Last year New York Post reports about Biden family enrichment schemes were dismissed by old-media firms and suppressed by new-media firms. Old or new, the press corps was generally unwilling to allow voters to see the sordid reality of a candidate who was presenting himself as superior in character to the incumbent President. Now that Mr. Biden has been in the White House for eight months, will reporters be willing to act like reporters again?

So far a general media silence has been the response to a new Politico report seconding...

President Joe Biden in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus on Wednesday.

Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press

Last year New York Post reports about Biden family enrichment schemes were dismissed by old-media firms and suppressed by new-media firms. Old or new, the press corps was generally unwilling to allow voters to see the sordid reality of a candidate who was presenting himself as superior in character to the incumbent President. Now that Mr. Biden has been in the White House for eight months, will reporters be willing to act like reporters again?

So far a general media silence has been the response to a new Politico report seconding much of the New York Post’s 2020 reporting. If media folk become too embarrassed to ignore the story again, they will naturally be tempted to sell it as the sad tale of a troubled son whom a loving father tries to help but ultimately cannot control. But this time there’s no ignoring the presence of Joe Biden in the Washington access game.

Deep in a roundup column covering various news items, a team of Politico writers reports on the work of a colleague:

Ben Schreckinger’s “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” out today, finds evidence that some of the purported HUNTER BIDEN laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.
A person who had independent access to Hunter Biden’s emails confirmed he did receive a 2015 email from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden. The same goes for a 2017 email in which a proposed equity breakdown of a venture with Chinese energy executives includes the line, “10 held by H for the big guy?” (This person recalled seeing both emails, but was not in a position to compare the leaked emails word-for-word to the originals.)
MORE: Emails released by a Swedish government agency also match emails in the leaked cache, and two people who corresponded with Hunter Biden confirmed emails from the cache were genuine...
BACKGROUND: A former Hunter Biden business partner, TONY BOBULINSKI, said last year the “10 Held by H” email was genuine and referred to plans for Hunter to hold equity in the venture — which did not get off the ground — on behalf of his father. Biden’s campaign said he never considered going into business with his family.

The New York Post writes in an editorial:

While we appreciate the support, the truth is The Post’s reports always have been true... All of this information is out there. Yet the [New York Times] still called the laptop “unsubstantiated” last week (until it quietly corrected the story). And even as Politico credited its reporter, it added, “While the leak contains genuine files, it remains possible that fake material has been slipped in.”
What part? The pictures of Hunter smoking crack?
Schreckinger called the White House to check whether, as we reported, Joe Biden met Hunter for a dinner in April 2015 that included Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi. Biden’s team pointed him to a Washington Post “fact check” — which noted that Biden’s team had at first said there was “no record of such a meeting,” until they finally conceded that, yes, Joe did drop in on that dinner. The fact confirmed, the writer still concludes, haughtily, that there’s “less to the story than one might imagine.”
It’s the perfect example of how Democrats weaponize “fact checkers” to deflect criticism and enlist social media to censor articles. Nothing to see here! (See: the Wuhan lab theory.)
Consider the level of skepticism brought to bear here. Biden’s team lied to us but we’ll take them at their word that nothing of consequence happened at this dinner. Email after email, picture after picture are proved authentic from the laptop, but hey, maybe some of it is fake.

And hey, maybe buyers in the forthcoming sales of paintings by Hunter Biden won’t be interested at all in influencing Joe Biden. The Atlantic’s Casey Michel writes:

At some point in the coming weeks, hundreds of thousands of dollars will be funneled to the son of the sitting American president—and none of us will know anything about who sent the money, or where it originally came from, or why anyone chose to send it in the first place.
The transactions will nominally center on artwork created by Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. After spending years working alongside post-Soviet oligarchs—work that complicated his father’s anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine—Hunter has tossed on a new hat as an emerging “artist.” CNN has reported that his debut shows—one in Los Angeles, another in New York—will be held in late September, though the dates haven’t been announced (which may be because of the scrutiny the sales have received). Whenever they happen, Hunter will make the transition from unqualified oil-and-gas adviser to budding Basquiat—and will offer his artwork to the highest bidders his gallery can attract...
Hunter’s artwork isn’t bad, per se. A certain base-level skill is evident in the paintings. Sebastian Smee, the Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic for The Washington Post, told CNN that Biden was comparable to “a cafe painter. By which I mean, you see a certain kind of art in coffee shops, and some of it is OK and a lot of it is bad, and sometimes it’s surprisingly good. But you wouldn’t, unless you were related to the artist, spend more than $1,000 on it.”

Some of the works are expected to fetch more than 500 times that amount.

Last fall many media outlets dismissed and suppressed the New York Post reporting with the phony claim that it was the result of “Russian disinformation.” This column warned that if the Post reporting continued to hold up—as it has—some media folk might pivot and begin to downplay its significance. But how can one argue that revelations are so damning they must be part of a hostile foreign intelligence operation against the United States and then argue they aren’t damning at all?

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Coming to America

It’s hard to find a silver lining in the humanitarian crisis at the U.S. southern border, but at least it provides a daily reality check on anti-American propaganda from the political left. Hard proof of U.S. exceptionalism arrives every day in the sacrifices people make to arrive here.

Hannah Dreier of the Washington Post tweets:

Many of the Haitian migrants at the Texas border risked trekking through the Darien Gap jungle to get here. It’s one of the most dangerous journeys in the world, with drug traffickers, jaguars and venomous snakes.

Ms. Dreier links to a 2020 report for which Nadja Drost won a Pulitzer Prize:

The four Pakistani men, the first to arrive, were breathing hard. Most of the Cameroonians — there were 18 in all — made straight for a nearby river, their plastic passport holders dangling in the water as they doused their faces. Some stripped off their clothes and washed themselves. A woman named Sandra stood motionless, in obvious pain...
Sandra and her group had set out two days earlier from northwestern Colombia and had walked at least 15 miles on steep, unforgiving trails across a swath of land known as the Darién Gap. Straddling the border of Panama and Colombia, the Gap is approximately 10,000 square miles of dense, mountainous rainforest and marshland. There are no roads. The only way around it is by sea. It has long been considered one of the most dangerous regions in the world... This has not stopped thousands of migrants from Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean from traversing it in the hope that they will reach the United States.

Will the wokesters who spend all day trying to persuade U.S. children to hate their country ever understand why aspiring Americans brave the Darién Gap?

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web.)

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