Hunter biden

Unanswered questions for Big Tech

From our US edition

It’s been a full week since the New York Post published their first story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is currently in FBI possession. The purported contents of the laptop which were released selectively in several news stories by the Post include private emails and photographs. These have yet to be proven as forgeries or inauthentic. Swiftly cable news pundits and liberal-leaning journalists began wondering whether the laptop, the repair service in Delaware, or the source of the leak to the Post were part of a foreign campaign to influence the presidential election. But the DNI, FBI, DOJ and State Department all said there was no evidence to support those theories.

new york post big tech

Get ready for Russiagate 2.0 if Trump wins

From our US edition

If Trump is reelected, prepare for Russiagate 2.0. This time it'll be even crazier. The Hunter Biden story has given the President's opponents an excuse to do what they do best: shout 'Russia' at any allegation they don't like. It sounds insane that they would double down on a strategy that has failed so miserably before. The Democratic party's obsession with the Trump-Russia conspiracy alienated average Americans and with very little payoff. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's multi-year investigation indicated that there was insufficient evidence to show collusion between Trump and Moscow, though it did find that Russia had attempted to hack the election.

russiagate

Will we ever know the truth about Russiagate?

From our US edition

Writing in mid-October, anno domini 2020, it is sobering to speculate that when the results of a certain upcoming political contest are finally decided, an item that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly four years might be about to evaporate without trace. I refer, of course, to that great long-running entertainment, the Trump-Russia Collusion Delusion. As I write, the latest morceaux are the revelations from John Ratcliffe, the newly installed Director of National Intelligence, to the effect that Russian intelligence believed that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services’ during the 2016 presidential campaign. Why? Typical campaign dirty tricks, in part.

russiagate

Behind the social-media blackout of Biden family corruption

From our US edition

Hunter Biden is now the subject of multiple stories involving serious corruption. Whether he committed any crimes is a question for prosecutors and the courts. Whether he was paid handsomely for his family’s political clout is a question for voters.You wouldn’t know that from ABC's pathetic town hall with his father Joe Biden on Thursday night. They spoke with him for 90 minutes and didn’t ask a single question about the shocking emails published by the New York Post. That’s either journalistic malpractice or public-relations work. After all, the emails raise profound questions that the candidate needs to answer. They appear to show his son, Hunter, repeatedly using his last name to fill his pockets.Hunter’s family is his only asset.

hunter biden

Oh, there’s Hunter…

From our US edition

Res ipse loquitur. What a card Joe Biden is. Here he is to Fox News a year ago: 'I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.' Ha, ha, ha. Peter Schweizer exploded that bald faced lie in his film Riding the Dragon and elsewhere. And just today the New York Post prints an email captured from Hunter Biden’s computer. It’s from a Ukrainian businessman named Vadym Pozharskyi, who in 2015 was an adviser to Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter sat. Hunter had no experience in the energy sector. But his dad was vice president of the United States and apparently that was worth the $50,000 per month that Hunter collected in fees.

hunter biden

Trump was his own worst enemy in the first debate

From our US edition

The first presidential debate in Cleveland was a disaster, to put it bluntly. After 90 minutes of crosstalk, petty jabs, and 'c'mon man’s it's hard to believe many undecided voters will come out of the night with a clear candidate in mind. Most will be begging for presidential politics to stop rather than racing to the polls. In fact, judging from social media, many undecided voters are already saying this debate convinced them not to vote at all. President Trump's performance was perhaps his worst in a major debate so far because he squandered numerous opportunities to let Biden hang himself with his own words.

debate

Why is the media downplaying the Hunter Biden story?

From our US edition

Remember the Ukraine impeachment drama? No? Cockburn can hardly blame you. But believe it or not, less than nine months ago, the Ukraine ‘scandal’ was supposed to be the greatest in American history. Donald Trump was impeached. Mitt Romney gave some embarrassing speech.Not even a year later, it’s the story never happened. Neither impeachment nor Ukraine were mentioned a single time at the Democratic convention. The party isn’t just tired with the story. They seem earnest about keeping it dead.But now, thanks to the US Senate, they’ll need an assist from the press.A newly released report by the Senate Intelligence Committee resurrects the Ukraine story by reviving focus on Joe Biden’s ne’er-do-well son Hunter Biden.

hunter biden
impeachment

Impeachment is a bad bet for everyone

From our US edition

Is Donald Trump going to be impeached? Nancy Pelosi is not giving herself much room to maneuver: once a Democratic-led committee of inquiry is assembled, its results are a foregone conclusion. It will recommend impeachment — to fail to do so would only strengthen the president and make Democrats look stupid on the eve of an election. As things are, Pelosi evidently found the pressure from within her party already too great to withstand: her sense of the political risks of impeachment was outweighed by her sense of the danger to her own position from continuing to resist it. So the die is cast. Perhaps this tells us, too, that Joe Biden’s support for the Democratic nomination is dwindling behind the scenes.

Sleepy no more: Joe Biden unmasked

From our US edition

It was like an Elvis sighting. ‘WHERE’S HUNTER,’ Trump kept bellowing in his tweets. Well, there was the recently reclusive 50-year-old lobbyist Hunter Biden, the black sheep of the family, who almost brought down his pappy’s campaign with his Ukraine shenanigans. He looked youthful with his hair slicked back, dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie, appearing at the Democratic convention together his sister Ashley to endorse him for president. Hunter probably will retreat back into seclusion for the duration of the campaign, but it was a smart move to feature him so prominently, a version of the courtroom tactic of getting the unpleasant facts before the jury before the prosecution can air them.

joe biden

Biden’s mental frailty makes him a Teflon candidate

From our US edition

President Trump gets away with a lot because much of the world thinks he’s a buffoon. Former vice president Joe Biden gets away with a lot because much of the world thinks he’s demented. Welcome to American politics in 2020. Trump may or may not be a buffoon; Biden may or may not be senile — there’s been perhaps too much speculation about his mental health. What is certain is that he gives the strong impression of being a doddery old codger. Perversely, in what Gore Vidal called the United States of Amnesia, that could be the key to his success. You can’t really blame a man who has lost his mind. He can’t be that bad, after all, if he doesn’t know what he is doing.

joe biden mental frailty

Pete Buttigieg isn’t going to win

From our US edition

I see that various pundits are competing to write the political epitaph for Joe 'son-of-a-bitch' Biden. That’s entirely understandable. It’s been clear for some time that Biden is on the threshold of senility, and it is only my charitable disposition that prevents me from speculating about which side of the threshold he occupies. And then there was the desolation wrought by the Democrats’ impeachment entertainment. From the start, it was clear that the chief casualty of that amateur theatrics was going to be Joe Biden and his sniff, sniff, sniffing son Hunter. Everyone who is not Bill Kristol understood that the bullet of that purely partisan hit job would miss President Trump.

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The Democrats’ dirty secret? They don’t want witnesses

From our US edition

The Senate leaders have stated their positions clearly and constantly. Chuck Schumer, who leads the Democratic minority, is demanding that John Bolton testify. Mitch McConnell, who leads the Republicans’ narrow majority, responds that the Senate already has enough evidence to vote. If more was needed, the House should have gotten it when it had the chance. Anyway, the House managers have repeatedly boasted they have 'overwhelming evidence'. The president’s lawyers add that, if any witnesses are called, they want to call some, too. They want to hear from former Vice President Biden, his son Hunter, the whistleblower whose complaint started the impeachment, and Rep. Schiff and his staff, who apparently worked with the whistleblower.

witnesses

Why John Bolton won’t win his war on Trump

From our US edition

The first sentence of the New York Times report on John Bolton’s tell-all memoir about his time in the Trump White House contains a bombshell — but not the one that everybody thinks. The real revelation is that it suggests that President Trump is innocent of the charges on which Democrats are trying to impeach him. Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt reported on Sunday that Trump 'wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

bolton

Headlines of the coming year

From our US edition

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. January to March ‘Caucasians Are The Best’ Remark By Biden At Iowa Caucus Renews Concerns Over Age Declaring An ‘End To These Endless Security Agreements,’ Trump Tweet Announces US Will Withdraw From Nato ‘Why Do We Need To Defend Germany? Did They Defend Us At Normandy? NINE!’ New Whistleblower Bombshell: $391 Million Military Aid To Ukraine Conditioned On Start Of Construction Of Trump Tower Kiev Trump Tweet Hints At Displeasure With Lawyer ‘Rudy Is A Great Guy But He Is Making Trump Look Evil And Should Stop Going On TV NOW!!!

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The wages of Trump fixation

From our US edition

Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: 'If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.' In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

trump fixation boot

The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is a doomed and desperate time-buying ploy

From our US edition

Oh no! The walls are closing in again on Trump! We’ve reached a 'tipping point.' This time, finally, at last, we have the fatal 'bombshell' that will destroy him. The testimony of Bill Taylor, Deep State apparatchik and acting Ambassador to Ukraine, has given 'devastating', 'explosive' testimony to Adam Schiff. They’ve certainly got Trump this time. An establishment lifer with deep ties to Burisma, the corrupt energy company that was so generous to Hunter Biden, has said that Trump insisted on a quid in the form of probing cokehead Hunter and his dad, Joe, in exchange for the quo of $400 million in military aid. Or was pelf the quid and the investigation of the Joe and Hunter show the quo? Our experts are working on untangling that.

impeachment

Ukraine returns to the front of the Get Trump cavalcade

From our US edition

Spin the magic wheel: click, click, click, click, click — click — click: Ukraine! We’re all going to Ukraine! Another week, another pseudo-scandal fomented by anonymous anti-Trump actors in the 'intelligence community' and fanned into attention-grabbing headlines by an impatient, irresponsible press. Can anyone keep them all straight? They rise like noxious bubbles from the cauldron of deep-state anti-Trump sentiment, only to pass away almost immediately, carried off by their own insubstantiality and the contrasting bright-light series of real achievements on the part of the Trump administration.

ukraine

Kiev won’t chicken out over Trump’s desired Biden probe

From our US edition

For several years Donald Trump has depicted himself as a kind of Roger Thornhill, the advertising executive in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest played by Cary Grant. Thornhill tells his secretary at the outset of the film that in his line of work there is no such thing as a lie only 'expedient exaggeration' and soon gets swept up in the machinations of the Cold War deep state as a gang of thugs mistakes him for someone named George Kaplan. An indignant Thornhill eventually manages to rescue himself, but Trump seems to get further enmeshed in his ongoing deep state saga by the week, and, in contrast to Thornhill, much of it is his own fault.

kiev donald trump

The problem of Beijing Biden

From our US edition

Imagine a presidential primary campaign candidate who is far ahead in the polls. Now, imagine that candidate leading in a diverse array of early states – Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. This candidate is the most famous in his field. He has over four decades in the limelight. He routinely makes remarks that are offensive. Women suspect he is a sexual predator. The commentariat insist he’s finished. This politician is said to be out of step with his party’s base: his values don’t reflect theirs. Oh, and this candidate would be the oldest nominee in his party’s history, and America’s oldest elected president. This person is Donald Trump in 2016. He’s also Joe Biden in 2020.

beijing biden