Beltway and legacy media outlets as well as veteran political reporters are increasingly covering scandals that rocked the Democratic Party ahead of the November election, shedding new light on issues that Republicans have long criticized and opposed.
“A full 4½ years after The Post’s bombshell series on Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling schemes, The New York Times has deigned to take an interest in the former First Son’s corruption,” the New York Post’s editorial board wrote in a piece last week that was highly critical of The New York Times for reporting on Biden corruption allegations years after other outlets had already uncovered reported details.
“We’d say the Times’ willingness to at long last cover this comes better late than never, but it only published the story now that it doesn’t remotely matter anymore,” the editorial board continued.
In an article published Friday, The New York Times reported that Hunter Biden, the former first son, “sought support from the State Department” to help his former employer, Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, while his father was vice president. Conservatives have long criticized Hunter for allegedly leveraging his family name and his father’s political influence, accusing them both of engaging in influence-peddling through their ties to Burisma.
Hunter Biden earned millions of dollars while serving on the board of Burisma. He joined the company as legal counsel in the spring of 2014 and was later promoted to the Board of Directors that same year.
Republicans accused the Bidens of having “coerced” the Burisma CEO into paying them millions in exchange for assistance in ousting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company during the Obama administration.
The 46th president has denied any involvement in his son’s business affairs, Fox News reported.
Before leaving the Oval Office in January, Biden granted his son a comprehensive 10-year pardon, shielding Hunter Biden from any offenses he “has committed or may have committed” between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024. Allegations of Biden family influence-peddling have echoed from congressional halls to social media on X, although traditional and left-leaning media outlets have often refrained from giving these claims a platform.
Jonathan Turley, a Fox News contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, published an op-ed for Fox News Digital on Sunday. In his piece, he commented on a New York Times article that came out years after other media outlets and experts had already investigated allegations of influence-peddling involving the Biden family.
“For years, some of us have written about the Biden family’s multimillion-dollar influence-peddling operation and the Justice Department’s refusal to charge Hunter Biden with being an unregistered foreign agent. Now, years later, The New York Times has found evidence suggesting that the former president’s son was acting as a foreign agent as early as the Obama administration, when his father was vice president,” Turley wrote.
Media veterans and legacy outlets have increasingly delved into investigating several scandals and political issues that conservatives long warned about. These include the theory that the coronavirus likely originated from a lab in China, as well as concerns about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline in the run-up to last year’s election.
Last month, The New York Times published a column stating that the scientific community “badly misled” the public in an effort to suppress the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. This was despite the fact that one of the paper’s own science writers had previously labeled the theory as “racist.”
In her March 16 piece titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” NYT columnist and Princeton sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci argued that the scientific community had long suspected COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab but deliberately “hid or understated crucial facts” to mislead the public about the lab’s “terrifyingly lax” safety protocols.
The CIA under the Trump administration reported this year that a lab leak was the likely origin of the COVID-19 virus, which had previously been dismissed by media outlets and scientists as a conspiracy theory.