Jonathan Turley’s Dishonest Rant About Hunter Biden and the Media
Back in October Tucker Carlson devoted an entire show to interviewing a guy named Tony Bobulinski, who would have been a business associate of Hunter Biden’s if their fledgling venture was ever funded, which it wasn’t. Bobulinski says that Hunter wanted his father to join the startup in 2017, and they met with him to talk about it in Beverly Hills. But the former Vice President, to the extent he was paying attention, wasn’t interested. The entire saga is about a protracted failure to launch.
The whole purpose of the hour was to manufacture some Joe Biden “lies,” that is, to refute the former Vice President’s claims that he never discussed business with his son and that he never took a penny from foreign sources. As they say on Wall Street, money talks, bullshit walks. Until the venture was operative, there was never any business to discuss. The venture didn’t have much of a business plan, just a list of potential acquisitions for its deep pocket sponsor, the now bankrupt Chinese conglomerate, CEFC China Energy Company. And legal documents showed that Joe never had any part of it.
But that didn’t stop scam artists like Prof. Jonathan Turley from promoting the false tale of Joe Biden’s “involvement” in The Hill.“Joe Biden should address his denials of knowledge about the business activities of his son, an assertion even Hunter has contradicted,” writes Turley. “He also should say whether he met with Bobulinski at the Beverly Hills Hilton to discuss Chinese business deals in 2017.” Turley won’t mention that these were planned activities and potential deals, because doing so would undermine his agenda, which is to make something out of next to nothing, and to blame mainstream media for not paying sufficient attention.
That’s how BS artists like Turley operate. They invariably leave out the critical piece of information that nullifies their thesis, and malign others who are more scrupulous about fact checking. He derides media outlets who were wary about reporting on alleged emails from a laptop allegedly owned by Hunter Biden and obtained by Rudy Giuliani under dodgy circumstances. (Giuliani would only share the laptop with a reporters whom he favored.) As the intelligence community learned, it’s the easiest thing in the world to apprehend someone else’s emails and selectively disclose them in order to create a false or misleading impression.
Turley claims the skeptics were biased in favor of Biden and biased against Trump because they were wary about the laptop emails but gullible about Russia’s “collusion” with Trump. His proof? U.S. attorneys in Delaware and Pittsburgh are investigating Hunter’s financial affairs. That doesn’t address the reason why professional journalists were initially skeptical about the laptop; Turley leaves that part out so he can fabricate a bogus argument in favor of bias.
Here’s how he puts it:
Most striking about the blackout is that, as with the Russia collusion story, the media was coaxed to buy into a false narrative. Reporters became so invested in the denial that they could not afford to acknowledge growing evidence of possible wrongdoing. If Hunter and his uncle did conduct a significant influence peddling scheme, the reporters were at best dupes and at worst enablers. The shock was palpable since so many Americans have been sealed off from negative reports on the Biden family. The media was in the bag for Joe Biden.
Notice how Turley fabricates “a significant influence peddling scheme” related to someone who was out of office in 2017, while reporters who wanted reliable evidence “were at best dupes and at worst enablers.” Though The Wall Street Journal and others reported that Bobulinski’s emails showed no connection with Joe Biden, “so many Americans have been sealed off from negative reports on the Biden family.”
As for Trump and Russia, he uses two familiar tricks. First Turley focuses on collusion while ignoring bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report, which confirmed the consensus opinion of 17 different intelligence agencies that Russia operated to influence the 2016 election, mostly without the active involvement of the Trump campaign. Second, he excludes the irrefutable evidence presented in a subsequent volume the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report, which confirms that Trump allies were actively colluding with Russian proxies. Trump’s and Turley’s “Russia hoax” narrative is a big fat lie.
Using the false pretext that Giuliani’s laptop was reliable, Turley mendaciously converts the proposed venture into “raw influence peddling.”
The laptop refers to the Biden family talking about a $5 million unsecured loan from a Chinese enterprise that was allegedly part of a discussed wire transfer of $10 million. Because these exchanges strike some of us as raw influence peddling, there may have been an effort to conceal or disguise them.
Again, we see Turley’s eagerness to misrepresent the facts. The never-funded venture involving Bobulinski was to be a bona fide business called SinoHawk Holdings with an initial equity funding of $10 million. Fifty percent of the business would be controlled by CEFC Chairman, Ye Jianming, and the other 50%, the American stake, would be owned in equal parts by Bobulinski, Hunter Biden, Hunter’s uncle, James, and two others. The $5 million American stake was to be funded via a loan from CEFC. That may strike many as quite a sweetheart deal, but I’ve seen other examples where managers of private equity funds and hedge funds get really big bucks and upside without putting in their own capital. In any event, SinoHawk went nowhere because, unbeknownst to the Americans involved, CEFC turned out to be a Chinese Enron, a multibillion dollar house of cards that got Ye Jianming and others arrested.
Hunter Biden still has problems. According to Senator Ron Johnson’s Homeland Security Committee Report, Hunter Biden’s law firm charged CEFC-related entities for consulting fees and legal fees that may have been inflated. But the evidence connecting any of it to Joe Biden is zero, notwithstanding Turley’s eagerness to lump it all into “the Biden family.”
In case people forgot, Turley became famous on cable news more than 20 years ago as talking head to amplify the illegal leaks that came out of Ken Starr’s office during the Monica Lewinsky saga. Now he’s a paid fixture on Fox News.
