Politics

Why is most of the media circling the wagons to protect Hunter Biden?

A foreign natural gas company brings a top US politician’s son onto its board, even though he has no relevant expertise, for $50,000 a month. The politician travels to that country and demands the removal of a prosecutor who’s investigating the company. That prosecutor then gets axed, and the investigation shut down.

Imagine the son was Eric Trump, and the politician Donald Trump. Would the media be dismissing it as nothing worth looking at, a “debunked” issue?

Yes, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor declared in May that he’d seen no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe or Hunter Biden. (Of course not: Again, the investigation got closed years ago.) Yet Yuriy Lut­senko also basically told Bloomberg News he didn’t want to see any such evidence: “I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of US presidential elections.”

And Volodymyr Zelensky took over as Ukraine’s new president after that Lutsenko interview — having won on a vow to end Ukraine’s endemic corruption. Was it really so strange that President Trump pushed the reformer to reopen the probe?

No, Trump hasn’t bathed himself in glory with his ham-handed pressure on Ukraine. Then again, Joe Biden’s boasts about getting that prosecutor axed also look clumsy. Then there’s Lutsenko’s claim that the Obama administration handed him a “do not prosecute” list in mid-2016, even as it was pushing Ukraine for dirt on Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager.

That evidence eventually helped send Manafort to prison. What might come of a full-on Hunter Biden probe?

All of which makes it somewhat astounding that the media has circled the wagons when it comes to Hunter’s behavior.

Particularly since the Ukraine affair isn’t unique: As Peter Schweitzer reported in The Post, Hunter’s private equity fund Rosemont Capital (co-founded with John Kerry stepson Chris Heinz) similarly exploited family connections — in name, at the very least — to grow to $2.4 billion under management. Notably, one breakthrough was an early meeting with China’s largest, most powerful government-funded leaders — the same day Joe Biden met with China’s president.

A second meeting with the same Beijing bigs came just two weeks after the then-veep opened the US-China Strategic Dialogue with top Chinese officials. And Hunter would close a billion-dollar Rosemont deal with the government-run Bank of China in 2013 while accompanying his dad on a top-level trip to Beijing.

Liberal pundits routinely charge that Trump has used the presidency to vastly enrich himself, though the “scandals” boil down to people staying at his hotels, which is chump change. It’s easy enough to see why he sees red over the fact that the press holds the Biden family to a far softer standard.