By Colin Hanna, President, Let Freedom Ring
The biggest story from this past week is obviously the Washington DC grand jury’s indictment of former president Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith. The legacy media are breathlessly treating it as one of the biggest stories in the history of the Republic. One headline called it “The most important case in U.S. history.” Coverage of Trump’s troubles is swamping virtually all other stories – which is more than a little convenient, because there’s another big story that the same legacy media do not want to cover, and that’s what I want to spend the next few minutes examining.
That “other” story – the one that the legacy media is happy to have an excuse to ignore – is the Hunter Biden – Devon Archer – Joe Biden — Burisma political influence scandal.
MSNBC treated the Devon Archer testimony before the House Oversight Committee as a “nothing burger,” claiming that it shows “no evidence of Joe Biden’s connection to his son’s business affairs.” That’s not the way influence peddling works. Does MSNBC think the American people are idiots? No one flat-out promises a quid pro quo transaction. It’s all done with innuendo. The purpose of innuendo is to provide the opportunity for plausible deniability.
Remember the testimony of Michael Cohen about how Donald Trump used a kind of code to give orders to Cohen so that Trump could maintain plausible deniability? Cohen said “he speaks in code… I understand his code.” Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis stated that Trump used “coded” language to encourage Cohen to falsely state in Congressional testimony that there were no contacts between the Trump Organization and campaign and people linked to the Russian government.
Isn’t that exactly like what we have here? When it was Michael Cohen and Donald Trump, the legacy media proudly cracked the code and concluded that it was old-fashioned corrupt influence peddling and that Trump was guilty of it, yet in this case we are supposed to give Biden a pass because no pure quid pro quo was proposed? No, it’s the same code!
Republicans and Democrats offered dueling takes on the significance of Devon Archer’s testimony this week, with Republicans saying it provided confirmation that Biden previously lied about his knowledge of his son’s business dealings and Democrats saying the testimony yielded no evidence of wrongdoing and that the conversations never focused on Hunter Biden’s business.
When it was Trump under the microscope, the media happily fed the Democrats’ impeachment momentum by suggesting that anyone could see through the flimsy defense of plausible deniability. This time, the parties are reversed. Democrats are trying to plausibly deny that Joe Biden had anything to do with Hunter Biden’s Burisma deal, and Republicans are saying that anyone should be able to crack the coded language.
But in this case, we have an added factor that I believe definitively points the finger of blame directly at Joe Biden. His ego got the better of his slippery prevaricating when he bragged to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor. In his own words … he threatened the Ukrainian President that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Biden said “‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled, then proudly saying “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.” Shokin had threatened to investigate the corruption at Burisma. Hunter Biden’s client, Burisma, was being accused of corruption. Hunter Biden put Joe Biden on the phone with Burisma executives. Even if they didn’t talk on the phone explicitly about Viktor Shokin, somewhere along the line, Hunter must have asked his father to use his influence to get Shokin fired. How else would an American Vice President ask another country’s President to fire one of its prosecutors? Connect the dots!
Donald Trump famously called his telephone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky “a perfect call.” Democrats and the legacy media mocked mercilessly him for it, and the call ultimately led to his impeachment. Joe Biden has had 20 or so telephone calls with Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian associates. Democrats and the media are defending them all as perfectly innocent. Republican and conservative media need to make the same case against Joe Biden that Democrats and the legacy media made against Trump – and if well-executed, it should lead to the same result: impeachment.
My advice to our loyal American Radio Journal listeners is simple: Don’t let the media bury the Biden corruption story by distracting you with wall-to-wall coverage of the Trump indictments.
(Colin Hanna is President of Let Freedom Ring, USA.)