Hiding Biden: How Democrats And Media Crafted The First Impeachment To Help Defeat Trump In 2020
A news blackout may have helped propel Biden to victory, but questions regarding the Bidens have not gone away.
By Mark Hemingway
February 10, 2021
By the numbers, Joe Biden is president of the United States because he won the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by a combined total of some 43,000 votes.
But he also owes his victory to the groundwork laid by Democrats and their media allies one year before, during the first impeachment of Donald Trump over his supposedly strings-attached demand that the Ukrainian government investigate alleged corruption involving Biden’s son, Hunter.
The first impeachment failed to oust Trump from office, but it helped secure the White House for Biden. It shielded him from scrutiny, enabling him and his supporters to cast allegations during the campaign about dubious Biden family business ties as rehashed Trumpian conspiracy theories.
Biden’s razor-thin swing state victories might not have materialized if the Trump campaign had been able to gain traction from its October Surprise — a series of articles it helped orchestrate in the New York Post that reported information from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden suggesting corrupt foreign business deals that may have involved his father.
As many as 45 percent of Biden voters said they were unaware of Hunter’s financial scandals before the election. That’s likely because Democrats and much of the media discredited or did not report the accusations in the final weeks of the campaign — accusations that were bolstered after the election when Hunter admitted that he has been the subject of an ongoing federal corruption probe since 2018.
Once the Post ran its first laptop article on Oct. 14, Democrats and their allies immediately turned to the narrative they had long used against Trump: foreign interference. Without evidence save for the claims of Democrat partisans and anonymous official sources — like those commonly relied upon during the debunked Trump-Russia affair — the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico ran stories suggesting the laptop could be Russian disinformation. Joe Biden said the laptop was a “Russian plan†at the first presidential debate. The FBI, which was a main driver of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, added to the narrative when word was leaked that the bureau was investigating whether the laptop emails were Russian disinformation. Twitter and Facebook reacted by actively censoring the Hunter Biden story. Twitter went so far as to lock the New York Post out of its own account.
As the Senate takes up a second impeachment of Trump, Republican objections to the Democrats’ handling of the first go-round loom large. The record of those proceedings shows that they were conducted in a highly unusual manner. In retrospect, it seems clear that they were designed not just to target Trump — but to protect Biden.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/10/hiding-biden-how-democrats-and-media-crafted-the-first-impeachment-to-help-defeat-trump-in-2020/
