The Hunter Biden “Scandal” That Wasn’t, Brought to You by Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and the New York Post

The Trump administration/re-election campaign (there is no significant difference between the two) and theiir assorted minions, sycophants and hangers-on are desperate. The possibility of a Biden landslide in three weeks is growing. The Justice Department attempts to produce an “October surprise” regarding what Trump tried to brand as “Obamagate” haven’t found shit.

So, courtesy of Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and the Murdoch-owned New York Post, yesterday they tried yet another Hail Mary pass — if, this time, the quarterback flung the ball in the general direction of the football field while being dragged away to Bellevue by medics for a psych eval.

This time, the Post produced a story hung on the thunderous headline BIDEN SECRET EMAILS. Ooooh, shades of the bogus Hillary Clinton email scandal that hurt her candidacy so badly in the final days before the 2016 election!

The secondary headline screamed “Revealed: Ukrainian exec thanked Hunter Biden for ‘opportunity to meet’ VP dad.” Hmmm. That actually doesn’t sound so bad, but maybe, Jesu marimba!, this would finally prove all that happy horseshit flung around by Giuliani and the Trump humpers regarding Burisma and the Ukrainian connection (oooooh…!).

Mommy, why does the New York Post look like the National Enquirer?

According to the trove of emails serendipitously received by the Post, Hunter Biden, who gets to stand in as a “criminal” in contrast to the actual criminals among Trump’s children, introduced his dad to a top executive of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, Vadym Pozharskyi, in April 2015. A year later, Biden and other Obama officials pressured Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was supposedly investigating the firm.

What the Post did not immediately tell its readership was that the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was seen as corrupt and ineffective. Shokin had no interested in investigating Burisma, and Biden was among dozens of American and European officials who urged the Ukrainian president to fire Shokin as part of a larger “house cleaning” effort to restore integrity to the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian government.

Of course, Shokin was a close ally of Russia and Vladimir Putin.

The Post did tell its readers about the European pressure and Shokin’s reputation for corruption at the very end of the article.

Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of Burisma in 2014, which led Republicans to accuse the Bidens and the Obama administration of corruption. The younger Biden was likely offered the position as something of a sinecure, but he was actually a valid asset to the company (in contrast to the perception of him as a wastrel drug addict painted by the Post, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets), and he gained nothing from the push to fire Shokin.

Pozharskyi supposedly sent “a message of appreciation” to Biden that read in part:

Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.

Another email from 2014 supposedly shows Pozharskyi asking the younger Biden for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The Post calls the emails “blockbuster correspondence” that supposedly “flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s ‘never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.'”

Here’s where the already-thin story (“blockbuster” emails? “Smoking gun” evidence?) goes completely off the rails.

A water-damaged Macbook Pro laptop computer was dropped off for “repair” to a private computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware in April 2019. The store owner claimed that the laptop had a “Beau Biden Foundation” sticker on it. The owner of the laptop never returned for it. The store owner says the computer contained a “raunchy, 12-minute video” of Hunter smoking crack and having sex “with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.”

The Post did not publish the video, for whatever reason, and the only photo it did publish was what appears to be a selfie of a disheveled Hunter Biden smoking a cigarette. (The photo looks like every male character in a Quentin Tarantino movie, but that’s just my impression.)

What they did publish was letters purportedly saved to the laptop. The store owner says he gave the hard drive to federal investigators. The owner gave copies of a federal subpoena which he says demanded that he turn over the hard drive and the computer to the FBI in December 2019 after the owner contacted federal authorities. The owner said he copied the drive and gave it to…wait for it…Giuliani’s lawyer Robert Costello.

Red flags flying yet? Of course they are.

Next up in this little redneck psyop melodrama: Steve Bannon, who told the Post about the hard drive last September. Giuliani obliged the Post with a copy of the drive on October 11. The Post went to press on October 14.

What else happened in late September? The Republican chairmen of two Senate committees published a wet fart of yet another “bombshell” report that used Russian “intelligence findings” to falsely claim that Hunter Biden committed an array of crimes and unethical actions while on the Burisma board. Sean Hannity screamed that the report “should immediately disqualify Joe Biden from being the president of the United States.” The report was filled with easily debunked lies and garbage allegations, and after giving the right-wing scream machine a news cycle or so to trash the Bidens, sank under the weight of the bullshit it was created from.

Anyone with two firing brain neurons to strike sparks from one another can put together the obvious: since the Senate report did nothing to knock Biden off his pins, the Trumpistas had to come up with something else, and fast.

The laptop and its “bombshell” evidence was apparently their Plan B. In the movies, “Plan B” always works. In the real world, if Plan A is a no-go, Plan B is likely to be a disaster.

The rest of the Post article is the usual garbage. Lots of inflammatory language about Biden “admittedly” pressuring the Ukrainians to fire Shokin (Biden is proud of his actions, as Shokin was a Russian tool and his removal helped the Ukrainian government lessen Russian influence on its functions), and some kind of unidentified “alleged shakedown” involving Hunter Biden — an interesting choice of words considering that Democrats factually accused Trump of engaging in a “shakedown” of Ukrainian officials during his impeachment.

The Post concludes by reporting that neither the FBI nor the Delaware US Attorney’s office would comment on the matter. Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George R. Mesires, said that Giuliani

has been pushing widely discredited conspiracy theories about the Biden family, openly relying on actors tied to Russian intelligence.

Finally, neither Pozharskiy nor the Biden campaign would comment.

Next up: The Post‘s entire email fabrication is debunked within hours, and the Post retaliates with MORE possibly libelous accusations against Hunter Biden. Stay tuned.