The collusion of mainstream media and Big Tech to censor The Post’s Hunter Biden story now is laid bare in leaked recordings of CNN’s news meetings from the time.
CNN boss Jeff Zucker is heard instructing his staff to downplay the bombshell story that implicated Joe Biden in a shady foreign influence-peddling scheme, according to audio released Tuesday by undercover news outlet Project Veritas.
On the morning of Oct. 14, the day we published an email from Hunter’s abandoned laptop in which a top executive from corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma thanked Hunter for arranging a meeting with his then-VP father, CNN political director David Chalian is heard telling Zucker and his underlings that the news network would not cover the story.
“Obviously, we’re not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden,” said Chalian. “We’ll just continue to report out this is the very stuff that the president was impeached over . . . that Senate committees looked at and found nothing wrong in Joe Biden’s interactions with Ukrainians.”
Chalian, who oversees all of CNN’s political coverage, was not being straight with his colleagues.
This was new evidence reflecting on Joe Biden’s integrity, suggesting that despite repeated denials, he had met with an executive of the company that was paying his wayward son up to $83,000 a month to sit on its board, at a time when Burisma was looking for favors from the US government and he was vice president.
This was the first concrete link between Joe and his family’s shady foreign business deals, and there was much more to come over the next few days, all ignored or pooh-poohed by CNN in a naked bid to protect the Biden campaign from legitimate scrutiny.
Most of the rest of the media followed suit. Twitter locked The Post’s account for two weeks and Facebook throttled our audience reach.
What made our story all the more compelling that first day was the feeble response from Joe’s campaign. Initially, they said there was no record of any such meeting on his “official schedule,” but finally admitted that an “informal” meeting with Burisma may have occurred.
On no planet is that not news.
But CNN proved that it is not the nonpartisan purveyor of straight news it once was, before reality TV huckster Zucker took over and turned it into a tool of the anti-Trump Resistance, leading the way for other media.
“Hey, Jeff, it’s just David on the Burisma story,” David Vigilante, general counsel for CNN, is heard telling Zucker, according to the Project Veritas recording.
“We should be awfully careful about that obviously, but I do think there’s a media story in what in the world are [the New York Times’] Maggie Haberman and [Politico’s] Jake Sherman doing retweeting that story?”
Sherman soon saw his error, apologized profusely and deleted his tweet: “My goal was not to spread [the story]. My goal was to raise questions.”
Not allowed.
You see here how CNN acts as a sheepdog to shame and coerce reporters from other organizations to stick to the approved narrative.
Two days after we broke the Hunter story, CNN moved to traducing it, wheeling out James Clapper, one of the contributors it pays to push the debunked conspiracy theory that President Trump was a Russian agent. Clapper told CNN our story was “textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft.”
The following week, Hunter’s ex-business partner Tony Bobulinksi held a press conference and produced documents claiming Joe Biden had actively engaged in his family scheme to make millions of dollars from Communist China. He revealed that Joe Biden was the “big guy” referred to in a Hunter email who was to receive a 10 percent cut of one of the Chinese deals.
Here was further evidence that Joe had been lying about his involvement in his family’s shady business.
But the day after the Bobulinski story broke, at CNN’s 9 a.m. news conference call, Zucker again issued orders to bury it.
“On the Breitbart, New York Post, Fox News rabbit hole of Hunter Biden, which I don’t think anybody outside of that world understood last night, the Wall Street Journal reported that their review of all corporate records showed no role for Joe Biden on the Chinese deal.
“And yes, I do put more credibility in the Wall Street Journal than I do in the New York Post.”
And that was how the story was killed.
But failing to find corporate records showing a role for Joe Biden doesn’t make the story moot. Even if that particular China deal was never finalized doesn’t mean it was not planned. And whether or not Joe’s name appears on corporate records does not refute the story, either, since we have published texts and emails in which Hunter tells his partners to keep his father’s involvement quiet.
The Journal’s story was an excuse for the rest of the media to bury the whole affair for the last two weeks of the election campaign, failing even to ask Joe Biden questions.
A measure of how deep this story was buried can be seen in a poll last week from the Media Research Center that found 45 percent of Biden voters had never heard of the Hunter scandal, and 9.4 percent said they would not have voted for Joe had they known.
As an addendum, you may not know that two weeks after the election, an ongoing Senate inquiry into Hunter and his business dealings released new findings that identify $6 million transferred from a Communist Chinese government entity to a business associate of Hunter.
This story is even more important now that Joe is president-elect. If he lied about his family’s lucrative business dealings with China, it makes him vulnerable to extortion.
This is what used to be called news.