Wall Street Journal Editorial Board says Americans deserve answers from Biden on China business dealings
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member James Freeman weighs in on ‘America’s Newsroom.’
Recent revelations from a trove of emails found on the laptop of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter have thrown the U.S. presidential race into a frenzy less than two weeks before Election Day.
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is now imperiled by allegations of inappropriate business affairs in Ukraine, China and Russia over several years to enrich his family while he served as vice president under President Barack Obama.
Reeling from the fallout and trying to calculate a response, Biden and his campaign have so far remained largely silent on the substance of the revelations.
BIDEN DENIES FAMILY PROFITED FROM HIS NAME, SAYS 'NO BASIS' TO HUNTER BIDEN STORY
The rumors of alleged illicit business deals by the Bidens are not new. Joe Biden was confronted in September 2019 on this issue. He stated with an unequivocal confidence: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”
Let’s consider this colossally thoughtless statement by Joe Biden. The idea that a father and son, who seemingly are as close as Joe has led the American people to believe, would not even mention in passing a discussion about work or how business is going is absurd and utterly unbelievable.
The fact that Joe Biden was so quick to universally dismiss the charge shows his complicity and attempt to hide the truth.
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Anyone — especially someone with 47 years in politics who has mastered the art of evasion — would have considered the probability of such a discussion taking place. Joe Biden could have said that it might have been possible he discussed business dealings with Hunter, even if only to protect against the very scenario he now finds himself mired in.
Fortunately for the American people, we now have evidence and no longer need to rely on Joe Biden’s version of the events or his ability to tell the complete truth. New email evidence has surfaced clearly showing that Joe Biden met with at least one and possibly two executives from Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company that appointed Hunter to its board.
Over this past weekend, Joe Biden supporters attempted to deflect from the controversy by suggesting the emails released were the work of Russians attempting to foment a disinformation campaign against him and his bid for the presidency.
There are four problems with this approach.
First, the metadata associated with these emails has been authenticated by news sources and is from Hunter Biden’s computer.
Second, new information came to light Sunday that includes emails and phone logs showing Hunter’s attorney attempted to recover the missing computer from the repair shop where it was located. This validates Hunter’s ownership.
Third, in a separate email relating to one of the alleged business transactions in China, an individual copied on that email has come forward and validated its authenticity.
Finally, and most stunningly, neither Joe Biden, his campaign, nor Hunter have denied any part of any of the news stories regarding material on Hunter’s computer, first reported by The New York Post.
As the plot and the facts continue to unravel, more questions are being raised.
While the FBI has offered no comment thus far, it issued a subpoena to the computer repair shop in Delaware and has been in possession of Hunter’s hard drive since December 2019. Yet none of this information was shared with congressional leaders during a recent bipartisan committee investigation of the Biden family’s alleged foreign business dealings.
Enflaming the situation even further, several tech giants — including Twitter and Facebook — initially prevented the reports of the Bidens’ business activities from being widely amplified by suggesting the information could not be shared due to a potential breach of the companies’ hacking and privacy rules.
However, this same standard offered up by the tech companies in the Biden case was never applied to information widely disseminated during the Russia investigation carried out by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, or during President Trump’s impeachment hearings.
In fact, as we now know, it was quite the opposite. Massive amounts of information — including unverified emails, the Steele dossier, unsubstantiated reports, and even dubious claims in news articles — were used as “evidence” to substantiate the false claim that Donald Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election.
This enabled Mueller and his team to weaponize the law against many of us who were targets. We certainly did not receive the same treatment as the Bidens.
The immeasurable danger caused by both these acts of the tech giants is unacceptable and tears down the foundation of our country’s First Amendment rights.
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Who nominated Twitter and Facebook to be the information police?
Censorship in any form is wrong. But the actions taken by both companies last week are tantamount to election interference. They need to be held accountable.
In the meantime, the revelations about the Bidens’ suspicious business transactions — and Big Tech’s attempts to cover it up for them — have now only cast an even darker shadow in voters’ minds of what exactly Joe Biden did, the influence and power he used as vice president, and whether he enriched himself and his family from it.
Why Joe Biden did not give a blanket denial of the recent allegations as he did in September 2019 is mind-blowing. Perhaps he knows his lies have caught up to him, and at this point in the campaign believes no response is his best response.
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Or perhaps the Bidens have no idea how to respond because they do not know precisely what information is on the laptop and are waiting to better understand what bombshells may drop.
Right now, it doesn't really matter, whatever the reasoning.
The American people are demanding that Joe Biden come clean. The drumbeat for the truth will only continue to rise louder before Election Day. If Biden continues to refuse to respond in details and does not answer every question fully, it may cost him the election
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