In mid-January, a hullabaloo broke out about an application form Hunter Biden signed in 2018 to seek a rental in California. It listed the address on his driver's license to Joe Biden's house in Wilmington, Delaware - the same house where they just found classified documents. The form also suggested the "monthly rent" on his "current residence" was $49,910.
My first joke to co-workers was how high was Hunter when he filled out this form? It sounds ridiculous he was paying $49,000 a month in rent for a residence. When conservatives started asking questions about why Hunter Biden was paying almost $50,000 a month at his father's house with classified documents in the garage, you could be confident the liberal "fact-checkers" would leap to defend the Bidens, and they did.
PolitiFact and The Washington Post each went after Fox News, the Daily Caller and other conservative journalists for jumping to conclusions -- when they wanted no conclusions. You can easily find that PolitiFact has never evaluated any statement from the mouth or the pen of Hunter Biden. Glenn Kessler at the Post counted 30,573 false or misleading statements from Donald Trump, but he doesn't count Biden lies. It's all defense for Hunter Biden, and no offense.
Straightening out Hunter's bizarre and erroneous application is important. It turns out the $49,910 "monthly" rent figure was a quarterly amount at the House of Sweden building in Georgetown, just across Rock Creek from the Kennedy Center, for his influence-peddling with the Chinese. The "fact-checkers" didn't note Hunter repeatedly lied on the document, including when he was asked if he's ever been convicted of a crime or had a charge expunged from his record. In 1988, Hunter was arrested for drug possession and the record was expunged.
Now Joseph Simonson and Andrew Kerr at the Washington Free Beacon found some additional details. Hunter had directed his assistant Katie Dodge to fill out the form and gave her only 45 minutes to complete it. Then there's the big twist: Hunter Biden was attempting to aid another dissolute Biden - his cousin Caroline, the daughter of Joe's brother James. The rental application form was an attempt to gain a luxury apartment for Caroline, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup with a stolen credit card. She wanted to serve her probation in California. She would also fail the "never been charged" question.
The application was not approved. On top of that, Caroline Biden wouldn't accept a job there from a Biden donor with an $85,000-a-year salary, with a guaranteed 10% bonus and stock options. She called that "below minimum wage in California after taxes" and demanded a job for no "less than $180,000." Pampered heirs abound in the Biden family, and it's not surprising they supported each other.
Text messages from the laptop show Caroline repeatedly referred to Hunter as her "partner in crime," and complained "our family's sick" and she had "no relationship with my nuclear family," since "the majority of my family thinks I'm nuts."
In one reply, Hunter told Caroline not to worry about the job thing. "You are crazy im crazy and two crazies make ... double the cray I guess. It'll be fun we may just blow up a house and rob banks together."
None of this juicy messaging is grist for The Washington Post or PolitiFact. They don't seem to be interested in what has happened with Caroline Biden, or James Biden, or Frank Biden, or Ashley Biden -- unless, of course, they are wronged by a conservative journalist.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.