Glenn Greenwald’s take on Hunter Biden’s laptop is revelatory, about Greenwald
Journalists are supposed to be skeptical about everything. Every source has an agenda, and seeks out reporters sympathetic to his agenda. Any trove of emails, especially one obtained surreptitiously, can be doctored or selectively edited. So, before you publish a story about somebody’s emails, you need to vet the credibility of the source and vet the credibility of the emails. If your vetting isn’t solid, you need a compelling reason to show why the story is newsworthy.
The Hunter Biden laptop story always had problems with vetting and with newsworthiness. The source — a computer repair guy who wasn’t certain Hunter dropped off the laptop — was, at best, a busybody who didn’t really know what he was talking about. The provenance and veracity of the emails was suspect. And the possible “bombshell” revelation, which could not be verified, was that Vice President Joe Biden may have met with a Ukrainian business associate of his son. Joe had denied any involvement in his son’s business.
That was it. Nothing else suggested that Joe Biden exploited his position for private gain. Some emails suggest that Hunter had hoped to include his father in a prospective private equity venture after he left office in 2017. But those hopes weren’t realized, and the venture never was never funded. Emails also seemed to affirm what had been previously reported, that Hunter and his uncle parlayed the Biden name for business opportunities. If that raises eyebrows, it merely confirms a truism of modern life: whoever you are and whatever you want to do, namedropping opens doors.
Glenn Greenwald thought Hunter Biden’s laptop was a big deal, and says those who disagree —at CNN, MSNBC, CBS and NPR — are less than ethical. When his editors at The Intercept pointed to weaknesses in his arguments and evidence, he resigned his job and decried censorship. Since then, he’s appeared on Fox News to trash The Intercept for being unethical lapdogs for the Democrats. He’s become the network’s poster boy for decrying the corrupt liberal media.
Bias in the media is a big topic, which can easily devolve into name-calling. Here’s how Greenwald describes his departure from The Intercept:
But the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.
Wow. This is not a guy who asks: is it them or is it me? To support his claims, Greenwald published the email chain with his editors, which reads like an epistolary novella of self involvement. If you start out with an inflammatory title like, “THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS,” you’d better have the goods. Greenwald doesn’t.
What falsehoods are used to defend Joe Biden? Greenwald seems to say that media misgivings about vetting of the emails or newsworthiness are unfounded. Calling that a falsehood is a stretch.
To make a case for newsworthiness, he bypasses the substance of the original New York Post article, which was about a purported thank-you note for an unverified meeting with Vice President Biden. Instead he skips to something that sounds more sinister:
After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.
Really? What purported emails reflect Hunter’s efforts to induce his father to do anything about Burisma? I can’t find any. It would be nice if Greenwald provided a link, because it looks like he invented them out of thin air.
Nor were there ever any “proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.” There was only an assortment of ideas to be pitched to a Chinese investor for deals located outside of China. But those ideas, which never advanced to the proposal stage, were based on contacts of James Gilliar, another venture partner unrelated to the Biden family. Greenwald’s mistakes show he isn’t detail-oriented, which is not a good thing if you like being accusatory.
Money talks, BS walks. Everyday in the business world, people engage in discussions and negotiations that lead to nothing. The entire narrative about the Bidens and China is based on something that might have happened but never did. How does Greenwald demonstrate that preliminary discussions about nonexistent deals are important? He doesn’t. He just insists that they are:
But nobody claimed that any such deals had been consummated — so the conclusion that one had not been does not negate the story.
Consider the weird use of a double negative — nobody denied that deals had not been consummated, so therefore the story is not negated. Actually failure to consummate does negate the story. A business deal by the son of an out-of-office politician isn’t newsworthy unless the terms are outside arm’s-length bounds. But nothing ever advanced to the point where terms were even discussed.
The plan was that Hunter Biden, his uncle, and three other co-equal partners would enter into a venture that earned fees for finding assets that might be purchased by a Chinese energy conglomerate. Their equity stakes in the venture were to be funded through nonrecourse loans extended by the Chinese investor. But the stillborn venture was never funded.
How do you make something out of nothing? You say it raises important questions. As Greenwald writes:
All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign, raise important questions about whether the former Vice President and current front-running presidential candidate was aware of efforts by his son to peddle influence with the Vice President for profit, and also whether the Vice President ever took actions in his official capacity with the intention, at least in part, of benefitting his son’s business associates. But in the two weeks since the Post published its initial story, a union of the nation’s most powerful entities, including its news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these questions rather than try to provide answers to them.
Nobody’s saying it was a conspiracy, but, “a union of the nation’s most powerful entities, including its news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these questions” about discussions that went nowhere. Whatever questions Greenwald might think up, we know the answers would be wild speculation.
If China was a big nothing, what about Ukraine? Greenwald doesn’t identify any incriminating emails, but he does revive a familiar charge, that Vice President Biden’s effort to replace Ukraine’s General Prosecutor was intended to favor Burisma, a gas company that paid Hunter to sit on its board. This allegation came up before Trump’s first impeachment and was dismissed at the time because Vice President Biden’s action reflected the consensus position of the State Department, the EU and the IMF. Greenwald’s retort:
But that claim does not even pass the laugh test. The U.S. and its European allies are not opposed to corruption by their puppet regimes. They are allies with the most corrupt regimes on the planet, from Riyadh to Cairo, and always have been. Since when does the U.S. devote itself to ensuring good government in the nations it is trying to control?
Get it? Joe Biden acted because the U.S. and its European allies support corruption and always have, which is why Hunter Biden’s stint with Burisma must also be corrupt.
You know who else must be corrupt? Former intelligence officials who said the Hunter Biden laptop saga sounds like it was planted by Russian operatives.
That’s the through line in Greenwald’s 4,800-word missive, in his correspondence with his editors, and in much of his other work. If people disagree with him, it’s not because they have a different perspective, or happen to be naive or misguided. Anyone who disputes the credibility or substance of the Hunter Biden laptop narrative — Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, NPR, the Washington Post, or anyone else in liberal media — must be afflicted with the “pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored.”
You know who Greenwald doesn’t consider corrupt? Fox News and Tucker Carlson, who offers him a regular platform to express his vitriol against those who disagree with him.
