Trump Allies Tried to Push Hunter Biden Story Through The Wall Street Journal Before Giuliani Ran It With NY Post
Allies of President Donald Trump tried to run the story on Hunter Biden’s business dealings through The Wall Street Journal before it ended up breaking in the New York Post.
New York Times’ Ben Smith reports that White House adviser Eric Herschmann and others close to the Trump family were concerned about the president’s re-election prospects and needed something to shift the 2020 election narrative. This resulted in a meeting with WSJ reporter Michael Bender in early October, in which the group pitched him a story of the Biden family’s business dealings.
From the Times:
They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski. Mr. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son’s activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.
After the meeting, Bender shared the information with his colleagues, and they set out to interview Bobulinski while verifying other elements of the story. The story went sideways, however, when Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani approached the New York Post with his dubiously sourced “tabloid version” of the story, which “cast a pall over” it for the Journal.
In the end, the newsroom of the Journal ended up delivering an unsatisfying piece for Trump. As the president has ratcheted up his attacks on the Biden family over the story, in rallies and at the final presidential debate, the Journal’s eventual article assessed that Bobulinski could not prove the Democratic presidential candidate’s involvement in his son’s foreign business deals.
“Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself,” Journal editor-in-Chief Matt Murray said when contacted by the Times for a statement.
The news and editorial divisions of the Murdoch-owned newspaper have been in conflict on how much evidence exists to suggest that Joe Biden was involved with his son’s activities. As the Journal handled the story with caution, Mediaite previously reported that Fox News also didn’t run a report on Hunter Biden’s laptop — over to credibility concerns — when approached by Giuliani before he brought the story to the Post.
