The Biden campaign lashed out at the New York Post after it reported Wednesday on emails showing that Hunter Biden arranged a meeting between an adviser to the Ukrainian company he worked for and then-Vice President Joe Biden, despite the elder Biden’s repeated denials he ever discussed business dealings with his son.
One email dated April 17, 2015, said, according to the Post: “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.”
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement to Politico:
Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump Administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.
The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani – whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported – claimed to have such materials. Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.
The Biden campaign’s statement is not a clear denial that the meeting ever happened — just that there was no meeting according to Biden’s “official schedules.”
The New York Post reported:
Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.
The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.
“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,” the email reads.
An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.
The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.
Meanwhile, those on the left discussed trying to suppress the story by not linking to it or sharing it.
Daniel Goldman, a lawyer who led the impeachment inquiry for the House Democrats, urged journalists that before they “go peddling” the story, they look into how the emails were obtained, suggesting that Russian agents gave it to Rudy Giuliani.
Before more journos go peddling this @nypost story, they should do some diligence on the cover story for how Giuliani got the “hard drive.” Giuliani has been conspiring with Russian agents for months, including someone the US says is actively trying to interfere in this election
— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) October 14, 2020
A former Democrat congressional staffer who now works for Facebook tweeted that Facebook was “reducing” the story’s distribution:
While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020
Some members of the media also tweeted about not wanting to share or amplify the Post‘s report:
No one should link to or share that NY Post ‘report’. You can discuss the obvious flaws and unanswerable questions in the report without amplifying what appears to be disinformation.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 14, 2020
I wish we still had journolist so we all could discuss the NY Post story privately without amplifying it
— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) October 14, 2020
The attempts to suppress the story’s distribution did not stop “New York Post” from trending on Twitter. In addition, “MAGAHaberman” and “Maggie” also trended on Twitter, after New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted out the story, angering many on the left.
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