly reputable media, and conservative media at the time was struggling to get traction on other Biden topics such as the Hunter Biden laptop. It wasn’t until March 2022 that the Washington Post was willing to admit the laptop story was true. They were still eight months ahead of CBS News which made the same admission only after the midterm elections.
Why were they so slow when people with fewer or no resources at all were able to sniff out this story? For regular readers of American Greatness, big media hypocrisy isn’t exactly news, but many ordinary Americans are still surprised to grasp the scale of it.
During the period before the 2020 election the news media was an industry on a mission: If they had anything to say about it, the wrong man could not win a presidential election ever again. Remember in 2018 when the Boston Globe coordinated with more than 300 daily newspapers across the country in response to President Donald Trump, declaring “we are not the enemy of the people”? They took all of that very personally.
The cause of beating Trump and his movement was termed the “battle for the soul of the nation” by Joe Biden during his famous “red backdrop” speech on September 1, 2022. Big media dutifully and unquestioningly reported on it as such, including Voice of America, a news outlet owned and operated by the federal government, ahead of the actual delivery of the address. Biden had been using the terminology of a “battle for the soul of the nation” in public appearances since the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Winning the “soul of the nation” required steely discipline for those who enlisted in that battle through their news organizations—armed with their laptops, notepads, and recording devices. It was the discipline needed to willfully ignore and dismiss every possible indication that they weren’t actually saving any nation (least of all America), but preserving an established order. They were so dead set on destroying the “wrong” candidate that they were perfectly fine with averting their eyes to the flaws of the other candidate.
Selective indignation has been the plague of partisan journalism for decades, Republicans included. Most of them harrumphed in indignation whenever anyone questioned whether there was just cause to invade Iraq in 2002-03. To this day, many Trump supporters are not willing to hold the former president accountable for his role in Operation Warp Speed that allowed experimental vaccines to reach the market at the “speed of science” rather than undergoing the full battery of verification and validation tests that typically is required of a pharmaceutical product.
Still most members of the news media are aligned with the Democrats, even if they won’t admit it. It would be too much to ask of them to cover the news fairly and objectively, because they know on which side their bread is buttered. But now, because of that short-sighted, careerist decision to ignore the glaring warnings that Biden was unfit to sit in the Oval Office, they are in a predicament. They cannot make the honest admission they were wrong about Biden, but there’s more involved than simple pride. Often the people reporters are meant to cover in their broadcasts have allies, friends, and even relatives in their newsrooms.
CBS, for example, has former federal prosecutor Scott Fredericksen working as a commentator on the first Biden classified document revelation. It should surprise no one that he argues there is a difference in intent between this case and the Mar-a-Lago saga. Fredericksen, of course, was a regular donor to both the Biden 2020 campaign committee and the Biden Victory Fund.
NBC News’ Ken Dilanian, who famously declared in 2021 that “even if the Steele dossier is discredited, there’s plenty of evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia,” hedged in a conversation Chuck Todd about the latest Biden allegations by saying “a mistake is more possible.” Suddenly evidence of a crime was no longer the standard but intent was paramount. ABC News’ Maryalice Parks also emphasized that the Biden team “voluntarily disclosed and returned” the documents. This is a classic application of the Comey Principle, created by former FBI Director James Comey on July 5, 2016, wherein a mountain of evidence pointing to a pervasive pattern of illegal behavior can be waved away as a mulligan when cooperation is cited as evidence of a supposed absence of malicious intent.
But the audacity of Peacock network’s egregiously conflicted legal analyst, former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, may take the cake. McQuade tweeted about the first set of documents that there are four factors that feed into a prosecution: “Obstruction of justice, storage in a way that risks exposure, willful violation [of the law], and disloyalty to the United States.” She went on to say that none of the factors were present in the Biden case.
But on January 11 her tune had changed when speaking to NBC News anchor Tom Llamas. Here are some statements she made, as a legal analyst:
The M.S. Media have become leftists propagandists no one should trust a thing they show or anything they say most of it is fake news
The left has no problem with accepting the incompetence and corruption of their leaders. It’s basically not news; it is epidemic in the Democrat party. Greed, not patriotism, guides them. So, while it is an acceptable fact among the elites, they don’t necessarily want the general public, who are reliant on the decisions of these morons, to know the extent of their malfeasance. So, it just isn’t reported or, best case, the failings are assigned to Republicans to misdirect attention.
Rather than “winning the soul of the nation”, like Satan, the Democrats and idiot Biden want the nation to sell its soul to them. They try to take that soul for the offer of “free” this and that as they slowly pull the rights and freedoms out from under them. The media is a willing participant and ally.
They had to compare a severely and dangerously flawed candidate to one with a proven record of success, leadership and patriotic service. To do this, they suppressed the facts about idiot Biden and generated lies about Trump. I keep hearing leftists declare they give idiot Biden the benefit of the doubt, but what is there to doubt? He has proven he is a liar, a dolt, corrupt and in the CCP bag, so why wait around for it to be proven… again? Usually, the “benefit of the doubt” is what used to be called the “honeymoon period” of the first 100 days of a Presidency. Trump got no such “benefit”; in fact, Democrats were pledging to impeach him before he was even sworn in and he had done nothing to draw such fire. Idiot Biden has a 50 year record of failure, lies and corruption, yet he gets “the benefit of the doubt”. No, there is no doubt, just protective cover-up.