You’ve got to hand it to the House Oversight Committee: they’ve done their homework on Joe Biden. For years, the narrative from both Biden and the media has been “Joe Biden never spoke with Hunter Biden about his business,” “Joe Biden never spoke with Hunter Biden’s business partners,” and “Joe Biden had no knowledge of his son’s business.” There was nothing ambiguous about it. But since Republicans took back the House and the Oversight Committee started investigating, they’ve been uncovering a trove of evidence pointing toward unprecedented corruption by the Biden family. This evidence includes records that they received millions of dollars from foreign sources via roughly twenty shell companies that only had one product to sell: Joe Biden’s influence.
While the White House and the media haven’t admitted that Joe Biden did anything wrong, they have conceded plenty by changing the narrative surrounding his contacts with Hunter Biden and the latter’s business associates. That’s a tacit admission that the House Oversight Committee has uncovered inculpatory evidence that is incontrovertible, their witness testimony was damning, and communications found on Hunter Biden’s laptop were, indeed, legitimate.
The White House story went from denying that Joe Biden ever spoke to Hunter about his business dealings or with his business partners to Joe Biden “was not in business with his son.” The goalposts had clearly been moved in response to the evidence.
Joe Biden even went from denying any involvement in Hunter Biden’s business deals to responding to a question about his participation on more than 20 phone calls with Hunter’s foreign business associates. Biden’s response, “I never talked business with anybody,” wasn’t actually a denial of what Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer testified. Joe Biden’s presence on the call was how Hunter was “selling the [Biden] brand” and getting the money flowing. Joe had just moved the goalposts.
And they’re being moved again. As legal expert Jonathan Turley notes, the media is now trying to peddle the narrative that Hunter Biden wasn’t selling access or influence to his father while he was vice president, but was actually selling the “illusion of influence.”
Related: Joe Biden’s Response to Devon Archer Testimony Is More Incriminating Than You Think
“When confronted with the transfer of millions and what Devon Archer now calls ‘categorically false’ denials by the President, the media seems positively exasperated like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland. It is insisting that the public should not assume that the influence sold was influence realized. They just need to believe in the Bidens and the ‘illusion of influence,’” Turley explains on his website. “The media has shown that it is possible to believe six impossible things to avoid the reality of the Biden scandal. Accordingly, the media now will accept that there was influence peddling but will treat it as ‘an illusion’ until a direct payment is shown to President Biden himself rather than his family.”
In essence, the media is expecting that the tangled web of shell companies, which were clearly set up to launder substantial amounts of foreign money before going into the accounts of various members of the Biden family, will be enough to keep them from admitting that Joe Biden never got a direct payment. But these shell companies generated no product or service other than the influence of Joe Biden.
This is the media’s play: to hope the public is ignorant enough of the details that they can make the claim that Hunter Biden was selling the illusion of access, but that Joe Biden never once performed a service in exchange for a hefty payment. That’s an impossible sell when Joe Biden is literally on camera bragging about how he got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired on behalf of Burisma, which employed his son and, according to sworn testimony by Devon Archer, directed Hunter to “call D.C.” to get that prosecutor fired.
