Legacy media and longtime politics reporters are increasingly reporting on scandals that rocked the Democratic Party ahead of the November election, shining additional light on political issues that Republicans had long spotlighted and railed against.
“A full 4½ years after The Post’s bombshell series on Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling schemes, The New York Times has deigned to take an interest in the former First Son’s corruption,” the New York Post’s editorial board wrote in a piece last week slamming the New York Times for reporting on Biden corruption allegations years after other outlets had already uncovered reported details.
“We’d say the Times’ willingness to at long last cover this comes better late than never, but it only published the story now that it doesn’t remotely matter anymore,” the editorial board continued.
The New York Times declared in an article published on Friday that former first son Hunter Biden “sought support from the State Department” to aid his former employer, Ukrainian energy company Burisma, while his father served as vice president. Hunter Biden allegedly leveraging his last name and father’s political status in the U.S. has long been criticized by conservatives, who have alleged that Hunter and his father engaged in influence-peddling through Burisma.
BIDEN’S CLAIM TO HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF HUNTER’S BUSINESS DEALINGS IS BECOMING HARDER TO MAINTAIN
Hunter Biden was paid millions of dollars while serving on the board of Burisma after joining the company as legal counsel in the spring of 2014 before being elevated to the Board of Directors later that year.
The Bidens were accused by Republicans of having “coerced” the Burisma CEO into paying them millions of dollars in exchange for their help in getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company fired during the Obama administration.
The 46th president denied any involvement in his son’s business dealings.
Biden issued his son a sweeping 10-year pardon before exiting the Oval Office in January that protects Hunter Biden from offenses he “has committed or may have committed” from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024. Alleged Biden family influence-peddling has echoed from the halls of Congress to social media channels on X, but legacy outlets and left-wing media outlets often didn’t give a platform to the allegations.
Jonathan Turley, Fox News’ contributor and Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, published an op-ed for Fox News Digital on Sunday remarking on the NYT’s piece that was published years after other outlets and experts investigated alleged Biden family influence-peddling.
“For years, some of us have written about the Biden family’s multimillion-dollar influence-peddling operation and the Justice Department’s refusal to charge Hunter Biden with being an unregistered foreign agent. Now, years later, The New York Times has found evidence suggesting that the former president’s son was acting as a foreign agent as early as the Obama administration, when his father was vice president,” Turley wrote.
Media veterans and legacy outlets have leaned into reporting on and investigating a handful of other scandals and political news that conservatives had long sounded the alarm on, including that the coronavirus likely originated out of a lab in China, as well as on President Biden’s mental decline in the lead-up to the election last year.
PUBLIC WAS MISLED BY THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY ABOUT COVID ORIGINS, NY TIMES COLUMNIST ARGUES
The New York Times ran a column last month claiming the scientific community “badly misled” the public in an effort to suppress the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, even after the paper’s own science writer called the theory “racist.”
“We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” the March 16 piece published by NYT columnist and Princeton sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci, argued that the scientific community long suspected COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab, but purposefully “hid or understated crucial facts,” to mislead the public about the lab’s “terrifyingly lax” safety precautions.
“We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story,” Tufekci wrote.
The Trump administration’s CIA reported earlier this year that the lab leak was the likely origin of the COVID-19 virus, which had previously been passed off by media outlets and scientists as a likely conspiracy theory.
The New York Times defended that it had reported on the lab leak theory multiple times across the years, including in 2021, when approached for comment by Fox News Digital on the recent articles on both Hunter Biden and the lab leak theory.
“The New York Times has intensely pursued every theory and lead on the origins of Covid-19, documented the political debate, funding, influence, and shifts in thinking among the scientific community, and reported on China’s censorship campaign that has stifled the search for truth. The Times has helped readers navigate the coronavirus pandemic through independent, verified reporting, and any insinuation that we have not thoroughly pursued leads is false,” a NYT spokesperson said.
And a newly released book by longtime D.C. reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” investigates Biden’s mental decline in the lead-up to the general election, calling him a “shell of himself.”
“All of them,” Parnes told Vanity Fair of who in Biden’s inner circle is most to blame for covering up his mental decline when he was in office. “It’s pretty remarkable how they kept him very closed off. He was a shell of himself. When he entered the White House, he was so, so different from the man who I covered as vice president, a guy who would hold court in the Naval Observatory with reporters until the wee hours.”
“We’d been watching Biden’s decline for a long period of time and, honestly, thought he had lost his fastball some when he was running in 2020. And it was still so shocking to see the leader of the free world so bereft of coherent thought,” Allen added of Biden’s mental decline.
Biden’s mental acuity had been under conservatives’ microscope since before the 2020 election, with concerns heightening in February 2024 when Special Counsel Robert Hur, who was investigating Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents as vice president, announced he would not recommend criminal charges against Biden for possessing classified materials after his vice presidency, calling Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
JONATHAN TURLEY: BIDEN DOJ BEHIND EVEN THE TIMES IN PURSUING ALLEGED HUNTER CORRUPTION
The report renewed scrutiny over Biden’s mental fitness, which rose to a fever pitch in June 2024 after the president’s first and only presidential debate against Trump. Biden’s debate performance was seen as an abject failure, with traditional allies soon joining conservatives in their concern over the president’s health in the context of encouraging Biden to pass the mantle to a younger generation of U.S. leaders.
Biden dropped out of the race in July, and shortly thereafter endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s presidential candidate. Harris ultimately failed to rally enough support to defeat Trump at the polls in November.
Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor and longtime Trump critic, has also touted his upcoming book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” which is also anticipated to detail Biden’s mental decline and the alleged cover-up by members of the Democratic Party.
Fox News Digital reached out to Biden’s post-presidential office but did not immediately receive a reply.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller, Gabriel Hays, and David Spector contributed to this report.