Chuck Todd, host of broadcast TV’s most slanted partisan political talk-show cocoon, wants Republicans to know that if they bother shattering that cocoon by talking about inconvenient topics like Hunter Biden, he’ll tell them to “go back on your partisan cable cocoon.”
On Sunday, Todd invited Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson inside the venerable NBC News liberal cocoon “Meet the Press” to talk about the issues of the week.
Unfortunately for Todd, the week hadn’t been good for the left. As you may have heard, months after the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in search of classified documents that the feds have been claiming he shouldn’t have had, President Joe Biden’s administration announced that Biden had done the same thing with classified documents from his time as vice president.
And then the administration announced that he’d done it again. Whoops. At least this time he’d improperly stored them in a garage next to a rad 1967 Corvette in his Delaware residence, not a boring, unsecured office building like with the first batch. You can’t say the man lacks for class.
Part of the issue, however, is that the residence where the ’Vette and the classified documents were being kept was also the stated residence of Hunter Biden, the president’s wayward son.
Forget about the fact that Joe was letting his son, who once totaled an anodyne rental car during a drug bender, have access to a 1967 Corvette Stingray. (That’s still a pretty big deal, mind you; why would any father give a perpetual inebriate access to a ridiculously fast sports car built back when General Motors’ idea of safety standards involved a page in the driver’s manual describing the proper way to flip off Ralph Nader?)
Beyond that, though: Why would he let his influence-peddling progeny live in a house with classified documents that may have contained information on Ukraine, China or other countries in which Hunter did business?
Todd, however, wasn’t particularly interested in talking about that. Instead, he was upset that Johnson and other Republicans wanted a public investigation of the document storage because — gasp! — people might come away with a less-favorable impression of the president, even if he wasn’t impeached or no one was charged with a crime.
“What you’re saying is, if the Justice Department decides a crime wasn’t committed, they’re not going to prosecute a crime, it sounds like you still want the information out there because you want to politically damage the person that was investigated?” Todd asked at about the 3-minute mark of the interview.
Check out the exchange that followed here:
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“No, Chuck, because a lot of political wrongdoing does not necessarily result in a crime, but it’s still wrong and the public needs to understand exactly what happened,” Johnson responded.
“So, you know, take a look at the political wrongdoing on the part of the FBI. They went to Twitter and they were censoring information,” he said.
“Take a look at the 51 intelligence operatives that issued a letter saying that the Hunter Biden computer was — had all the earmarks of a Russian information operation. That letter was an information operation. What happened? The FBI had access to Hunter Biden’s computer in December 2019.”
Uh-oh! Hunter alert!
In September 2020, Johnson, who was then chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had released a report detailing what a news release called “millions of dollars in questionable financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreign individuals, including the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and individuals with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.”
And that was even before the existence of the notorious Hunter Biden laptop was revealed to the public by the New York Post, which was promptly censored by social media giants Twitter and Facebook, thanks in large part to the FBI.
The FBI had received the laptop in December 2019.
“The FBI spent almost nine months setting up the ability to sabotage the Hunter Biden computer, should it ever surface, which it did the day after,” Johnson told Todd. “We were offered Hunter Biden’s computer the day after Chuck Grassley and I issued our report. But we did our due diligence.
“Nine months of the FBI setting up the process of sabotaging Hunter Biden’s computer, which we now know is authentic. Our investigation was accurate, but we were smeared,” Johnson continued.
“All that information was censored and suppressed. And the FBI, in their actions, impacted the election to a far greater extent than anything that Russia or China ever could have hoped to have accomplished. These are facts, and that’s all I’m interested in, is I’m interested in the truth. And I think the American public deserves the truth. And again, these investigations, they cover up the truth.”
Todd then said he’d “yet to see anybody explain” a crime Hunter Biden had committed: “It is not a crime to make money off of your last name,” he said.
“I mean, Chuck, is it a crime to be soliciting and purchasing prostitution in potentially European sex trafficking operations?” Johnson asked. “Is that a crime? Because Chuck Grassley and I laid out about $30,000 paid by Hunter Biden to those types of individuals over December of 2018, 2019, about $30,000.
“That’s about the same time that President Biden offered to pay about $100,000 of Hunter Biden’s bills. I mean, again, that’s just some information. I don’t know exactly if it’s a crime.”
Todd went on to say that “I’ll take you at your word that you’re ethically bothered by Hunter Biden. I’m curious, though, you seem to have a pattern —”
“Are you not? Are you not?” Johnson responded.
Try not to laugh at Todd’s response, I dare you:
“You seem to have a pattern,” he said. “I’m a journalist. I have to deal in facts.”
At this point, Todd began getting very indignant about the focus on Hunter Biden, engaging in a bit of whataboutism with former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s business dealings with Qatar while serving as a senior advisor in the Trump White House.
Johnson, Todd claimed, was “targeting an individual.”
“You know, I’m just trying to lay out the facts that, certainly, Sen. Grassley and I uncovered,” Johnson said.
“They were suppressed. They were censored. They interfered in the 2020 election. Conservatives understand that. Unfortunately, liberals in the media don’t. And that’s part of the things that — part of the reasons our politics are inflamed is we do not have an unbiased media. We don’t. It’s unfortunate. I’m all for free press.”
Forget about a woman scorned: Hell hath no fury like a partisan media hack told he is a partisan media hack.
“Look, go to partisan — partisan cable — look, you can go back on your partisan cable cocoon and talk about media bias all you want. I understand it’s part of your identity,” Todd said, before moving on to the Hunter-free events in Brazil.
What’s truly amazing is the lack of self-awareness here regarding the media bias on NBC News.
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