10 Media Hack Factories That Pooh-Poohed The Biden-Burisma Scandal As A Conspiracy Theory
The head of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, who paid Hunter Biden handsomely to sit on the company’s board, told an FBI source he has 17 recordings proving he was “coerced” into giving the Bidens millions in return for Joe Biden getting rid of a Ukrainian prosecutor who had been investigating Burisma, according to an explosive FBI document Sen. Chuck Grassley made public on Thursday.
The four-page form documents testimony from a trusted confidential human source (CHS) based on conversations with Burisma chief Mykola Zlochevsky. In the source’s telling, Zlochevsky told the CHS he had 17 recordings, including two of Joe Biden, that prove he “was somehow coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired” after he hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
A scandal involving our now-president selling out his country for foreign dollars is nothing less than earth-shattering, but the biggest scandal of all is the coverup being run by everyone from the Justice Department and FBI to the compromised corporate press.
In any country with a free press that sees itself as a government watchdog and not a government lapdog, this would be a news cycle to make Watergate look like a case of stolen lollipops. Instead, the explosive developments have been making their way to Americans directly from the mouths of brave whistleblowers and in documents pried from FBI fingers by Congress. For good reason, Grassley didn’t give the FD-1023 form to gatekeepers at The New York Times or The Washington Post; he released it straight to the American public.
Why? Because the corporate media have spent years actively trying to shut the story down, in service of the Biden dynasty. Here are some of the best examples of media hackery about the Burisma-Biden scandal that aged like fine milk.
1. The New York Times
In October 2019, Davey Alba in The New York Times called the allegation that “while Mr. Biden was vice president, he pushed to have Ukraine’s top prosecutor removed for investigating a company connected to Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma” a “prominent falsehood.”
The Times admitted Biden pushed for the prosecutor’s firing but insisted “there is no evidence he did so to benefit Hunter Biden or the oligarch who owns Burisma.” The Times also chastised then-President Donald Trump for calling foul on the Bidens’ suspicious Burisma connections, and characterized Trump’s decision to question the Ukrainian president about the Bidens’ dealings as a “crisis.”
2. The Washington Post
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius insisted Hunter’s shady association with Burisma “isn’t a scandal about his father, as the Trump campaign claims, but part of a personal tragedy for the vice president’s son, compounded by this week’s dissemination of what looks like disinformation about Joe Biden’s role.”
Ignatius concluded that “the notion that the Burisma affair undermines Joe Biden’s case to be president is, as he would say, malarkey.”
3. The New Yorker
Jane Mayer of The New Yorker derided what she called “a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine” in a 2019 piece.
Under the headline “The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine,” she promised to demonstrate “How a conservative dark-money group that targeted Hillary Clinton in 2016 spread the discredited story that may lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment.”
4. The Intercept
“Republican Conspiracy Theory About a Biden Scandal in Ukraine Is ‘Absolute Nonsense,’” wrote Robert Mackey in The Intercept in 2019. He cited a Ukrainian “anti-corruption activist” to counter the accusation that Biden got prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired “to derail an investigation he was leading into a Ukrainian gas company that the vice president’s son, Hunter, was paid to advise.”
“[T]he false nature of the allegation about [Biden’s] role in Ukraine won’t stop Trump and his supporters from treating it like a major scandal,” Mackey fretted.
5. CNN
CNN “fact-checked” Trump for his assertions “that Joe Biden was improperly trying to help Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, when Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire the country’s prosecutor general.”
“[T]here are significant holes in Trump’s story. Some of his allegations have been false. Others have been missing important context,” CNN blubbered.
6. NBC News
“Senate Republicans aim to turn Biden-Burisma conspiracy theories into 2020’s Benghazi,” wrote Kurt Bardella for NBC News, calling the story a “baseless political scandal” that Republicans were “engineering.”
“Republicans claimed that Joe Biden pushed to remove Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to protect Hunter Biden from an investigation into allegations of corruption at Burisma,” he continued. “But there has never been any evidence that the elder Biden acted inappropriately.”
7. ABC News
Even after news broke of the existence of the FD-1023 with its allegations, ABC News kept running cover for the Biden family business. In a section titled “The unproven Biden bribery claim,” ABC’s Lucien Bruggeman simply regurgitated talking points from congressional Democrats and the Biden White House without substantively responding to the FD-1023’s assertions that “a foreign national who brokered the alleged $10 million bribe had made 17 audio recordings of his discussions with the Bidens.”
8. Slate
“’Tis the Season to Debunk Your Family’s Hunter Biden Conspiracy Theories,” Molly Olmstead wrote for Slate in December 2022.
“It’s fair to say (to Uncle Bob, or whoever else needs to hear it) that claims that Joe Biden protected Burisma to safeguard his son’s interests are politically motivated, and constitute misinformation,” she continued.
9. The Daily Beast
“Trump’s Big Lie About Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and Ukraine Falls Apart,” headlined a September 2019 piece in The Daily Beast by Casey Michel. Michel reassured his readers that ackshully, Biden strong-arming Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who had been investigating Burisma was an example of how “Biden did the right thing, no matter the personal cost.” Because Shokin wasn’t doing enough to root out corruption and his investigation into Burisma had stalled, getting rid of him was really not doing Burisma a favor, the talking point went — despite the fact that Shokin reportedly claimed he backed off of investigating Burisma because of threats from the United States in 2015, roughly a year before he was fired.
10. USA Today
“Fact check: Biden leveraged $1B in aid to Ukraine to oust corrupt prosecutor, not to help his son,” USA Today insisted in October 2020.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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