Glenn Greenwald should not have been censored for this proposed article he submitted to The Intercept regarding Joe Biden's son, Hunter, and brother, Jim, and their pretty pathetically brazen attempts to trade on Joe Biden's name in dealings with Chinese investors and businesses.
Greenwald is certainly correct how those corporate media outlets who are not in the tank for Trump are protecting Biden. I would add that this is of a piece with the whole Tara Reade allegation. Yeah, it's been a long year. I think, and Glenn does allude to this, that the pro-Biden bias is just as much related to their own guilt in printing the endless Hillary email stories and making Jim Comey think he needed to go public with a nothing-burger--a deadly one, though--just before the election.
However, Greenwald is deadly wrong about Biden and Ukraine. James Risen, the NY Times reporter who broke the initial Biden-Ukraine story, and now is with The Intercept, wrote over a year ago at The Intercept how Biden wanted the prosecution of Buisma to proceed, and that what the prosecutor had in his possession, but did not act on, was Burisma's corruption from before Hunter Biden's time on the board. Greenwald cites Matt Tiabbi's anti-Biden biased opinion-based reporting, and makes no mention how James Risen had written an extensive piece in The Intercept showing this.
Greenwald is right to wonder just how far Hunter and Joe's brother Jim Biden had gone in trading on the Biden family name, and whether Joe may ultimately be in for a taste of whatever deals they struck in China. My sense, from the fact Biden is not anywhere near as rich as most senators, starting with DiFi and McConnell, is he was probably not. Joe seems to ingratiate himself to bankers and credit card industry types for straight up campaign contributions, and he does not live anywhere near as lavishly as the other senators. So count me skeptical, though I am okay with the questions Greenwald is posing to the Biden camp, which will never answer those questions before this election and without those questions copied for a prosecutor or a congressional investigation.
The Greenwald resignation from the journalism outlet he founded--and which I subscribe--was a long time coming, once I saw that Risen article last year. I have found Greenwald surprisingly obtuse, and more than a few times, cynically so, regarding Trump's connections to Russia. This is when Trump's connections are far more direct and far-reaching. Yet, Greenwald breathlessly loves to connect dots and hurl speculation against Joe Biden, when we know, from the Risen article, how Biden was pretty blunt with his son that he wanted nothing to do with what Hunter was up to with respect to Burisma.
Finally, I would say to those fretting about this, from either a Trumpist or anti-anti-Trumpist stance, You ought to remember how, in 1972, only Walter Cronkite was willing to broadcast the information Woodward & Bernstein were uncovering at the Washington Post about the Watergate crimes and ethics violations. The NYT, Boston Globe, ABC, NBC, and others at CBS were largely ignoring the information that W&B were finding, information they could have easily found or followed up on. I also think there is at least some reason, though questions should still flow, to avoid doing what happened in the last days of the 2016 presidential election.
I again feel badly for Greenwald, as I would not have censored him. I would have, however, let another reporter critique the analysis beyond what I am saying here on my lunch break from teaching. :)
