EDITOR’S NOTE, February 16, 2024: On February 15, Justice Department Counsel David Weiss indicted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov on two felony counts of making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record for claims made to the bureau. The charges are in relation to June 2020 FD-1023 form alleging President Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden received a combined $10 million in a bribery scheme involving the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.
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The obsequious liberal media were out kissing the feet of the Biden White House on Wednesday morning as they rushed to defend President Biden with shrieks of “no evidence” following Tuesday morning’s official opening of an impeachment inquiry by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) into the mountains of evidence of Biden family malfeasance.
ABC, CBS, and NBC were so blatant in their spin as it came just hours after the White House sent out a memo to their besties in the news media, demanding they endorse and promote Biden talking points attacking Republicans as their own.
ABC’s Good Morning America was the most unctuous with chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce even touting the memo “urging [the media] to ramp up scrutiny of Republicans for what the White House is calling an impeachment inquiry based on lies.” Based on their coverage, they got the message.
Co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos parroted it in a tease: “Impeachment inquiry into President Biden. Speaker McCarthy opens an investigation claiming Biden was involved in his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings despite no evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Stephanopoulos was shameless when the show got to the two reporters on the impeachment inquiry that featured zero soundbites of McCarthy citing examples of suspicious Biden family activity. Instead, he huffed the probe was “an unprecedented move” and had been opened “in the absence of evidence of impeachable offenses.”
Senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott did her part: “[E]ven the Republicans who are pushing for this the most acknowledge they are still searching for hard evidence of any wrongdoing by President Biden.”
Doubling down on her bemoaning the “far-right” as having pushed for an impeachment inquiry, Scott took a skeptical tone in asking McCarthy and Congressman Scott Perry (R-PA) if there’s “hard evidence” of “an impeachable offense” and/or “wrongdoing.”
On Tuesday’s World News Tonight, Scott channeled Karine Jean-Pierre or John Kirby: “House Republicans have already spent nine months investigating whether as Vice President Joe Biden made decisions to help his son and enrich himself, but they’ve come up empty.”
Going to Bruce, Stephanopoulos eagerly boasted that Team Biden seems to have “decid[ed] basically the best defense is a good offense”.
“The White House has been very vocal about this, adamant that the President did nothing wrong, stressing that even after nine months of investigating, House Republicans have found zero evidence and noting even several Republicans, as Rachel said, note they haven’t found anything linking the President to any wrongdoing,” Bruce replied
Bruce later concluded that this would keep her pals from working for the American people: “[W]hile they are hoping that all of this will ultimately backfire on Republicans in the upcoming election, there is no question that politically this does create a real headache for this administration and will no doubt be a distraction.”
CBS Mornings was also in compliance. Co-host Tony Dokoupil expressed sever skepticism: “The question is a Republican claim that Biden’s son, Hunter’s business dealings have enriched the Biden family and Republicans have also made some unproven allegations that the President himself was involved in all of this.”
January 6 correspondent Scott MacFarlane whined this marked “another volatile fight in an already combustible Washington” that’s made worse by Republicans “not” having “provided a conclusive link” between Hunter Biden’s life of ruin and his father.
What do these people want? A Publisher’s Clearinghouse-sized check from Burisma to Joe Biden?
Pivoting lastly to NBC’s Today, they were more concerned about McCarthy doing this merely to appease conservatives, though Capitol Hill correspondent Ryan Nobles made sure to touch on the White House’s talking points (click “expand”):
NOBLES: The investigation is based on a Republican belief that Hunter Biden traded on his then Vice President father’s name to win lucrative business deals around the world. But they have yet to show any proof that Joe Biden used his influence to aid his son’s work or personally benefited from it. A point some Republicans acknowledge.
SENATOR TOMMY TUBERVILLE (R-AL) [on NBC News NOW’s Meet the Press NOW]: There’s a lot of smoke but we don’t if there’s any truth to it.
NOBLES: This comes at a time when Congress must pass a funding bill before the end of the month or risk a shutdown. They must also pass legislation to fund the Department of Defense, provide assistance to farmers, and deal with aid to Ukraine and disaster relief.
CONGRESSMAN DANIEL GOLDMAN (R-NY): We have significant legislation that we need to pass and instead, the Speaker is catering again to the fringe right-wing.
(....)
NOBLES: [W]e know the Republican-led Oversight Committee says they’ll now plan to interview additional Biden family associates as well as pursue personal and business bank records from them, including from Hunter Biden. Of course, they’ve been investigating the Biden family for some time now but this new inquiry gives them expanded powers, including subpoenas that go beyond the simple scope of legislatively purposes, and they can now dig into the finances with the end goal to produce articles of impeachment against the President which would still require a majority vote in the House. Savannah, right now, it’s not clear that McCarthy has those votes for articles of impeachment.
On Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News, Nobles’s colleague Garrett Haake was joined at the hip with the White House:
House Republicans have alleged that the President has profited off the foreign business dealings of his son Hunter and lied about it, but have provided no direct evidence to prove those claims, which the White House has denied.
Tuesday’s shameless White House propaganda was made possible thanks to the backing of advertisers such as IBM (on ABC), Progressive (on CBS), and Subaru (on NBC). Follow the links to see their contact information at the MRC’s Conservatives Fight Back page.
To see the relevant transcripts from September 13, click here (for ABC), here (for CBS), and here (for NBC).
