One of the Media Research Center’s biggest complaints amid news of Hunter Biden’s plea deal was that Republicans were continually called out over their obsession with Hunter. Bill D’Agostino tried to put a whataboutism spin on that in a June 22 post:
After CNN earlier this week attempted to accuse one of its competitors of being “obsessed” with Hunter Biden, we thought we’d take a look at CNN’s own past fixation on the son of a President: Donald Trump Jr.
It’s not exactly news that the liberal cable network devoted far more air time to Trump Jr. than they have to Hunter Biden, but the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
During the Mueller investigation, Donald Trump Jr. was a hot topic on CNN: be it his phone calls, his emails, or his twitter exchanges, all of his communications were treated as self-evidently suspicious by the network’s curious hosts. By contrast, they were positively bored by anything relating to Hunter Biden.
D’Agostino failed to mention that, unlike Hunter, Don Jr. made himself a public figure by working alongside his father in the family business and vociferously defending him during his presidency and since. He continued:
In July of 2017, CNN ran numerous lengthy reports about Trump Jr.’s “bombshell emails” from June of the previous year. A few months later, when those emails had proven fruitless, CNN instead shifted to caring about his Twitter messages. In November of 2017, New Day host Chris Cuomo excitedly announced: “Trump Jr. released the Twitter messages. The timing of the exchanges is raising a lot of eyebrows!”
When those too turned up nothing of note, 2018 saw the “bombshell report about the original emails” back in the spotlight. Another dud.
Fast forward to 2019, and the network had begun hoping that perhaps Trump Jr.’s phone records might provide some proof of his father’s non-existent collusion efforts. On January 31 of that year, Congressional correspondent Manu Raju briefed viewers of The Lead about a handful of phone calls the then-President’s son had made to unlisted numbers. Yet again a thread was pulled, and again nothing unraveled.
Eventually Bob Mueller concluded his investigation, having uncovered no proof that President Trump had conspired with Russians to steal an election. Years of investigative fervor, all for naught.
D’Agostino was curiously vague about those emails were about, aside from claiming it involved “non-existent collusion efforts.” In fact, those email exchanges involved Don Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton (who ultimately failed to deliver), so it’s a bit strange to claim that evidence of possible collusion was “non-existent.” He continued:
But when Hunter Biden began appearing in headlines about his potential role in a family corruption scandal, eyes quickly glazed over at CNN. Most of the network’s reporting on the current President’s son has come laced with lazy dismissals and assertions that “there is no evidence” that either Biden “did anything wrong.”
If we’re going to nitpick, claims of “no evidence” are most certainly false. There is plenty of evidence of potential wrongdoing — for example, Hunter’s own admission that he would not have landed landed his $50,000 per month gig on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma if not for his last name. That is, by definition, circumstantial evidence.
What the allegations against the President and his son lack are definitive proof.
Note that he undercuts himself by referencing “potential wrongdoing” and not actual wrongdoing. But if all that alleged evidence doesn’t result in actionable proof, don’t look for D’Agostino to apply the same standard here by calling the obsession with Hunter by his employer and other Republicans a “hoax” and insisting the investigation was filled with “years of investigative fervor, all for naught.”