The Media Research Center closed out its coverage of Hunter Biden’s trial the way it began — by whining that non-right-wing media treated him as a human being and not a partisan punching bag. Clay Waters grumbled in a June 13 post:
Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was convicted this week of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer and thus illegally possessing a firearm in 2018. The Biden family got the full-on mawkish treatment from painfully sympathetic reporter Katie Rogers in Wednesday’s New York Times. “A Guilty Verdict for Hunter Biden Weighs on a Worried President Biden.”
[…]Rogers gave the president points for staying close to his troubled son, which really isn’t the highest bar to clear.
[…]In September 2023, Rogers also treated the Hunter Biden crime story as a sentimental family one under the headline “Biden Puts Son First, In Spite of Political Price.”
Alex Christy spent a June 15 post complaining that Republican hypocrisy was called out:
PBS News Hour may have launched a rebranding campaign this week with a new studio and a new name that now makes News Hour two words instead of one, but that doesn’t mean the weekly Friday recap with New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist and pinch hitter for Jonathan Capeheart, E.J. Dionne, was any better as the duo insisted Hunter Biden is a victim of politics and that Republicans are hypocrites.
Host Geoff Bennett began with Brooks and asked, “David, has the GOP’s argument that Joe Biden is ordering prosecutors to target his political opponents, has that been undercut by the fact that Joe Biden’s Justice Department successfully prosecuted his son?”
Brooks began by repeating what he said a week ago, “Yeah, I guess so, yes. No — well, a couple of things. I do not think Hunter Biden would be having these trials if his dad wasn’t president. I think he was in a terrible mess. He was addicted to drugs. He signed some false documents. Yeah, that’s bad.”
He then recalled, “But the guy was leading a very sad and pathetic life, which he’s trying to climb his way out of. And so, as I said on the NewsHour last week, I just felt so much sadness reading all that he went through and all that he did. And I don’t think, if he had a — didn’t have a high-profile father, he would be suffering this increased conviction of a felony. I think they would have said, okay, you did this. Let’s wrap it up. And so I think he’s — in some sense, he’s a troubled guy who’s the victim of his father — of politics, frankly.”
Dionne agreed, “I see — in terms of the tragedy here, I see it very much as David did.”
Turning to Republicans, he lamented, “It was a little dispiriting to see Republicans, on the one hand, say, we got to sort of live by this case, respect the jury, they found him guilty, these were legitimate charges, and then, when asked about a certain jury in New York with a certain other person, ‘oh, well, that is totally different.’”
Republicans would say that is too simplistic because there were real problems with the Trump case, but Dionne wasn’t convinced, “And, yeah, I suppose they could argue if they want about the case that was brought, but the case was very clear and involved some real crimes that were committed linked to a cover-up. And yet it’s okay to prosecute Hunter Biden, not to prosecute Donald Trump? There’s something wrong with that.”
What real crimes were linked to a cover up? Nobody knows for sure because the D.A. didn’t specify and the judge didn’t make him.
As we pointed out, the specific crimes that were covered up are irrelevant here, since the crime being charged against Trump is falsifying business records to conceal a crime.
Tim Graham brought in general accusations about Hunter and the Biden family in a June 16 post:
Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio wasn’t hiding its partisan stripes on the day of the guilty verdicts for Hunter Biden. On The NPR Politics Podcast, NPR senior political correspondent Mara Liasson said there was “no evidence” of Hunter and the Bidens taking millions from foreign influence-peddling.
She said with Donald Trump, “all criticism is confession” when he complains about a weaponized Justice Department. She summarized his criticism as “Heads I win, tails, you cheated.”
[…]One can argue the Biden influence-peddling is not a crime, but it’s just silly to say there’s “no evidence” of an influence-peddling mountain of millions.
Graham failed to mention that he had to correct dozens of NewsBusters posts after it was revealed that one key alleged witness against Hunter turned out to be a liar and a Russian operative — which raises questions about all of the allegations against Hunter.
Clay Waters similarly groused in another post that day:
Does PBS stand for Partisan Broadcasting Service?
Hunter Biden, son of the president, was found guilty by a Wilmington, Delaware jury Tuesday of three felonies related to a gun purchase he made in 2018 while under the influence of drugs. PBS NewsHour White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez empathy-fueled story hailed President Joe Biden both as father figure and defender of the judicial process, while his wife Jill Biden was in the courtroom amid “concern about a potential relapse” by Hunter after the guilty verdict against him.
Then things took a political turn, with Barron-Lopez posing Trump and Republicans as hurling “baseless” accusations against President Biden while Democrats defended the rule of law by respecting the judicial process. Funny how those same Democrats tear down the right-leaning Supreme Court at every opportunity without being criticized by the mainstream press.
[…]But to declare Republican accusations “baseless,” Barron-Lopez had to ignore, among other things, Joe Biden falsely stating in 2019 that he’d never spoken to his son about his business dealings, and the contents of Hunter’s infamous laptop (evidence confirmed as legitimate by the FBI after Big Tech banned its mention on social media before the 2020 election) contain messages indicating that President Biden showed up to meet Hunter’s foreign business clients at fancy restaurants. He has appeared with Hunter’s clients in photographs.
To say there is no evidence of Joe’s involvement is like saying there’s no evidence that Hunter had a cocaine problem.
He too failed to mention the discredited witness.
Graham returned to use Hunter’s conviction to downplay Trump’s crimes in his June 28 column:
The Left can’t stand that anyone would think Hunter Biden becoming a convicted felon waters down their talking point that Trump is a convicted felon. They worked hard to inflate some accounting entries for legal expenses into felonies. It’s much less serious in their minds that a crack addict lied about being an addict on a gun-purchase form so he was able to buy a gun that was later thrown in a trash can near a school.
After Hunter Biden was found guilty of three felonies, Democrats tried to argue that having a “convicted felon” in both presidential families meant the Biden Justice Department wasn’t partisan or “weaponized.”
Then the weaponizing began. Before the first presidential debate in Atlanta, the Democratic National Committee bought five billboards saying (in all capital letters) “Donald, welcome to Atlanta for the first time since becoming a convicted felon. Congrats – or whatever.”
Graham ignores the fact that Hunter is not a politician and has never held or even run for public office, while Trump was the president, who should be held to a higher standard and which automatically makes his crimes more prominent, however much Graham tries to minimize them by dismissing 34 felonies as merely issues with “accounting entries” and censoring the fact that Trump paying hush money to a porn star to cover up an alleged affair is at the center of it.