After CNN earlier this week attempted to accuse one of its competitors of being “obsessed” with Hunter Biden, we thought we’d take a look at CNN’s own past fixation on the son of a President: Donald Trump Jr.
It’s not exactly news that the liberal cable network devoted far more air time to Trump Jr. than they have to Hunter Biden, but the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
During the Mueller investigation, Donald Trump Jr. was a hot topic on CNN: be it his phone calls, his emails, or his twitter exchanges, all of his communications were treated as self-evidently suspicious by the network’s curious hosts. By contrast, they were positively bored by anything relating to Hunter Biden. See the video below for a few choice examples of CNN’s double standard:
In July of 2017, CNN ran numerous lengthy reports about Trump Jr.’s “bombshell emails” from June of the previous year. A few months later, when those emails had proven fruitless, CNN instead shifted to caring about his Twitter messages. In November of 2017, New Day host Chris Cuomo excitedly announced: “Trump Jr. released the Twitter messages. The timing of the exchanges is raising a lot of eyebrows!”
When those too turned up nothing of note, 2018 saw the “bombshell report about the original emails” back in the spotlight. Another dud.
Fast forward to 2019, and the network had begun hoping that perhaps Trump Jr.’s phone records might provide some proof of his father’s non-existent collusion efforts. On January 31 of that year, Congressional correspondent Manu Raju briefed viewers of The Lead about a handful of phone calls the then-President’s son had made to unlisted numbers. Yet again a thread was pulled, and again nothing unraveled.
Eventually Bob Mueller concluded his investigation, having uncovered no proof that President Trump had conspired with Russians to steal an election. Years of investigative fervor, all for naught.
But when Hunter Biden began appearing in headlines about his potential role in a family corruption scandal, eyes quickly glazed over at CNN. Most of the network’s reporting on the current President’s son has come laced with lazy dismissals and assertions that “there is no evidence” that either Biden “did anything wrong.”
If we’re going to nitpick, claims of “no evidence” are most certainly false. There is plenty of evidence of potential wrongdoing — for example, Hunter’s own admission that he would not have landed landed his $50,000 per month gig on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma if not for his last name. That is, by definition, circumstantial evidence.
What the allegations against the President and his son lack are definitive proof.
In Trump Jr.’s case, CNN’s reporters went looking for the proof themselves. They turned over practically every stone in D.C., and even when there was nothing new to discuss, they were more than happy to rehash panel discussions about months-old revelations. But when it comes to Hunter Biden, those same “journalists” instead have folded their arms and demanded that proof be laid before them. Until then, they tell us, they cannot be made to care.
