When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke last week, the Biden campaign strategy seemed pretty clear:
- Don't comment on any of the specifics
- Call it "a smear" that's been debunked
- Run and hide
That's what they did, and they figured they could play out the clock and wait for it to blow over with the complicit cooperation of the DC/New York media.
It might have worked, were it not for clueless Adam Schiff.
Adam Schiff couldn't help himself. He was asked to go on national television as the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and he jumped at the opportunity. His ego is so gigantic that he couldn't resist being a part of this developing story.
Then, he made quite possibly the biggest blunder of this entire campaign: He called the entire Hunter Biden story a "Russian disinformation" campaign.
And that, my friends, screwed Joe Biden's entire exit strategy from this scandal.
Once Biden finally emerges from seclusion, he is going to try to stick with the same story he had last year when this story first popped up. At the time, his story was very consistent, and the mainstream media never challenged it because... of course, they didn't.
Newsweek detailed Biden's talking points from late last December when he was asked by CNN's Anderson Cooper and again when he was asked by Telemundo.
During the Democratic debate on October 15, 2019, Biden was asked why Hunter was allowed to make money in Ukraine while he was serving as vice president.
Instead of answering that question directly, Biden stuck to his script.
"My son did nothing wrong... I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine. No one has indicated I have. We always kept everything separate," Biden said.
"My son did nothing wrong." Remember this as it pertains to Schiff. We will put this all together in a moment.
More from Newsweek: "There is nothing he—there is nothing to .?.?. that he did anything that was illegal. Nothing," Biden said, according to a transcript of the interview with Telemundo's Jose Diaz-Balart in December 2019.
"My son did nothing wrong," and "nothing he did was illegal."
Got it? OK, back to Schiff.
"We know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin," Schiff said on CNN. "That's been clear for well over a year now that they've been pushing this false narrative about this vice president and his son."
Rep. Adam Schiff says he’s concerned that he hasn’t “gotten much from the intelligence community” on Russia peddling disinformation.
— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) October 16, 2020
“At times, some of the leadership, like Director Ratcliffe, not been very forthcoming in terms of the intelligence on the Russian threat.” pic.twitter.com/JhcVYlCgcf
The Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, the Secretary of State, corroborating emails, and anyone else with actual, first-hand knowledge of this story have debunked Schiff's claim outright, but Schiff's claim as part of the Democrats' response to the story hamstrings Joe Biden in a way his campaign must be fuming over.
Think this through for a moment - an activity Schiff clearly did not engage in.
If you're Vladimir Putin and you are engaged in a disinformation campaign to sabotage the Biden campaign to help your buddy Donald Trump, you utilize all the powers at your disposal to plant a story against Biden's son, painting a picture of the son enriching himself on his father's name and position. You go through all that trouble to fabricate emails and plant the story.
Would you go through all that trouble to plant anything other than a story that is clearly criminally corrupt on the face of it?
Would a Russian disinformation campaign plant anything in the American political system that displayed anything other than a highly corrupt scandal that would spell the doom of the Biden candidacy?
The answer is obvious.
If this story is "Russian disinformation," according to Schiff, the propagandists in the Kremlin would ensure that the scandal would be a real doozy. Otherwise, why bother?
So Schiff claiming this story is "Russian disinformation" implies that it would be a real problem if it wasn't disinformation. And that's how he screwed Joe.
Joe Biden always had the escape hatch of "this thing may seem unseemly, and in retrospect, perhaps Hunter shouldn't have done it just for appearance's sake, but he did nothing wrong and he did nothing illegal."
Now, that story won't work without exposing Schiff as the blowhard liar that he is.
It's one or the other: Either it's a Russian disinformation campaign or Schiff was talking out of his butt, the emails are real, but they do not rise to the level of criminal behavior. It can't be both.
It will be fascinating to see how Biden plays this. Either way, we can all agree: Adam Schiff is a lying moron.